Put Into Practice Before the Ink Is Dry
Father Alain Lorans, spokeman of the SSPX and Director of DICI, comments on the main effect of Amoris Laetitia: “what was forbidden is now permitted”.
The ink is not yet dry on the exhortation Amoris Laetitia, which allows “pastoral exceptions” that authorize divorced and civilly remarried persons to receive communion, but it has already been put into practice as a matter of urgency. In the Philippines, Archbishop Socrates B. Villegas of Lingayen Daupan, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, wrote on April 9:
After discernment as a group, our bishops will develop more concrete guidelines on the application of the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. But mercy cannot wait. Mercy must not wait. From now on, bishops and priests must open welcoming arms to those who have been kept away from the Church by feelings of guilt and shame....This is an arrangement of mercy, an opening of heart and mind that needs no law, awaits no guideline. This can and must be done immediately.”
In Italy, Msgr. Alberto Carrara, editor of the diocesan bulletin of Bergamo, wrote on April 14:
Divorced and separated persons who have remarried can be readmitted to the sacraments. This is one of the innovations of Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation Pope Francis wrote following the two synods on the family.”
Theological and canonical critics of this exhortation may be legion; its pastoral applications are above such analyses, considered antiquated. Only one idea is retained: what was formerly forbidden by doctrinal rigidity is now permitted by pastoral mercy.
It must be remembered that since the Council, doctrine is not directly contradicted, nor openly attacked: it is simply circumvented, as one gets around an obstacle, in the name of pastoral practice. Opposing the traditional doctrine to conciliar praxis, attempting to argue on theological grounds against a practice that follows the mentality of the moment and adapts to the customs of the day, is as useless as trying to grasp a slippery bar of soap with scholarly concepts. The conciliar praxis can only be responded to with the traditional discipline, founded on bimillenial doctrine—a discipline that is not an opposed praxis, but rather the opposite of conciliar praxis.
Source: DICI 4-22-2016
