The answers Pope Francis gave are irrefutable. They are the epitomy of absolute truth in relation to the questions asked in the set of dubia. It must be mentioned here that the term dubia refers to the official process of presenting the Pope with a series of [academic] questions asking for clarification pertaining to matters of Church teaching or faith-practice. Therefore the terms dubia or dubium and questions will be used interchangably in the context of this article.
Reading that stuff written by Pope Francis in answer to these bishops’ quandaries nurtures the faith within my heart & helps it heal from the relentlous attacks of the Evil One. I was touched by the authenticity of the answers given and how often these were backed up by prior evidence given or facts testified to by his predecessors such as Pope John Paul II, and not to mention the substantiations from the various councils of say Trent and Vatican II, and of course harking back to Thomistic scholarship. There was absolutely no smidgin of error whatsoever in any of Pope Francis’ answers to the presented questions. I also had glimpses of how the popular solidarity alluded to in Question 4. was an ideal not yet realized in concrete temporal existance this side of the New Era. And of course the awesome insight regarding how the variegation in different charismatic slipstreams was conveyed in the following statement: “On the other hand, to be rigorous, let us recognize that a clear and authoritative doctrine on the exact nature of a “definitive statement” has not yet been fully developed. It is not a dogmatic definition, and yet it must be adhered to by all. No one can publicly contradict it and yet it can be a subject of study, as with the case of the validity of ordinations in the Anglican Communion”, which btw, ties in prophetically with this, the answer he gave to the first dubium:
“a) The answer depends on the meaning you give to the word “reinterpret.” If it is understood as “interpret better,” the expression is valid. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that it is necessary that with the work of exegetes – and I would add of theologians – “the judgment of the Church may mature” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, 12).
b) Therefore, while it is true that the Divine Revelation is immutable and always binding, the Church must be humble and recognize that she never exhausts its unfathomable richness and needs to grow in her understanding [of this richness].
c) Consequently, she also matures in her understanding of what she has herself affirmed in her Magisterium.
d) Cultural changes and new challenges in history do not modify Revelation but can stimulate us to express certain aspects of its overflowing richness better, which always offers more.
e) It is inevitable that this can lead to a better expression of some past statements of the Magisterium, and indeed, this has been the case throughout history.
This though by no means changes the traditional context in the Roman rite of what exactly constitutes ordained ministry since it is particular to the unique charism of the Roman rite that this ministry be a patrilineal one in that it is exercised exclusively by males. However, this mandate pertains solely to the Roman rite and its particular charism and so the patrilineality is therefore not necessarily applicable to other Christian traditions, spiritual charisms or slipstreams, and more specifically the ministry of their sacred rites btw, would be defined by the nuances of tradition specific to those slipstreams or congregational collectivities we have generally come to label in common religious parlance as “denominations”.
This also brings to the fore here the continuing validity of the first four Biblical Covenants, the ones that preceed the Mosaic Covenant. Bishop Athenasius Schneider calls this covenantal age before the Mosaic one, “the primitive period” while that of the Mosaic era is named “the Old Covenantal period” and that of the New Testanent era, “the period of the New Covenant or Evangelical period”. (1) It is obvious that much of the contemporary confusion stirred up by certain ultra-traditionalists among others within the Roman Catholic Church relates to the fact that many ultra-traditionalist leanings and certain modernist ones too, tend to ignore or outright denounce the validity of any tradition stemming from the pre-Mosaic Covenants as though these are somehow ‘heretical’ or ‘anti-Christ’ or just ‘anti-progess’ when in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth. Why? Because each of the seven Biblical covenants are eternally valid and they ultimately compliment each other and further, this complimentarity was echoed by Jesus Himself when He said that He has not come to do away with anything covenantal between God and creation that preceeded the New Covenant but that instead He came to reaffirm and complete this sacred relationship, hence the New Covenant sums up in essence the entirity of all the preceding ones. The myriad varieties of spiritual substances and traditions of these earlier Covenants have as much of a valid place, (if not even a more valid one) now within the universal Body of Christ as they had when they were first made between God and those whom He chose to make them with.
But the stupendous arrogance of certain ultra-traditionalists who want to interpret universality exclusively and unequivocally in terms of the Latin rite and a very specific albeit culturally unreflexive version thereof, leads them into error whereby they throw out much of the history, narratives, and spiritual wisdom of the pre-Mosaic Covenants, castigating the content thereof as no more than ‘heathen superstition’. And this then brings these contemporary Pharisees into conflict with certain nuanced approaches and steps taken by Pope Francis, towards achieving positive ecumenical dialogue and fraternity such as during the Amazonian Synod in 2019. Their rejection of Pope Francis’ extension of fraternal charity is a rejection of God’s call to love one another as He has loved us. Such a rejection is also an unhealthy denial of living out the universal call to holiness by rejecting an appehension of the humility to desire a Christ-centered appreciation of the vast plethora of spiritual knowledge and variety bestowed upon humanity by God from age to age and from land to land. It must be said that while I am writing within the context of the Latin rite, I am answering the complexity of issues raised by both Pope Francis in his own responses to the dubia as well as to that of the dubia themselves in a spirit of solidarity with my own multi-faith and inter-cultural family history because an honest quest to reconcile seeming but in-actual-fact illusiory ‘irreconcilable differences’ is the only way for me to holistically answer God’s call to purpose in my life.
And to return to a more general reading of the thematics at hand in the entirity of Pope Francis’ response to the dubia, even the words of someone as ultra-fundamentalist as Bishop Athenasius Schneider have reflected much of the same sentiment echoed in Pope Francis’ responses to the five dubia as can be gleaned from the following:
“The expressions “living tradition, “living magisterium”, “hermeneutic of continuity”, and “development of doctrine”, properly undetstood, can only mean that a greater clarity or precision is given to the same changeless content of revelation over time. Such new insights can never contradict what the Church has previously and definitively proposed, because Christ promised that the Holy Spirit would not reveal anything new, but only remind the disciples of what He told them.” (Schneider, 2023, Loc. 27-28)*
It is also vitally clear to recognize from this that the pope was in no way out of touch with the reality of how the Magisterium functions relative to the correspondance between the unbroken continuity of both Scripture and Tradition and the natural learning process of humankind relative to God’s sovereign wisdom. However, as we can see from the latest furor, these bishops who are heckling the Holy Father on these matters are ignoring the fact of our humble human reality: that we need as Francis said, to humble ourselves before God and recognize that although the Church is infallible in her core teaching and therefore “never exhausts its unfathomable richness”, she is essentially made up of fallible human members and in light of this “needs to grow in her understanding.”And this essentially means that as humans, it is our task and sacred duty to navigate the ambiguities of our broken humanity with humility and fortitude, and it is through doing so that we learn more astutely to recognise the still small voice of the Holy Spirit speaking within us and within our midst. This is how we grow spiritually and become better atuned to shining the Light of Christ out in the world around us. One of the greatest Saints to ever live, and whose feast we recently honoured teaches us no different. St Terese of Lisieux was told by God Himself about the complementarity of navigating the ambiguous path of human existence with both humility and fortitude as these complement each other rather than contradict. Nature can neither be or do as she is or does without the symbiotic interplay of the two existential faculties of being and doing. It’s a reflection of the mercy of God as complementary to His righteousness for neither are mutually exclusive as each of these reflects something of the inherent nature of its co-relational other. What’s more is, this symbiosis neither cancels out the unique participation of one with the other but instead harmonizes them perfectly. This process was succinctly and with much candour, summed up by Pope Francis in his reflection on the nature of Sacramental Confession (Dubium 5.) and how the dynamics of Absolution work.
In light of all of this then and much much more, I am absolutely gob-smacked that these cardinals who originally posed the set of dubia could have such gumption and impatience to the point of showing a persistent dissatisfaction with the response Pope Francis lovingly made to each of their five quandaries:
Other than the fact that many of these ultra-fundamentalists are crack-pottedly cynical about ecumenism in conjunction with their blatant castigation of the advocated practice by Pope Francis that Catholics on the whole need to be more communicatively transparent instead of being perpetually stuck in a vaccum of staunchly parochial and rigidly inward cliquism that embraces patriotic sentiment which wrongly equates an unhealthy sense of nationalism that borders on being anti-universal with being ‘upright and God-fearing’ (and underneath all that, might we imply, lies the arcane sin of racism??), I can’t think what it could be that these senior clergy really have a bee in their bonnet about since I doubt they could actually, in all earnestness pin Pope Francis on a supposed endorsement of gay marriage when Pope Francis has repeatedly stated that the only marriage the Church endorses is the sacred nuptial convenant between a man and a woman. And considering this, it becomes clear that the article from Citizen Digital gives a distorted view of what Pope Francis said in answer to the second dubium, implying that just because Pope Francis defined blessing as requesting God to assist one in navigating the course of their life, this somehow auto-translates as ‘Pope Francis is now officially endorsing same-sex marriage within the Church’, which actually is none other than a completely false accusation. He was merely expounding the spiritual component of what a blessing in the general sense, actually is. He was not referring to the sacramental rite of marriage as such in this instance.
From the way these surly cardinals have now pressurized Pope Francis for a second answer, unsatisfied with the first, it is as though the Devil is now using these men to tempt Pope Francis into sinning. He gave the perfect answer the first time, what more could they ask for, really?
Other References:
(1.) Schneider, A., Credo: Compendium of the Catholic Faith, 2023, Sophia Institute Press, Manchester, New Hampshire, Loc. 27-28 in the Adobe Digital Editions format.
* Ibid
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