Rod Dreher's Blog, page 595

Reading Francis Through Rieff

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.

Bless Her Heart!

I. LOVE. HER.:

Hell hath no fury like an angry Southern mom.

Taking away electronics is a common parental punishment, but this mother decided to take it one step further – and shoot up her children’s iPhones with a rifle.

‘I hereby denounce the effects that social media have on my children,’ the mom shouts at the beginning of the video, a gun in her hand. ‘Their disobedience and their disrespect.’

She then points the gun and the camera moves to reveal that she’s not about to shoot a pheasant or a bottle, but is aiming straight for an iPhone perched on a tree trunk.

More:

‘My children’s lives are more important to me,’ she begins, as the camera reveals she is standing over the trunk with a sledgehammer, ‘than any electronic on this earth.’

‘Good for you,’ one of the children interrupts. ‘We still don’t give two f***s’.

‘I refuse to have them influenced in negative ways,’ the mother continues.

‘Contacting people they don’t know, being involved in drama they don’t need to be in, and being in trouble at school for having phones out.’

She then hammers the remaining pieces a few times, her dog watching, before screaming: ‘I’m done!’

Read the whole glorious thing! I’m short-listing this heroine for a Nobel.

‘Bacon Is My Beatrice’

Teaching the Divine Comedy to his students at Petra Academy in Bozeman, MT, Sam Koenen was trying to convey how the pilgrim Dante sees Beatrice sacramentally. Struggling for a way to explain to them how sacramentalism works, he drew on the Jim Gaffigan routine about bacon (“the most beautiful thing on earth”). This:

The pig is an amazing animal. You feed it an apple, it makes bacon. The pig is turning an apple, essentially garbage, into bacon. That’s magic…!

One of the students said, “Mr. Koenen, it sounds like bacon is your Beatrice.”

Well, yeah, the teacher said.

So they made him a bumper sticker. And they made one for the author of How Dante Can Save Your Life. It will be on the bumper of a certain 2007 Honda Accord before sunrise Monday. Thanks, y’all!

Vibrancy! Diversity! Conformity!

WE DEMAND that Stanford expels Panda Express from campus, since its food is culturally appropriative, and celebrates the harvesting of the endangered panda bear.

WE DEMAND that Stanford renames White Plaza to Black Plaza. Naming a central plaza after a race is hateful.

WE DEMAND that Stanford recognizes that half-lives matter, and establishes a committee to fund the Chemistry and Physics Departments accordingly.

Et cetera. Some of them were funny, some of them were lame. But campus snowflakes melted down. The College Fix collected some of the social media rage:

Sorry fam for putting this out here, but the Review just loves being disgustingly offensive. April Fools or not, this is no joke. These are people’s lives and cultures and struggles. Stop throwing out slander. Stop throwing out garbage. And I see no one wanted to put their name on this one either. That’s the only smart thing y’all did with this article. …

Y’all think you’re being hella cute and funny with this don’t you? Like, are you forreal? Do you still not get it? There are no words. Honestly I’m tired. Blatant disrespect. Have some freaken respect. Have some ounce of understanding. Oh but wait, too busy crying cis white male tears that I still don’t really see the point in collecting?????? …

So, another day, another absurd day on an elite American campus. But here’s where it gets well and truly pathetic. The administration of an actual Ivy League college elite American university e-mailed this drivel to all students on Friday:

Dear Stanford Student,

When you joined Stanford University, you became part of our diverse, vibrant community founded upon academic excellence, innovative thinking, collaborative engagement and civic responsibility.

The challenge for us all is to balance freedom of thinking and expression with our responsibility to others. At Stanford, we believe one way to do this is for community members to engage in respectful conversations with each other. The goal of these exchanges is to foster a learning environment that includes multiple perspectives and life experiences different from our own, thereby affirming the value of all identities as distinctive strengths of our university community.

At Stanford, we are each responsible for our words and actions, and we are accountable to the people in our community who are impacted by what we say, regardless of the initial intent.

Free speech is paramount to the success of our academic community, and, at the same time, we must reject language that encourages or reinforces stereotypes and bigotry including racism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia [sic], sexism, homophobia—discrimination of any kind. As James Baldwin says, “Language is a political instrument.”

There is a long history in the United States of racial animus through satire that we all need to recognize. We must be careful of participating in and perpetuating inequities. Parodies or stereotypes of people of color, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientation and gender non-conformity have the effect—whether intended or not—to undermine the legitimacy and value of already marginalized people.

Thus we must be particularly alert as to how our language, including the use of humor, can undermine the climate of respectful dialogue that we are building and be careful that it does not work to delegitimize critical claims toward the diversity that Stanford affirms.

Humor and satire are powerful tools that can be provocative and profound; they can also be insensitive, hurtful and cruel. When we employ such tools, we need to measure the impact of our words and be responsive to those whose own experience is the basis for the intended humor.

We know many in our community have felt the pain of recent events. And, as members of this community, we acknowledge your hurt. We want you to know that we care about you and value you.

Integrity, empathy and accountability are foundational to our community, and it is our responsibility as ethical citizens to practice these actively with each other.

Sincerely,

Greg Boardman

Vice Provost for Student Affairs

Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Patricia J. Gumport

Vice Provost for Graduate Education

These people. I swear. First of all, does it not occur to these adults that by acting like nursemaids to a bunch of spoiled privileged children, they are only making their lives and the life of the university worse? Here’s an audio version of that letter, for your listening pleasure.

Second … really, Stanford administration? You’re trying to tell college students that they can’t poke fun at favored minority groups? This paragraph is asinine:

Free speech is paramount to the success of our academic community, and, at the same time, we must reject language that encourages or reinforces stereotypes and bigotry including racism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia [sic], sexism, homophobia—discrimination of any kind. As James Baldwin says, “Language is a political instrument.”

Translation: “We have to say that free speech is important, because we like to tell ourselves that. But you should not feel free to say anything critical of favored races, Judaism, Islam, women, gays, or, well, anybody. As the party commissar says, “Language is a political instrument.”

Honestly, somebody help me here. What kind of actual adult college administrators draft a response to an humorous op-ed in a student newspaper in the first place?

The Stanford Review editorial board responded, in part:

Time to address the elephant in our inboxes. We are disappointed that, in the middle of student elections, Stanford’s administration has chosen both to politicize themselves and to ignore by far the clearest abuse of free speech this campus has seen all year. An April Fools’ Day joke commanded 300 words of commentary from Stanford. Anti-Semitic comments from a sitting student Senator? Two words, and in passing.

Our administrators claim that students must be “accountable to [those] impacted by what [they] say, regardless of the initial intent”. If this were true, nobody would dare engage in discussions of controversial topics at all.

Of course, there are limits to speech. Words that directly incite violence should be condemned and prohibited. But offense is subjective. At Brandeis, the Asian American community created a gallery of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”, only for another group to deem the gallery itself offensive and demand it be taken down. Punishing people for statements that cross a line known only to the person hearing them leads to fearful silence, and a campus unwilling to push boundaries or ask questions that matter.

Neither the Review nor the administration has called on Stanford to prohibit speech like Senator Knight’s. However, condemning speech and attacking its merits is itself an exercise in free speech. And leveraging administrative power and procedures to threaten and stifle words because you do not like them, or because they intrude on campus “empathy”, is arbitrary and wrong.

 

Norcia In Bozeman

Brother Ignatius, guestmaster of the Norcia monastery, and Area Man

Montana readers, come out tonight (Saturday) to Bozeman’s Petra Academy at 7pm and hear me talk about the Benedict Option by sharing the wisdom of the Benedictine Monks of Norcia. I’ve been transcribing the interviews I did in February, and will be sharing some of their advice for how we orthodox Christians can live more faithfully in these chaotic post-Christian times. I knew I had good material when I left Norcia, but listening to those interviews again and transcribing them made me excited about this book, and sharing what those prayerful men have to offer to the world.

Come out tomorrow night to get a preview of the Benedict Option book.

Bring The Gaypocalypse To Tupelo!

There was a time not too long ago when, had this Guardian story been written as is for a major media outlet, it would not have been published because it would have been seen as aiding and abetting the cause of the Religious Right (by feeding prejudice). Times have changed. Vice is a virtue, and debauchery is now liberation of a politically advantageous kind. Arwa Madhawi reports from Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, California. Excerpts:

Every year at the end of March, 20,000 lesbians from around the world fly into the Californian desert for five days of debauchery, and I’m one of them. It’s my second time at the Dinah, also known as the largest girl festival in the world. I’m staying at the Hilton in Palm Springs, which is hosting the famous Dinah pool parties, and the hotel feels like a homosexual harem.

I like her colorful, forthright, descriptive language. No euphemisms there, nor any of the self-censoring media used to do when reporting on these things a decade or two ago, lest the public read the facts and come to doubt the Narrative. Do not fail to observe that even today, despite the securing of same-sex marriage rights and the ongoing cultural revolution around all things LGBT, if a cultural conservative used the same language to describe the event, it would be prima facie evidence of bigotry. More:

There’s a sense of liberation and a tacit understanding that what happens in Dinah stays in Dinah (unless it ends up on Facebook).

“Flashing is normal,” Charlotte, 24, told me. “I get flashed at a lot.” Random girls pulling you into their hotel rooms are also pretty standard. One year, there was a minor earthquake in Palm Springs. Debbie, a Dinah veteran who has attended every event since 1991, recalls that half the water splashed out of the pool. Most of the girls were too drunk to realize or care.

The feeling of permissiveness is compounded by the desert scenery: it looks like there has been some sort of gaypocalypse, and all the straight men and women have died out.

It’s a surreal experience: for a few days the world is turned upside down, the minority is suddenly the majority. Everywhere you look, lesbians are smiling, drinking, dancing, kissing.

I will never accept that acting like an animal is evidence of human dignity. And:

Speaking of economics: corporations have finally woken up to the profit margins of the margins, and the Dinah has become a lot more attractive to brands. Bacardi, Bud Lite, Smirnoff and Barefoot Wines are all big sponsors this year. Bacardi and Bud have sent teams of scantily clad promo girls (most of whom are straight) who hand out swag, pose for photos and generally act a little gay for pay. While it’s normally irritating to get relentlessly advertised to, in this case it’s a sign of progress. You’re not a real human until you’re recognized by corporate America.

What a great line, that last one, and so very true. Read the whole thing. 

This is our world now. I spent the past few days talking to conservative Lutheran pastors in Canada, where LGBT consciousness in both law and culture is further advanced than in the US. If you doubt the need for the Benedict Option, spend a little time north of the border talking in depth with orthodox Christians, both pastors and laity. Where Canada is today, the US will be tomorrow or the day after — though Deo gratias, we will be spared the terror of the Human Rights Commissions.

Note too the conclusion of the Dinah Shore Weekend piece for a sign of what’s to come:

It’s also a reminder of how much today’s gay people owe to previous generations. There was a long fight for our right to party, and it’s not over yet. I got back from the Dinah on Tuesday morning; the same day Mississippi’s governor signed legislation making discrimination against gay couples legal. There’s still a while to go before we can all really celebrate.

Madame DeFarge has a Sapphic side, methinks. Humankind will not be free until the gaypocalypse comes to Tupelo.

UPDATE: I kept getting annoyed reading the people in the comments section saying that I had a double standard for Spring Break and Mardi Gras. Annoyed, because I specifically mentioned Spring Break and Mardi Gras as examples of heterosexuals acting like rutting animals. The software saved an earlier version of the post, but not the final version, and my online connection cut off as the flight I was on began to land. So, yes, absolutely compare this to heterosexual bacchanals. That’s totally fair. Thing is, events like Spring Break and Mardi Gras, when they get like this, are simply regarded as vice. This writer frames the Dinah Shore Weekend as an identity-politics virtue.

Religious Liberty In Mississippi

I am trying to find a neutral description of what the religious liberty bill the Mississippi governor just signed into law would and would not do. The Washington Post said:

It is the first law to prohibit state government from taking any discriminatory action against a person, religious organization, business or government employee for refusing services to LGBT people because of “sincerely held religious beliefs” or “moral conviction” against same-sex marriage, extra-marital sex and/or transgender people.

That is misleading. When I first read that, I thought that it would give a fundamentalist Christian cashier at Burger Doodle the right to refuse to serve fries to gay customers. That would be wrong, no doubt. But it turns out that that’s not exactly what the law does. ABC News says:

Specifically, religious organizations protected by the law can:

– Decline to “solemnize any marriage” or provide wedding-related services based on their religious beliefs or moral convictions. Those services run a full gamut, from wedding planning, photography, disc-jockey services and floral arrangements to cakes, venues and limos.

– Decide “whether or not to hire, terminate or discipline an individual whose conduct or religious beliefs are inconsistent” with their beliefs or moral convictions.

– Decide to whom they will sell or rent housing they control based on their religious beliefs or moral convictions.

Does anybody actually believe that religious organizations should not have those rights — even if you believe that exercising those rights would be wrong? More from ABC News:

In addition, for others protected under the law:

– Adoptive or foster parents can raise a child they’ve been granted custody of by the state with the same beliefs and convictions of those protected by the law.

– Medical and therapy professionals can decline “treatments, counseling, or surgeries related to sex reassignment or gender identity transitioning” and “psychological, counseling, or fertility services” to people whose lifestyles violate their religious beliefs.

– People can create “sex-specific standards or policies concerning employee or student dress or grooming, or concerning access to restrooms, spas, baths, showers, dressing rooms, locker rooms or other intimate facilities or settings.”

– State employees and those acting on behalf of the state may recuse themselves from authorizing or licensing legal marriages, although they may not stand in the way of others doing so.

With the possible exception of the state employees’ provision, I fail to see why any of this is outrageous. Ryan T. Anderson goes further:

HB 1523 specifies types of people and types of organizations for particular protections—including religious organizations, medical professionals and professionals working in the wedding industry, and government employees. It crafts careful protections for each type of entity.

For example, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a religious organization because it declines to solemnize or celebrate a same-sex wedding, or because it makes employment decisions in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage. It prevents the government from discriminating against religious organizations that do adoption or foster care work in keeping with their religious beliefs about marriage as the union of husband and wife.

When it comes to professionals, HB 1523 says that the government can never discriminate against a surgeon, psychiatrist or counselor because they decline to do sex-reassignment surgery or decline to do marriage counseling for a same-sex marriage. The bill makes clear, however, that it cannot be used to deny visitation or proxy decision making to a same-sex spouse, nor to deny any emergency medical treatment required by law. Likewise, under HB 1523 the government could never penalize a photographer, baker or florist who declined to help celebrate a same-sex wedding.

As for government employees, HB 1523 strikes a reasonable balance. It says that the government cannot discriminate against employees for speech or conduct they engage in in their personal capacity outside of their job responsibilities when it comes to these three beliefs.

And regarding the state employees’ provision, Anderson says that the bill:

says that a government employee may seek a recusal from issuing marriage licenses, provided they do it ahead of time and in writing, and provided they “take all necessary steps to ensure that the authorization and licensing of any legally valid marriage is not impeded or delayed.” A commonsense win-win outcome.

Isn’t it? It’s saying that religious people with conscience objections don’t have to participate in the licensing of same-sex marriages, but they have to register their disapproval in advance, and make it so that no gay couple seeking to marry faces any obstacles or delay to their wedding from the state licensing authorities. Why is that unfair?

I reserve the right to revise these opinions if I read a more complete account of what the law does and doesn’t do. But at this point, it seems like a legitimate attempt by a socially conservative state to offer limited and specific protections to people who have a sincere religious objection to changing views on homosexuality. I might be wrong about this, and appreciate correction if so.

My friend Matthew Sitman strongly disagrees, and in particular focuses on conservatives complaining about big corporations punishing states for attempting to protect religious liberty in these matters. Excerpt:

What the conservative position on LGBT rights and religious freedom, exemplified in the Mississippi and North Carolina bills, amounts to is this: they want maximal ability to opt out of any and all situations that might involve doing business with LGBT people or treating them in minimally considerate and decent ways, but then rail against others for not going along with it. They want the state to sanction their own discrimination, but then are horrified when others freely choose to follow a different, better path. They want their freedom, but despise the free choices of others.

Anti-LGBT conservatives, in other words, want to live in a world made over entirely in their own image. Freedom means getting their way, all the time. The future of religious liberty in this country will be a perilous one indeed if it becomes associated with such nonsense.

The problem with this is that the pro-LGBT side also wants maximal ability to impose its own views of right and wrong in these matters on everyone else, and to refuse to treat religious dissenters in minimally considerate and decent ways. Consider the Washington state florist Barronnelle Stutzman, who is paying a heavy legal price — and who may lose her business — because she declined on conscience grounds to provide flowers for her friend and longtime customer’s same-sex wedding. Stutzman explained her position in the Seattle Times:

That’s why I always liked bouncing off creative ideas with Rob for special events in his life. He understood the deep joy that comes from precisely capturing and celebrating the spirit of an occasion. For 10 years, we encouraged that artistry in each other.

I knew he was in a relationship with a man and he knew I was a Christian. But that never clouded the friendship for either of us or threatened our shared creativity — until he asked me to design something special to celebrate his upcoming wedding.

If all he’d asked for were prearranged flowers, I’d gladly have provided them. If the celebration were for his partner’s birthday, I’d have been delighted to pour my best into the challenge. But as a Christian, weddings have a particular significance.

Marriage does celebrate two people’s love for one another, but its sacred meaning goes far beyond that. Surely without intending to do so, Rob was asking me to choose between my affection for him and my commitment to Christ. As deeply fond as I am of Rob, my relationship with Jesus is everything to me. Without Christ, I can do nothing.

I’m not ashamed of that, but it was a painful thing to try to explain to someone I cared about — one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. But Rob assured me he understood. And I suggested three other nearby florists I knew would do an excellent job for this celebration that meant so much to him. We seemed to part as friends.

But then I was sued.

Seems to me that treating Barronnelle Stutzman with “minimal consideration and decency” would at least put filing a lawsuit against her out of bounds. She does not believe in refusing to do business with gay customers across the board. She had been doing so for years, knowing that her customers were gay. And she suggested three other places where her gay friend could find a florist to accommodate him. But that wasn’t enough.

I can understand why progressive-minded people in Mississippi would not want to trade with a bakery or florist that would not participate in gay weddings. That’s just a price that those business owners would have to be willing to pay for following their conscience. And Matthew is right, to a certain extent, that free-market conservatives have limited grounds for objection when a corporation refuses to do business in a state it regards as discriminatory. But I think conservatives are perfectly within bounds to point out that companies like PayPal have no problem doing business with countries that are far more discriminatory against gays and lesbians than the State of North Carolina is, but this doesn’t affect their desire for corporate profits.

The fact is, very few people on either side have a consistent, non-absolutist view on what constitutes an acceptable degree of religious liberty in an era of greatly expanding gay rights. Is there any situation in which gay rights supporters believe that a business owner or religious organization should have the right to opt out of providing a product or service to gay couples, on conscience grounds? If not, then religious liberty is meaningless. It’s only meaningful when it protects the right of sincerely religious people to do unpopular things in accord with their conscience.

The problem is that gay rights and religious liberty really are a zero-sum phenomenon in most ways. That is, the advance of one comes at the expense of the other. Nobody can have his way completely without causing the other side some loss. The problem for social and religious conservatives is that the other side either doesn’t understand the compromise it demands from the religiously dissenting minority, or it doesn’t care — and with the rare exception of places like Mississippi, the other side holds most of the power.

I would bet that in 20 to 30 years, this would hardly be an issue in Mississippi. In my home state, Louisiana, a majority of adults under the age of 50 support same-sex marriage. Social change is coming, and coming fast, even in the most culturally conservative parts of America. But having won so many victories, and so quickly, the LGBT rights side seems determined to rub the noses of the culture war’s losers in their own humiliation.

One more time: if I am missing something about the Mississippi law that ought to affect my opinion, please let me know.

Your Working Boy In Bozeman

Hey Bozeman, Montana, area readers, you have a chance to hear Your Working Boy tonight and Saturday night, as part of the Trinity Presbyterian Church’s lecture series. Here’s the info.

I have received assurances that the lecture halls will be a Sasquatch-free zone. A guy’s gotta have his safe space.

On Gay Marriage, GOP Is Gutless

Peter Leithart, with whom I just spent a wonderful three days in Canada, observes that the Republican Party has given up on traditional marriage, noting that the new line on SSM seems to be “personally opposed, but…” Excerpts:

It’s not surprising that marriage has been muted. What surprises is how easily the GOP has fallen into line. If a Republican candidate did the private/public two-step on abortion, his campaign would be abortive. When a candidate does it with marriage, there’s nary a peep. It seems the GOP has determined that marriage isn’t worth much of a fuss. Where are the howls of protest? Where have all the Bad Republicans gone?

Declaring a personal commitment to traditional marriage is nothing more than a sop to social conservatives unless it’s backed up by action. Either marriage is a basic institution of society, or it isn’t. Either family is essential to healthy public life, or it’s not. If the GOP isn’t willing to risk anything to conserve this institution, what is it conserving?

Its relationship to its corporate donors, and, I suppose, its long-term viability. That ship has sailed, unfortunately, and I don’t blame the GOP for being realistic about these things — to a point. And that point is its pathetic refusal to articulate and press a strong defense of religious liberty against the attacks by progressives and other gay rights supporters, especially those in the donor class.

This moment was entirely foreseeable — in fact, I saw it coming in 2008, and started writing about it back then. I said that social conservatives ought to realize we’ve lost this part of the culture war, but we ought to start mounting strong defenses, legally and rhetorically, on religious freedom grounds, to protect our institutions. The national Republicans have been by and large a disappointment on this.

So, I disagree somewhat with Peter. I can understand why the GOP wouldn’t be interested in the quixotic attempt to do away with Obergefell. But to sit back and watch the gay rights juggernaut roll over the religious liberty of orthodox Christians and other religious dissenters from the new regime of intolerance is repulsive. Social and religious conservatives have to know now that the Republican Party is not our friend.

And yet, most of us will end up voting for these jackals anyway in November, because of the Supreme Court. Such is life.

The Pope Finally Speaks

At long last, Pope Francis has released the thing:

He called for divorced and remarried Catholics to participate more fully in church life. But he closed the door on gay marriage. He quotes Jorge Luis Borges and Jesus Christ. There is an entire chapter on Love.

But more than anything, Pope Francis’s long awaited document on family life, released Friday by the Vatican, amounts to an exultation of traditional marriage while recognizing that life, in his own words, isn’t always “perfect.” Yet rather than judging, he commanded, the church should be a pillar of support.

More:

Although the pope did not explicitly call for a rule change, he seemed to suggest that such cases should be studied and ruled on one by one. At one point, he mentions that people who are living in an “objective situation of sin” can “also grow in the life of grace.” Then, in this footnote for priests, he notes:

“I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

The pope seemed to say that the church must deal with the world it lives in, not the world it wants. He sometimes sounded less like a pontiff than a marriage counselor.

One more bit:

Monsignor Fred Easton, who led the Indianapolis Archdiocese’s tribunal for 31 years, said Friday morning that the pope’s document was not offering the divorced and remarried a path to the Eucharist, but rather encouraging laypeople and priests to find every possible other way to include them in church life. He acknowledged the wording might prompt different analyses.

Read the whole Washington Post account.  And, here is the full text of the papal document.

That last sentence is the understatement of the year. Here is Footnote 351, on page 237. It is a footnote to a line about how people can be living in “an objective situation of sin — which may not be subjectively culpable, or fully such,” and should still be included in the life of the Church. The footnote reads:

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” (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium [24 November 2013], 44: AAS 105 [2013], 1038). I would also point out that the Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak”

That is the footnote that ate the rule of church law governing communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. It’s a hole that bishops and priests will drive a fleet of trucks through. It’s the principle of economia, I get that; we use it in the Orthodox Church. Maybe it’s the right thing to do here. But conservative Catholics are right to see this as a big deal. Francis seems to be changing church law de facto without changing church law de jure. It’s all now up to the pastor’s discretion, it sounds like. Here’s a passage from Chapter 8:

Hence it is can no longer simply be said that all those in any “irregular” situation are living in a state of mortal sin and are deprived of sanctifying grace. More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject 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 him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.

I understand what the pope is saying here, but is this not, in fact, a renunciation of standards, replacing them with situational ethics, at the discretion of the pastor? Eh?

(Readers, please be patient with my approving comments today. I’m flying in a few minutes from Calgary to Bozeman, Montana. Back online this afternoon.)