"...what the lawyer wants is authority, the newer the better ; what the historian wants is evidence, the older the better." Frederick William Maitland
There was a writer in the sailing world back in the 1970s named, if I remember correctly, Jack Knight. He once described how nice guys respond when they think the other side is cheating. The example he gave was team racing where boats are swapped after each race. A dirty crew might deliberately mess up a few things on their boat before passing it on. The nice guys in the new crew immediately find the most obvious problems but, not wanting to appear like whiners, they fix the problems rather than complain. But somewhere around the fifth or sixth minor act of sabotage they lose it and sail over to the committee boat to complain. And the committee members say, "What are you a bunch of whiners? That's only a little thing." The enraged crew say, "But what about ..." and abruptly realize that they have nothing to point to.
Similarly, having put a positive spin on what he has done before, even though they had to hold their noses and grit their teeth together to do so, traditionalists are now reading Amoris Laetitia and finding themselves in the position of suddenly thinking, "This is too much," but having no credibility to make the point they want to make. They played along because they thought there was a sharp limit to what he can do; they thought they had him over a barrel because a pope cannot change established church teaching. And they're right, he can't—not even the smallest letter or stroke. But, wily old bureaucrat that he is, he knew all along that that supposed trump card was nothing of the sort.
If you search "Pope Francis Pastoral" you get about a half-million hits as of today. The impression you get scanning the links is that this is a very pastoral pope—even his critics say so. Search "Pope Francis bureaucrat" and you get another half million hits and a quick scan of those suggests that Francis is to the very core of his being opposed to bureaucracy. What you wouldn't guess from any of that is that Pope Francis has virtually no pastoral experience. Nor would you guess that he spent almost his entire career as a church bureaucrat.
As a bureaucrat he understands perfectly well that praxis trumps the law every time. In that regard, I put it to you that these are the most important sentences in the entire exhortation:
I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it.
Read the harshest critics of Amoris Laetitia, you can a bunch of links here, and you will note that what upsets them most is not so much what Francis does as what he doesn't do. He faithfully restates Catholic teaching but he doesn't provide narrowly proscribed guidelines for interpreting that teaching. And that is where the traditionalists are finding he has them over a barrel. They can claim two thousand years of tradition but what really matters to lawyers is authority, and the newer the better, and Francis has just taken that authority away from the lawyers (many of whom are only self-appointed lawyers) of the Catholic Church.
That said, I have to hand it to the traditionalists that they, at least, understand what is happening. This, as musicologist Peter van der Merwe and psychologist Jonathan Haidt note in very different fields, is not unusual. People wrapped up in "revolutions" rarely understand what they are doing. The traditionalist has a better grasp on what the revolutionaries are really up to.
He is not repudiating in principle the objective truth of any revealed dogma or moral norm; but at the level of praxis he is shifting the emphasis away from objective standards of right and wrong behavior and placing it instead on presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience.
Exactly right. Liberals talk about a revolution led by Pope Francis. There is no such thing. Rather, Francis is assuming that there has already been a quiet revolution at the grassroots level and all the magisterium has to do is stay out of the way for it to be completed. As Bing Crosby says to Grace Kelly in High Society, "I'd like a piece of that bet."
How many divisions has Pope Francis?
So how does this play out from here on down the line? All Francis has done is to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. The toothpaste is still inside and he isn't going to do anything to change that. But, good bureaucrat that he is, he's betting that his assessment of the Catholic zeitgeist is better than that of his opponents (who, it should be noted, still outnumber his supporters among the bishops if the final decisions of the two synods on the family are anything to go by).
Assessing this is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. You might be tempted to look at polls that show that Catholics overwhelmingly support a more lax approach to teachings on sexuality and marriage but the majority of those polled don't go to church regularly. The church that matters the most is the one made up of people whose bums are on pews more than 52 times a year. And here, as Father Z sarcastically notes, traditionalists would seem to have an advantage:
But wait!
Are liberals or fallen away Catholics or people in “irregular” relationships beating down doors to get into confessionals?
Maybe we don’t have such a big problem and not much has changed after all.
Alas, I think Father Z is going to be disappointed (and I'm pretty sure he knows it).
I've been in traditionalist Catholic circles all my life. And I mean that quite literally, from my baptism to the present day. And I think that even there there is a solid plurality of people who, while not necessarily in "irregular situations" themselves, have a whole lot of family and friends who are and who are inclined to support a more charitable approach to these people. When push comes to shove, they'd rather emphasize presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience. Francis has correctly judged that, even on their homeground, the traditionalists will lose this battle in the long run.
Barring the possibility that this papacy turns out to be very short-lived it's all over but for the shouting. And I would think that short-lived would have to mean months not years; even then there is no assurance his predecessor would change direction enough to make a difference.
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