Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
This is the first year that the feast of the Holy Family is
being celebrated in the context and shadow of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris
Laetitia, the Joy of Love. The Feast
of the Holy Family was added to the Church’s calendar in the first decade of
the twentieth century. To contemplate
the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph is indeed a good thing to do within
the celebration of the Christmas season.
The bond of love that existed within this totally unique family is an
example for every family to emulate.
But, as I have preached about many times, to hold up the Holy Family as
a model for the what we can call normal family, is not an easy thing to
do. And when we try to apply our own
situation to that of the Holy Family without acknowledging that uniqueness, we
are always disappointed.
And so we come here today to celebrate this feast, which is
a contemplation of this unique family, this Holy Family, under the cloud of Amoris Laetitia. I say under the cloud in an objective sense,
in that there seems to be some confusion about what certain sections of that
document really mean, especially Chapter 8
It is no secret that four cardinals of the Church submitted a private
correspondence to the Pope in which they asked for a clarification of certain
sections of the Exhortation that could be construed as contrary to Church
teaching about the moral life with respect to the Sacrament of Marriage, the
role of conscience, and the authority of the Church. The request for clarification has been met by
a refusal to answer the dubia, as they are called, and instead resorting to
public press conferences to insist that the Exhortation is based on the outcome
of a valid Synod of bishops and therefore there can be no doubt, no dubium,
about the results of that Synod nor in the spelling out of its teaching in Amoris Laetitia. Such monarchial, to say the least, behavior
on the part of the Holy See is not only not consonant with the image of the
Bishop of Rome as the servant of the Church but also brings forth once again
what is the fundamental dogmatic problem in the Church today, a problem that
has been growing for at least a century, the problem that is the ever expanding
imagined power and authority of the Bishop of Rome.
One aspect of the question brought up by Amoris Laetitia is the objectivity of
moral norms. This has been a topic of
discussion in the Church for her whole life.
The question of whether particular circumstances affecting a particular
situation can in fact allow for the breaking of a fundamental moral norm. The Church’s answer to this question has
always been that particular circumstances can never justify an act that is
intrinsically evil. St. Pope John Paul
II affirmed this constant teaching of the Church in several of his encyclicals. The 1960s saw a resurgence of an attempt to
soften this teaching of the Church by an appeal to the relationship between
difficult circumstances and the moral law.
The protest against Humanae Vitae
was a clear example of an attempt to evade the difficulty of living a Catholic
life based on the teaching of the Church.
This specifically applied to marriage.
What we have seen in the past few years is an attempt to finish what was
begun in the sixties but what was held back by St. John Paul II and Benedict
XVI. It is a case of back to the
future. But now the same flawed
understanding of the demands of the moral life, of the role of conscience, and
of the power of the Church, are proclaimed in the name of the mercy of
God. The role of conscience, my friends,
is not to decide what to do. It is to recognize what is good and what is
bad. The role of the confessor is not to
decide what is right and wrong in the light of the penitent’s situation in
life. The role of the Confessor is to
absolve the penitent in the name of the mercy of God and to tell him: God and
sin no more.
I want to briefly contemplate the situation of one of the
members of the Holy Family, namely, Joseph.
We know so little about St. Joseph.
The most important is his faith, that he believed what the angel told
him about the singular situation of Mary’s pregnancy, and that he acted out his
faith by taking on the role of the father protector of this unique family, and
he did so in love. I always wonder why
St. Joseph’s Day on March 19 is celebrated with such fervor among some ethnic
groups, since objectively we know so little about him. My answer to my own wonderment is that most
of us know instinctively that he relates to us, especially those of us who are
married, in a mysterious and yet very real way.
He took on a task, a role, the role of a father although he did not
father the child for whom he was an earthly father, and every married man knows
that even when one has fathered children that to be a faithful and loving
father is not an easy task, and that a part of the at difficulty is to give
oneself even when one wants to keep part of oneself for oneself.
St. Joseph’s situation would give some theologians
pause. His acceptance to be the earthly
father of Jesus and the husband of Mary with all the moral imperatives that
apply without the physical intimacy of a husband and wife and without the deep
wonder and joy of looking at his Son as part of himself. This is indeed a
unique and difficult situation. And,
surely in this situation, we could declare that the moral norms of marriage do
not apply to him and that his failure to abide by those norms could be excused
by an appeal to the mercy of God, that the severity and ambiguity of his
calling surely can be softened by a God of mercy and surely his Confessor would
understand and tell him to not worry too much about following his own
conscience as a man in his peculiar situation.
Does that shock you? It
should. Is this consonant with the
Church’s teaching on marriage, on sexuality, on conscience, on living a moral
life, on the constitution of the Church ?
But is this consonant with the deliberate ambiguities found in the
teaching of Amoris Laetitiae? And if
it is not, then for the sake of truth, let the Bishop of Rome speak with
clarity and cast away the doubts that
cause so many good people to suffer because of the doubts that this lack of
clarity brings into their own marriages.
It is to the Holy Family that we must pray, pray that each
of us in our own families and husband or wife or child may have the grace to
live a life of sacrificial love for each other and that whatever our particular
circumstances we know that we have the prayers of Joseph and the Blessed Virgin
Mary to really assist us, and above all that we have the grace of our Lord
Jesus Christ who is present at this Mass to offer himself for your and me.
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