At several points during his pontificate, Pope Francis granted interviews to Eugenio Scalfari, a prominent Italian journalist and noted atheist. Of all the pope’s public performances these conversations were among the strangest, because Scalfari did not take notes. Instead, the interviewer, who was eighty-nine at the time of the first interview, published “transcripts” of their conversations summoned up from memory. So while Francis tended to be more adventurous in these conversations than even in his usual off-the-cuff remarks, it was difficult to tell what the pontiff had definitely said, and what the aging journalist had embellished or invented or misinterpreted.
The initial Scalfari conversation, in the fall of 2013, was filled with striking utterances. It had the pope calling proselytism “solemn nonsense,” insisting that “there is no Catholic God,” suggesting that “everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them,” and wandering into faintly New Age pastures: “Our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone.”1
The official Vatican website ultimately withdrew the interview, after briefly publishing it, with a clarification from the press office that “the text was an after-the-fact reconstruction” which had been approved by Francis without it being “clear how closely the pope read it.”2
This was the sort of modest fiasco that would normally preclude a follow-up interview, but instead the pope spoke to Scalfari again in the summer of 2014. Again there were striking formulations, including a suggestion that some cardinals were guilty of abusing children and a pledge to “find solutions” to the “problem” of priestly celibacy.3 Again there was a declaration from the Vatican press office that while the “spirit” of the conversation was accurate, “individual expressions that were used and the manner in which they have been reported cannot be attributed to the pope.”4 Then the same dance played out again in the spring of 2015, when Scalfari’s text had the pope speculating, heretically, that lost souls would be “annihilated” instead of damned.5 Once more the press office characterized the interview as “private discussions” whose details could not be confirmed.6
By this point it was clear that Francis saw an advantage in this sort of deliberately unreliable communication—whether as a form of freewheeling dialogue with a nonbeliever, a means to communicate very informally to supporters, or simply a way to talk casually without the strictures that an actual interview transcript would impose. So it was not surprising that he returned to Scalfari following the second synod on the family, speaking with him by telephone three days after his blistering closing remarks. The conversation, or at least Scalfari’s reconstruction thereof, appeared in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica a week later, and it included this response to a question about the pope’s intentions for communion and the remarried and the outcome of the synod:
“This is the bottom line result,” Francis said (supposedly). “The de facto appraisals are entrusted to the confessors, but at the end of faster or slower paths, all the divorced who asked will be admitted.”7
Again, of course, the Vatican denied that this quotation was necessarily accurate. But by now everyone sensed that it must be reasonably close to something the pope had said.
That same week the vigorous Father Spadaro, who was increasingly taking on the role of Francis’s public theological interpreter—a one-man Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for a papacy in conflict with its official CDF—published a wrap-up of the synod in Civiltà Cattolica. In his essay, what had appeared to be a setback for the church’s liberals—the conservative tone of the document, the at-most-ambiguous paragraphs on the internal form, the absence of any specific mention of communion for the remarried—was reinterpreted as a major victory for reform. All that mattered, Spadaro wrote, was that the document had talked of integrating the remarried, and the traditional teaching had not been formally restated. What wasn’t restated was, by implication, potentially defunct. “It is not said how far the process of integration can go,” he said of the remarried, “but neither are any more precise and insurmountable limitations set up.”8
This reading of the synod’s report was similar to how progressive Catholics had often interpreted the documents of Vatican II. Whatever was novel was taken to control the text’s meanings and implications. Whatever was conservative was assumed to be vestigial. What mattered above all was the direction of movement, pointing to further movements still. This was not the traditional method of interpreting of the church’s magisterium, which held that anything novel was supposed to be interpreted in continuity with prior teaching, and wherever there was ambiguity the preexisting tradition remained the rule. But it explained why liberals and conservatives could look at the same texts and draw radically different implications, with the tradition-minded appealing to what the document said, and the progressives seeing vast space for action in what it didn’t say.
Now it seemed the pope himself might be one of those progressives. Through Scalfari and Spadaro, Francis appeared to be signaling that he would take the ambiguity of the synod’s document and use it to declare a new discipline, in which communion would be granted to the remarried not through any formal penitential pathway but through a permission slip to pastors, who would be urged to admit people to communion without an annulment “case by case,” but generously enough to make the answer in each case an all-but-foregone conclusion.
This was not what the synod had voted for, and it promised to empty out the church’s teaching on divorce, to make the rule against remarriage strictly theoretical. Much more than anything at Vatican II, it also threatened an immediate crisis for papal authority, because across two synods the church’s conservatives had made it clear that they considered such a change to be something—or very, very close to something—that the pope did not have the authority to do.
But now some of those same conservatives, who had briefly been relieved by their apparent synod victory, braced for that crisis to arrive. There were still attempts to insist that all was still stable and settled, that the synods had ratified orthodoxy and that Francis surely would as well. But many conservative observers now acknowledged the obvious. Those who had argued at the synod against communion for the remarried, wrote the Canadian priest-columnist Father de Souza in November, “must be ready for the Holy Father to decide differently. He has steadily prepared the Church for just that. It would be foolish to ignore the signs.”9
• • •
Yet when the papal exhortation finally arrived, five months later, it was not quite what conservatives feared. Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love,” was the longest papal document in history—two hundred and fifty-six pages, some sixty thousand words. It was at times rich in earthy pastoral insight, at times rote and repetitious and banal. But all eyes turned at once to chapter eight, in which the pope took up the question of Catholics in irregular relationships, and said . . . well, once again no one was quite sure.
Instead of explicitly addressing the controverted questions, the pontiff moved to a more abstract level of moral theology, engaging in a kind of critical dialogue with John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor on the question of what constituted mortal sin. (Indeed, several key passages seemed to borrow from an essay that the papal ghostwriter, Archbishop Victor Fernández, had written for a conference on Veritatis a decade earlier.) Where the Polish pope had rebuked situational ethics, the Argentine pope piled up lists of mitigating factors that could make an apparent mortal sin less serious. Where John Paul II had insisted that even in difficult circumstances the moral law is never impossible to follow, Francis discussed all the ways in which family turmoil and personal psychology and the exigencies of modern life could make the moral law seem either too hard to comprehend or too difficult to obey. A casual reader, reading the two papal documents together, would have no doubt that Francis wasn’t so much developing John Paul’s thought as arguing with it.
Some of these arguments didn’t directly contradict anything in Veritatis Splendor; they just placed a much stronger rhetorical emphasis on existing Catholic teaching concerning the ways that personal circumstances reduced moral culpability. But others seemed to go further, toward a vision of the moral law as either a gnostic mystery or a kind of unfair trap for ordinary mortals—who “may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding ‘its inherent values,’ or be in a concrete situation which does not allow [one] to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.”10
This idea was very Kasperian, akin to the cardinal’s suggestion that the church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality asked too much of the “ordinary Christian.” It also came perilously close to contradicting not only John Paul and other recent popes but the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and countless teaching documents in between. The idea that some circumstances do “not allow” Christians to avoid sin, that God’s grace is sometimes insufficient and the moral life sometimes resembles Star Trek’s no-win Kobayashi Maru training exercise, would be a serious revision of the church’s traditional position—closer to certain Protestant theologies than to Catholic moral teaching as defined and defended by past councils and past popes.
This flirtation with theological revision was serious enough to occasion more than twenty pages of suggested edits from Müller’s CDF, which saw the long document late in the process. Not that it mattered, since most if not all of those suggestions were ignored. But the revisionism happened at an abstract and general level, as a broad point about a lot of different moral dilemmas, and not in the concrete form of a particular answer to the particular question of communion for people living in relationships that are publicly adulterous. It was clear that chapter eight of Amoris Laetitia yearned in the direction of changing the church’s rules for communion, that its logic suggested that such a change was reasonable and desirable. Yet the pope never said so directly, never made explicit what he repeatedly implied, never simply came out and said: For many of the divorced-and-remarried, the church’s law is too hard to follow, the moral dilemmas too extreme, and therefore they cannot be considered to be seriously sinning, and can receive communion in good conscience.
Although there were two footnotes in the text that came particularly close. One, footnote 329, strongly suggested that it is unreasonable for the church to ask—as John Paul’s Familiaris Consortio did—a remarried couple raising children together to try to live as brother and sister, without having sex, because in such cases “the good of the children” might suffer from their parents’ want of intimacy.11 The second, footnote 351, was attached to a passage that discussed how pastors might accompany couples living in nonmarital relationships—people who, because “of conditioning and mitigating factors,” may not be “subjectively culpable” for their sins, and therefore should be helped to “grow in the life of grace and charity” before their irregular situation is resolved. The footnote elaborated what that help might mean, by saying:
In certain cases, this can include the help of the sacraments. Hence, “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber, but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy.” . . . I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”12
What were those “certain cases” where the sacraments might be given? Well, the strong implication of the papal language was that they included some cases where people continued to live in public adultery. But the footnote did not say so clearly; instead it very deliberately said so unclearly, leaving open the possibility that like prior papal documents those “certain cases” only included people trying to live as brother and sister, trying to be chaste.
Which meant that Amoris Laetitia left the church in a bizarre position. After two synods, two years of heated argument and deep division, the pope’s great matter came down to a strange question: Could long-standing church discipline and a core moral teaching be rewritten via a suggestive footnote to a deliberately ambiguous papal exhortation? Not just the synods themselves, but decades of debates about how far the church could go to accommodate modernity, how much change could be allowed, were all suddenly distilled into a strange sort of textual parsing. Depending on your interpretation, Amoris Laetitia’s drift proved that the pope could change what his recent predecessors had taught was unchanging and essential—which would be a church-shaking, revolutionary development! Or else, just as plausibly, its lack of clarity proved that even a pope who wanted to change a major teaching was constrained—by the Holy Spirit?—from doing so.
This uncertainty lent itself, and swiftly, to multiple interpretations of what the pope meant and where the church might go next. There were conservatives for whom relief was the dominant emotion: The pope had not explicitly taught heresy, the gravest crisis had been averted, and the thing to do was hail everything in Amoris Laetitia that affirmed orthodoxy and simply ignore its footnotes and ambiguous, arguing–with–John Paul II formulations. On the other hand, there were conservatives (among them Cardinal Raymond Burke) for whom those footnotes and formulations were too dangerous to be ignored, and who therefore pressed the case that Amoris was not actually a fully magisterial document, that as a mere apostolic exhortation (as opposed to a papal encyclical) it could be corrected, challenged, or ignored. The first camp seemed to want to talk as little as possible about the contested portions of Amoris, and, indeed, complained that people were making too much of them. The second camp began circulating public petitions, signed by various conservative theologians, asking the pope to clarify what he had meant, and affirm the positions that his ambiguities had shadowed with a doubt.
Then there were those middle-grounders who wanted to accept Amoris in full while also acknowledging that the footnotes did point to some relaxation of the rules for the reception of communion, and who therefore labored to make that relaxation fit with prior teaching, prior doctrine. This case for continuity was made by several prominent figures linked to John Paul II and Benedict—including Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian philosopher and jurist, and Christoph Schönborn, an Austrian cardinal and theologian assigned to explain Amoris Laetitia to the press.
The most compelling idea that Buttiglione, in particular, put forward was that someone could be in a second marriage (or a nonmarital relationship) that amounted to a form of psychological compulsion or constraint, in which threats or blackmail or overt abuse from their partner or spouse made the sin of sexual relations merely venial and not mortal, and therefore not bad enough to require refraining from communion. (The more striking analogy used was to the condition of a prostitute under the sway of a brutal pimp.) It was these kinds of genuinely extreme cases, Buttiglione argued, that Amoris had in mind when it hinted at opening communion, and the opening it envisioned was a kind of provisional one for desperate situations, with the sacrament offered to weak Catholics in a kind of emotional captivity who had not yet found a way to escape.
This argument had its merits and its difficulties, but the main issue with it was that it did not imply what liberal reformers actually wanted, and already claimed to have won. It suggested that a remarried Catholic (or a cohabitating Catholic, or a Catholic in a same-sex relationship, or a Catholic prostitute, or any other case) might receive communion temporarily if her situation was so toxic or controlling that it could not be easily escaped. So did the related argument-from-ignorance—that a divorced and remarried Catholic who had been misled by the ambient culture, who did not understand that remarriage was adultery, could provisionally receive communion while being educated in the full truth of the faith. But in both cases, the provisional nature of receiving communion was crucial to the logic of the argument, since it required that eventually, with sufficient spiritual and moral growth, the Catholic in question would either have to leave the adulterous/sinful relationship or cease to take communion once again.
The original Kasper proposal was roughly the opposite. It envisioned a temporary abstention from communion, while a given divorced-and-remarried person reckoned with the failings of the past, followed by a permanent reintegration even as the second marriage advanced in stability and happiness. It proposed communion for the remarried not as a temporary gift for people in chaos and great difficulty, but as a permanent grace for divorced Catholics who had rebuilt their lives, entered in a new and happier relationship, and achieved the proper psychological posture toward their past. It wanted to make a distinction, as the Australian Archbishop Coleridge put it during the synod, between “a second marriage that is enduring and stable and loving” and “a couple skulking off to a hotel room for a wicked weekend,” and provide for people in the first category while still potentially withholding communion from people in the second.13 The official view of the church, that separation or civil divorce was sometimes acceptable (and that merely divorced people were welcome to the Eucharist) but remarriage always wrong, was implicitly reversed: The past divorce became the key sin in need of atonement to make the new marriage morally acceptable.
Which meant that the Catholic prostitute, under the liberal vision’s logic, might be a poor candidate for communion because her personal situation was so unstable, her relationship to her sins so obviously fraught . . . whereas the happily remarried Catholic divorcée would be in a much more appropriate situation to receive the Eucharist. And the language of Amoris seemed at times closer to this view—portraying reintegration (again, never specifically defined) as a reward for the “responsible and tactful” Catholic, as a response to a “a second union consolidated over time, with new children, proven fidelity, generous self giving”—than to the narrow reading that its more conservative, continuity-focused defenders tried to offer.14
But multiple readings were possible and reasonable, and because the pope had declined to choose explicitly between them, all of them were embraced, by theologians and Catholic scribblers and bishops all around the Catholic world, as the true interpretation of Amoris. The synod had rejected the German vision of a devolution of doctrinal authority, of a local-option Catholicism in which each bishops conference or bishop adapted the church’s teaching to cultural conditions. But by issuing such an ambiguous document Pope Francis had pushed Catholicism toward exactly that kind of devolution, toward a geographical and cultural variation in what his church would teach.
• • •
Thus in the months following the release of Amoris some bishops declared that the rule of prior centuries was still fully in effect, and that the pope’s message of reintegration was limited and that “accompaniment” for the remarried could only lead to communion if they obtained an annulment or lived as brother and sister with their new spouse. These conservatives included the Polish bishops and a number of bishops across North America—led by Charles Chaput in Philadelphia, and eventually joined by bishops in Phoenix, Portland, Lincoln, Portsmouth in England, Western Canada, the unlikely traditionalist bastion of Kazakhstan, and more.
Then at the same time there were bishops who quickly announced their intention to welcome the remarried back to communion. In some cases they did so sweepingly: Bishop Robert McElroy in San Diego, a Francis appointee, essentially operationalized the full liberal endgame, treating the decision to receive communion as an individual decision, to be assisted but not challenged by priest-confessors, and thus for most people a matter of when, not if. In other cases the movement was more cautious: in Rome and Brazil and Pope Francis’s native Argentina, guidelines emerged that allowed for exceptions, but seemed (in different ways in each locale) to emphasize their rarity, the key role of the priest-confessor in discerning when such an exception might be made. The German bishops’ guidelines were likewise a little more circumspect when they inevitably opened communion to some of the remarried. Meanwhile, the two bishops of tiny, very Catholic Malta put out guidelines that seemed expansive, welcoming to communion any remarried Catholics who felt “at peace with God.”15
A few bishops seemed intent on having it both ways. In Florence, the cardinal archbishop, Giuseppe Betori, instituted a “diocesan course of formation” to instruct priests and laypeople on Amoris and its implications. The first lecture was given by his predecessor, Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, a conservative who told listeners that the ban on communion for the remarried was still very much in force. But then when the lecture series came around to the contentious eighth chapter, Cardinal Betori’s invited speaker was a supporter of the most liberal interpretation, Monsignor Basilio Petra, who had argued that for the “enlightened faithful” contemplating whether to take communion after a divorce and second marriage, there might be no need for confession at all.
These varying responses made it clear that there was no consensus about what Amoris meant even among Catholic leaders who read it as an opening to communion. Instead, like functionaries in a somewhat capricious dictatorship, they all were effectively “working toward the pope,” trying to offer guidelines that differed with one another but also tried to fit what they thought his ambiguities intended. And when challenged or critiqued they appealed to the papal will—even acknowledging, in the process, that their papal positivism required ignoring what prior popes had rather clearly said. “Whoever wishes to discover what the true will of Christ is for him,” the Maltese archbishop declared in a sermon given amid the swirl of controversy, “he must ask the Pope and the bishops who are in communion with the Pope. . . . Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the Pope, this Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present Pope.”16
Yet most of those “bishops who are in communion with the Pope” seemed less confident. While a few conservatives and traditionalists went one way and a few liberals and papal loyalists another, the vast majority of the world’s five-thousand-odd bishops, regardless of their theological position, declined to take any firm stance. They talked about other sections of Amoris, they praised Pope Francis in generic terms—and then they waited, like good ecclesial politicians, to see what might happen next.
In effect, then, the immediate result of Amoris Laetitia was to move the church from a situation in which Catholic teaching on marriage and the sacraments was defined universally but implemented variously to a situation in which that teaching was defined variously as well—one way in Krakow and Philadelphia and Winnipeg, another way in Buenos Aires and Rome and San Diego, but in most places ambiguously, left up to whichever reading of Amoris’s relationship to the prior magisterium the individual pastor or individual Catholic found most convincing.
A waspish English priest, Father John Hunwicke, borrowed a phrase from the famous nineteenth-century English convert John Henry Newman and dubbed this “a suspense of the magisterium”—meaning a situation in which the pope was deliberately declining to exercise his teaching role.17 Alternatively, you could say that Francis was offering Catholics a choice of multiple magisteria. There was the formal teaching of the church, which had not been explicitly altered, and then there was the informal teaching of the pope, delivered by implication and through semiofficial interviews and in the footnotes.
Perhaps the plan was to allow conservatives to keep the first magisterium, the formal teaching, since then they would have no grounds for fearing that the pope had fallen into error or that the church had broken faith with Christ . . . while liberals from Chicago to Cologne could have the more liberalized teaching as a permission slip for pastoral experiments. The theory being, presumably, that so long as this doubled approach continued, there would be no crisis point, no danger of the church imitating the Anglican communion and skidding into schism. Denied the support he sought and the cover he needed for explicit change, Francis had taken the unofficial route—and perhaps found a new, politically brilliant way to keep the church together, to preserve its stability, even as he liberalized its rules.
Archbishop Forte, the synod secretary, suggested as much when he discussed Amoris shortly after its release. In a pithy way he confirmed everything that conservatives had sensed about the synodal process and the pope’s intentions. “If we talk explicitly about communion for the divorced and remarried,” Forte paraphrased the pontiff telling him, “you have no idea what a mess these guys will make for us. So let’s not talk about it directly, you get the premises in place and then I will draw the conclusions.”18
Which now the pope was doing—but in a way that remained ambiguous, leaving his critics baffled as to how they should respond.
• • •
But was it really so brilliant, and would it really bring stability after the storms of the synods? There were reasons to be doubtful. The first problem was that the Catholic Church was not designed for major decentralization of controverted questions (its selling point had always been the reverse), and Francis had not actually done much in the way of the formal restructuring that might make such decentralizing plausible. If anything, his personal style and tendency to ignore the bureaucracy had concentrated more effective power in his hands. A rhetoric of “synodality” did not obscure the fact that Rome was still the final arbiter, and if Amoris Laetitia was magisterially ambiguous most of Francis’s powers continued to be exercised in ways that made it very clear which side of the controversy he was actually on.
His appointments became more liberal after the synods. In choosing cardinals in early 2016 he passed over not only Chaput of Philadelphia but also José Gomez of Los Angeles, the leader of America’s largest and most Hispanic archdiocese and a crusader for liberal immigration policies. In a different moment Gomez would have been a natural appointment for a church moving to the peripheries and championing social justice causes . . . but he was seen as too theologically conservative, not enough of a Francis loyalist, and perhaps a dangerously papabile figure for conservatives to champion at the next synod. Instead the cardinals’ hats in the United States went to Blase Cupich and the more obscure Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis, who was installed in Newark as a kind of Francis-friendly counterweight to Timothy Dolan (one of the signatories to the thirteen cardinals’ letter during the synod) in New York across the river, and who wasted little time in aligning himself with the liberal interpretation of Amoris and critiquing fellow bishops (Chaput, notably) who differed.
Meanwhile, Francis also moved to undermine and isolate the conservatives who remained in prominent Vatican positions. Letter-of-thirteen signatory Robert Sarah, the head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, had his wings clipped after he gave a speech urging priests to celebrate mass ad orientem—toward the altar, toward the east, the traditional manner abandoned after Vatican II. He was summoned to a meeting with Francis, the Vatican spokesman slapped him down publicly, and then in a remarkable purge most of his subordinates were removed, and a more liberal roster of cardinals and bishops put in place—effectively leaving Sarah as a conservative figurehead with no effective power. Other purges followed: Several priests were fired from Müller’s CDF for no apparent reason (the real reason seemed to be that Francis had heard through back channels that they had criticized Amoris), and lesser entities like the Pontifical Academy for Life found their membership rolls emptied and replaced with a new roster of papal favorites.
The sharpness of these moves was distinctive. Both John Paul II and Benedict had prodded the Vatican and the episcopate in a more conservative direction by degrees, promoting their own men while also respecting the normal processes that turned auxiliary bishops into archbishops, archbishops into cardinals. In general but especially after the synods, Francis seemed to be on a more hurried timetable, more determined to put his stamp on the church while there was time to do it, lest a successor be elected who might reverse the informal changes he had made. It was a high-reward but polarizing strategy. “I am happy that he is increasing the odds that the next pope will be like him,” noted Father Thomas Reese, the dean of liberal Jesuits in the United States, “and all my progressive friends are certainly pleased with these appointments . . . but then I had to be honest with myself by asking the question, ‘How would I have reacted if Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict had done the same thing?’ Frankly, I would have been outraged.”19 And the precedent being set, Reese acknowledged, created a risk of counter-purges under a more conservative pope, thus raising rather than lowering the stakes of ecclesial appointments and debates.
Nor did the pope’s own words make the post-Amoris truce or devolution look like something built to last. He might be allowing conservative bishops to stick with the old magisterial line rather than his ambiguous update, but he wasn’t just denying them red hats; he continued to let them have it verbally, in the same style as his concluding synodal remarks, in sermon after sermon. The balancing act, the attempt to plant himself in a middle ground between liberal and conservatives, was a thing of the past. The synthesis of theological conservatism and social justice seemed to evaporate. What had been one theme among many in his early days as pope—the dangers of pharisaism and legalism, the evils of rigidity, the closed hearts of the doctors of the law—became a constant one, repeated weekly in varying contexts, whether the pope was addressing the state of seminaries and priestly formation (where Francis deplored the return of a “black and white” mentality among younger priests and told apocryphal stories about young priests standing on the sidewalk yelling at people, “You’ll go to hell!”20) or talking about the state of priestly dress (where Francis mocked the cassocks and hats favored by some tradition-minded clerics—“and it is said that the Church does not allow women priests,” he jibed21) or sermonizing on the Decalogue (do not “hide in the rigidity of the closed Commandments,” he warned22) or speaking, at Christmastime, about the journey of the Magi (which became an opportunity to denounce “prophets of doom” who cling to the “usual fare” instead of embracing the radical and new23).
At the same time, Francis escalated his unofficial interventions on behalf of a more liberal interpretation of Amoris. When the Buenos Aires bishops produced their guidelines allowing priests to admit some remarried divorcées to communion, it was arranged that the pope would write them a “private” letter praising the guidelines and saying that “no other interpretations” were possible.24 The letter then leaked to the press from the pope’s inner circle, to be cited repeatedly as evidence that the debate over what Amoris meant was settled. This claim was not theologically accurate, as private letters have no magisterial weight. But as a signal to the church the leak strongly suggested that the devolution on remarriage and communion was intended to be temporary, a means to buy time so that the consensus Francis had failed to win at the synod could gradually emerge . . . at which point the Polish-German and Philadelphian–San Diegan differences would vanish, and all the Catholic world would be united in Francis’s understanding of what mercy for the remarried should require.
Meanwhile, there was the further problem that the logic of communion for the remarried really did point beyond itself to further change, just as conservatives had argued. And not only on issues related to sexuality, as the German bishops quickly made clear: Once communion for the remarried was established, what they envisioned next was intercommunion with Protestants, or at least with their Lutheran fellow countrymen, beginning with the Lutheran spouses in mixed-faith marriages.
This was an idea as theologically fraught in its own way as communion for the remarried. Intercommunion, in limited forms, was allowed with the Orthodox churches because they shared the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation and the priesthood. But the Lutheran churches did not, and to admit Lutherans to regular communion was an effective statement that one could take the Eucharist not only without going to confession but without even believing what Catholicism believed about it. Still, the Amoris-style argument of pastoral necessity was invoked on its behalf. In late 2016, with the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation looming, Walter Kasper declared his hope that the “the next declaration [from the pope] will open the Eucharistic sharing in particular situations, especially in mixed marriages and families and in countries like Germany and the United States where this pastoral problem is extremely pressing.”25 And indeed, Pope Francis had hinted at sympathy for this idea, in a stream-of-consciousness answer to a Lutheran questioner after the second synod, which ended with him telling her to “talk to the Lord and then go forward. I don’t dare to say anything more.”26
Then there was the case of physician-assisted euthanasia, legal in an increasing number of Western nations, and offered to (or, in some cases, effectively imposed upon) the non–terminally ill in several European countries. When Canada passed a law legalizing suicide across the dominion, the bishops of Western Canada issued a pastoral letter reminding Catholics that it wasn’t possible for priests to give last rites to people preparing to kill themselves, since you can’t absolve someone of mortal sin when they’re consciously planning their own quietus for the next day or even hour. But the bishops of the Maritime Provinces had a different take: Citing Pope Francis’s pastoral innovations as a model, they wrote that in some cases pastoral accompaniment could include giving last rites to people about to receive what they (following the government) euphemistically described as “medical assistance in dying,” because it was more important to be there for people, to accompany them, than to impose any kind of one-size-fits-all rule.27 And just like that, the same kind of quasi-schism that separated Polish and German Catholics on remarriage and the sacraments separated Albertans from Nova Scotians on the sacraments and suicide.
So there was no reason, in Rome and elsewhere, to think that the ambiguities of Amoris would leave conservatives with anything but a provisional stability, or that the ripples from its quasi-innovations would not spread. For many conservative bishops and cardinals, including most of the letter-of-thirteen signatories, this realization didn’t suggest an obvious course of action, beyond a mix of caution, prayer, and hope that Francis’s bench-stacking would fall short and the next conclave would allow for a major course correction. But those with less to lose saw a case for open confrontation, which produced the peculiar drama of the dubia.
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A dubium, in Vatican parlance, is a question raised about a particular issue of church teaching or canon law: “Does document X allow for practice Y?,” etc. In the autumn of 2016 four cardinals—Burke, naturally, joined by Walter Brandmüller, Carlo Caffarra, and Joachim Meisner, all theological heavyweights but also all retirees—posed four dubia in a private letter to Pope Francis and to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, requesting clarity on Amoris. The first dubium asked the pope to clarify whether the church’s ban on communion for divorced Catholics in new marriages remained in place. The remaining dubia asked whether the church’s traditional opposition to situation ethics still held, whether Veritatis Splendor’s declaration that “circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil . . . into an act ‘subjectively’ good” had been superseded, and whether the church now taught, as it had not before, that individual consciences could discern “legitimate exceptions to absolute moral norms.”28
These were all reasonable questions, to which the various readings of Amoris suggested various responses—some clearly orthodox, some tipping toward heresy or rupture, some ambiguously in between. But Francis chose not to answer, and declined to authorize a response from the CDF as well. After an interval had passed, Burke and his coauthors took the unusual step of making the dubia public; this was just before another consistory in Rome, when the pope was to present red hats to the newest cardinals. The pope continued to ignore the questions, but took the equally unusual step of canceling a general meeting with the cardinals (the same meeting at which Kasper had delivered his address three years before). Perhaps he was “boiling with rage,” as some sources claimed,29 or perhaps he was entirely calm and focused on more important matters, as Father Spadaro suggested in one of his many tweets against the pontiff’s critics. But either way it seemed that he wanted to avoid any opportunity for the larger number of prelates who tacitly endorsed the four cardinals’ line of questioning to make their voices heard.
So the dubia, no less than Amoris itself, hung there, unanswered and unresolved. And as with Amoris itself, there was a small rush to take sides and a larger hanging back. The pope’s inner circle and leading allies, including Spadaro, Kasper, and Cupich, dismissed the questions as a pointless stunt and insisted that the meaning of Amoris was clear; somewhat more intemperately, the head of Greece’s bishops conference accused the dubia authors of heresy and possibly apostasy for questioning the pope. At the same time a smattering of bishops spoke up on behalf of the questioners, and a few of the key cardinals—including Pell and Sarah—offered ambiguous support. But when the conservative journalist Sandro Magister tallied up the numbers a month after the controversy began, he found fewer than twenty-five comments from bishops and cardinals—about ten in support of the pope, about fifteen giving some kind of encouragement to the dubia. From everyone else, again—silence. Watchful waiting. A refusal either to defend the pope or to question him openly, until they knew what moves he intended to make next.
What happened was a response, but of a different sort. The Knights of Malta, the charitable order to which Cardinal Burke was posted, had their own version of the larger church’s ongoing battles, which came to a head shortly after the dubia were publicized when a German knight, Grand Master Albrecht von Boeselager, was sacked by his English superior, Prince and Grand Master Fra’ Matthew Festing. The proximate issue was a condom distribution program; the deeper issue was a split over the order’s overall trajectory, how much it should insist on Catholic identity, and all the other inevitable questions of the age. Boeselager protested and appealed to allies in the Vatican, and Pope Francis intervened—which would not have been surprising except that the Knights were, in fact, their own sovereign country, owing religious fidelity to the pope but with an ancient constitution that made them self-governing and not subject to Rome in choosing their leaders or their rules. So Francis’s move, which led to Festing’s resignation and Boeselager’s reinstatement, was a kind of soft annexation with no clear grounds in international law—a move, a few observers pointed out, that offered a kind of precedent for Italian or European Union intervention in some future papal conclave.
These legal niceties aside, the Knights business wasn’t so very different from John Paul II’s intervention in Jesuit elections in the 1980s, when the pontiff tried (without obvious success) to change the order’s liberal drift. But it had a more personal edge, given that it was Burke who had been advising the Order of Malta, Burke who had possibly encouraged Festing to fire Boeselager, and Burke’s authority that the papal intervention superseded. That the traditionalist cardinal was soon thereafter dispatched to far-flung Guam to supervise a sex abuse tribunal did not feel particularly coincidental.
Around this time the inhabitants of Rome awoke to find the city plastered with posters bearing the visage of a dyspeptic-looking pope. “Ah Francis,” they read in colloquial Italian, “you’ve taken over congregations, removed priests, decapitated the Order of Malta . . . ignored Cardinals . . . but where’s your mercy?”30 Such a public Roman protest was an unusual thing, indeed without precedent since the nineteenth century. The authorities pulled them down; Father Spadaro, ever ready on Twitter, called them “a sign that he’s doing well and causing A LOT of annoyance.”31 Shortly thereafter Francis’s handpicked kitchen cabinet of nine cardinals met in Rome and issued a statement of support, also unusual, for the pontiff: “In relation to recent events,” the statement said, “the Council of Cardinals expresses its full support for the work of the Pope, assuring at the same time its full adhesion and backing for His person and His Magisterium.”32
The recent events were not specified, nor were the details of “His Magisterium.” And from Francis himself, and from most of the world’s uneasy, watchful bishops, there was still only silence.