Pope Francis and the authors of AL, I believe, sincerely wish to re-affirm the Church’s traditional teaching regarding the sacramental indissolubility of marriage, while providing a way of assisting those whose marriages have failed to find a welcome place at the Lord’s Banquet.
On the other hand, there are those who say that readmitting sexually active divorced and remarried Catholics to the Sacraments somehow contradicts the Church’s orthodoxy regarding that dogma of the permanence and indissolubility of the marital bond which they sincerely believe they must uphold and defend.
The crux of the dispute is this: how does one affirm the truth of Church teaching regarding the indissoluble bond of sacramental marriage yet judge that that it does not apply in his or her particular situation.
And so, at the very heart of Amoris Laetitia, we find the role of conscience, that judgment of reason which applies moral truths to particular circumstances.
It appears that AL is advancing a pastoral practice (readmittance to the Sacraments) based on a judgment of conscience that, in this particular marital situation, the universal moral norms of the Church do not apply. In essence, it appears that Pope Francis has advanced an argument of moral relativism which permits conscience to justify a subjective morality.
On the other hand, the authors of the dubia have asked whether or not such Papal teaching is a contradiction of Church teaching which has held that “conscience can never be authorized to legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms that prohibit intrinsically evil acts”. If so, then AL’s affirmation of subjective morality applies to the entirety of Catholic moral teaching, not just to marriage alone.
Defenders of AL argue that the Exhortation adopts a “new attitude” on the part of the Church toward those who sexually active in irregular second marriages, an attitude which focuses on the needs of the couple rather than upholding moral norms which protect the institutional Church’s teaching and practice from error.
Yet, the question put forth in the dubia remains: does this “new atttitude" apply to Catholic moral teaching beyond situations involving marriage?
For the moment (at the time of the writing of this post at least), the question remain unresolved: how can conscience apply in one area of moral life (marriage) differently than it applies in other areas of moral life?
Permit me (with an arrogance which I am sure tests the Charity of Christ Himself) to suggest that there is a way out of this impasse. That way is found in a re-examination of Church teaching regarding the faculty of the human conscience itself.
Let us, then, consider what the Church has taught about conscience at the highest level of magisterial authority, that is, in the pronouncements of the Ecumenical Council of Vatican II.
More in Part Four tomorrow.
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