The teaching on divorce-and-remarriage and the sacraments of Pope Francis represents Catholic tradition and shows the way forward for engaging those who are estranged and hurting, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has said.
"As with all magisterial documents, Amoris Laetitia is best understood when read within the tradition of the Church's teaching and life," Archbishop Chaput said in July 1 pastoral guidelines for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Amoris Laetitia is Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation written as a culmination of the 2015 Synod on the Family. Some vague language in the exhortation had allowed a variety of interpretations, and Archbishop Chaput's guidelines were meant to help in the implementation of the document in the Philadelphia archdiocese.
The archbishop said the exhortation, which includes "sections of exceptional beauty and usefulness", calls for "a sensitive accompaniment" for those whose grasp of Christian teaching on marriage and family life is imperfect and for those who may not live according to Church teaching but desire to take part in Church life, including the Sacraments.
"In all of this the Holy Father, in union with the whole Church, hopes to strengthen existing families, and to reach out to those whose marriages have failed, including those alienated from the life of the Church," he added. Pope Francis' statements, he said, "build on the classic Catholic understanding, key to moral theology, of the relationship between objective truth about right and wrong ... and how the individual person grasps and applies that truth to particular situations in his or her judgment of conscience." He recalled that "the subjective conscience of the individual can never be set against objective moral truth," and quoted several times from Veritatis splendor, St. John Paul II's 1993 encyclical on fundamental questions regarding the Church's moral teaching.
Archbishop Chaput considered how this applies in cases of divorced-and-remarried persons, cohabiting couples, and persons with same-sex attractions or relationships. Pastors should avoid "both a subjectivism that ignores the truth or a rigorism that lacks mercy," he said."But they must always convey Catholic teaching faithfully to all persons - including the divorced and remarried - both in the confessional as well as publicly," he added.
