Love and Fear

Shame and bitterness overcame me when the priest said that my parents were not married. They had spent thirty years together and had raised three children, but because my father was a Catholic who had married outside the church, the church held that he had never married at all. Or so this priest told me. I thought him a bastard—after all, he was saying I was one.

Truth can sting. Pope Francis wants to soften it, to minimize its assaults. In his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, he uses the euphemism “irregular unions” to describe relationships that Catholics consider objectively adulterous. He suggests that people living in a persistent state of sin may receive communion if certain conditions are met—not least, if they are “tactful.” Francis would like the church to be tactful, as well.

I have felt the Church’s teaching on marriage land like a sharp blow, yet I take no encouragement from this shift. Amoris Laetitia suggests that an objective assessment of whether or not one is in a state of mortal sin can be replaced with a more subjective “discernment” of one’s “interior disposition.” While this may seem merciful, it leaves Catholics less sure of how they stand before God.

Francis writes: “We must make room for the conscience of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel.” This notion of conscience as a licensing agency, as “making room” for actions that otherwise would count as sins, is strange to me. Far from reassuring me that I am worthy to receive communion, my conscience has often reminded me that I am not. As Mary Geach said:

One way in which moral advisers may fail people who have doubts about whether to commit respectable sins, is telling them that they must follow their consciences . . . would you say “follow your conscience” to a man whose code of honour obliged him to kill his father’s killer?

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