THIS is an information I got from the UK magazine The Tablet of September 23. Pope Francis says there: “Realities are greater than ideas”. And it is the need to connect the Church to the everyday challenges of Catholic families that drove his decision to convene two synods of bishops to focus on this topic. This led to the post-synodal exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, in which Francis writes shrewdly about the grieves, joys and hopes of family life and confirmed that the door to divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion in some circumstances has always been open.
On Tuesday, the Pope boldly pushed forward his attempt to consolidate Amoris Laetitia’s blueprint by founding a new Pontifical Institute for the study of marriage and the family, replacing the one set up by Pope St. John Paul II in 1981. In an apostolic letter, issued motu proprio, Francis writes that following the recent Synod the Church had put a renewed focus on the “reality of marriage and family life”, and this now required “a diversified and analytical approach”. The Church’s response to family life, the Pope stresses, cannot be “limited to pastoral and missionary practices” of the past. It should attend the “wounds of humanity”.
Nowhere in Francis’ text is there any mention of the “Theology of the Body”. This is an idiosyncratic body of teaching on the meaning of human sexuality drawn from a series addresses given by Pope John Paul II in the first year of his papacy.
Women, and whether or not they can be ordained, is a topic guaranteed to make most cardinals and bishops jumpy. This ia largely due to John Paul II’s 1994 edict, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which not only ruled against the possibility but insisted that the matter should not even be discussed.
While the stated aim was to draw a line under this question in the interests of church unity, it made all talk about the role of women in the Church highly sensitive. That is now beginning to change. Here in Rome, the role of women is increasingly on the agenda, with Pope Francis himself regularly opening up discussion on this topic, as well as making the dramatic move to appoint a commission to look at the question of female deacons.
In my own opinion, it looks like the Pope is moving the Church from Rome to the local Church authorities. They can make a valid judgment whether dispensation should be given in certain cases. When I decided to leave the priesthood, marry my present wife and adopt her six young children because she lost her husband in the Antongalon massacre. I felt that I was justified to do that. And this was confirmed by the fact that I received my own daughter after we tried very hard for a long time. I consider this as a sign from God that He agreed that I had left the priesthood.
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