Liberal ex-priest James Carroll writes to celebrate Pope Francis’s “love letter,” saying in part:
Conservatives have long warned of the dangers involved in a forthright, public acknowledgment that moral complexity requires flexibility. Rules and doctrines, they worry, will be undermined if absolutist attitudes about their meaning are mitigated. The conservatives are right, and they will surely see this new exhortation as a further source of concern. Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy toward the divorced and remarried doesn’t only mean that those people will more freely partake of Communion. It also means that the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage, however much it is still held up as an ideal, will not grip the moral imagination of the Church as it once did.
This, to Carroll, is good news.
Ross Douthat has other views. He says Francis has not formally changed Church doctrine, but has endorsed the de facto violation of it:
But there is also now a new papal teaching: A teaching in favor of the truce itself. That is, the post-1960s separation between doctrine and pastoral practice now has a papal imprimatur, rather than being a state of affairs that popes were merely tolerating for the sake of unity. Indeed, for Pope Francis that separation is clearly a hoped-for source of renewal, revival and revitalization, rather than something that renewal or revival might enable the church to gradually transcend.
Again, this is not the clear change of doctrine, the proof of concept for other changes, that many liberal bishops and cardinals sought. But it is an encouragement for innovation on the ground, for the de facto changes that more sophisticated liberal Catholics believe will eventually render certain uncomfortable doctrines as dead letters without the need for a formal repudiation from the top.
This means that the new truce may be even shakier than the old one. In effectively licensing innovation rather than merely tolerating it, and in transforming the papacy’s keenest defenders into wary critics, it promises to heighten the church’s contradictions rather than contain them.
And while it does not undercut the pope’s authority as directly as a starker change might have, it still carries a distinctive late-Marxist odor — a sense that the church’s leadership is a little like the Soviet nomenklatura, bound to ideological precepts that they’re no longer confident can really, truly work.
This reminds me of Philip Rieff’s observation:
The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.