The acceleration of the post-dubia Church: why time is sometimes not greater than space

When I launched this blog on 30th November I gave it the following description:

De Ecclesia arienarum republicae or living in a post-dubia Church

I wouldn't be surprised if my Latin is a bit wayward - I've enough for reading St Thomas (mostly) though perhaps not enough to tackle Terence - but the post-dubia label was one I felt strongly. This is why.

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The dubia of the four cardinals marks a kind of watershed. We have seen any number of letters and protests over the last two years about Amoris Laetitia. Only yesterday we heard news of yet another, this time from John Finnis and Germain Grisez. More of that in a moment.

I have always felt such letters were pretty futile in the long run, easy to stonewall, quickly forgotten and not worth the trouble of responding to, at least in the view of authorities whose notions of dialogue extend only so far .... but no further. Yet the dubia were different, and they have left the papal rhetoric echoing in a void.

The exceptionalism of Amoris Laetitia was facilitated by its ambiguity. I am not sufficiently expert in the history of ecclesiastical governance to say how original such an instrument was. To me it smacks more of Lambeth than of the Lateran. That said, the ambiguity of the footnote which did not clearly say what everybody thought it said - and whose intended message is now being repeated with increasing clarity and insistence - was the armour-piercing head designed to break through the plates of conservative doctrinal rigidity. I read the opening of Amoris Laetitia the other day in a new light. Here is part of paragraph 2 and the start of paragraph 3:

The debates carried on in the media, in certain publications and even among the Church’s ministers, range from an immoderate desire for total change without sufficient reflection or grounding, to an attitude that would solve everything by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations. 

3. Since “time is greater than space”, I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium.

Here, you have all you need to know about the pope's plan to defeat those damned generalist rule-obsessives: couch the changes in ambiguity, kick the difficult bit into the long grass of interpretation and discernment, and let time do its work.  Hagan lio, as the pope told young people in Rio: make a mess. It's the sign of the Spirit!

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Yet, these dubia have not only repelled the armour-piercing armament of ambiguity; they have sought to undo the Franciscan method from the inside. They seek precisely to establish what principles are in play, and that of course is impossible to clarify for someone who has just criticised those who are prone to

applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations. 

I refer the reader here back to what I wrote the other day about the nature of exceptions. The implication of Amoris Laetitia seems to be that exceptions are simply exceptions, untying the binding nature of law. If this is what is meant ...if ... then it is on very shaky ground. The only reason for an exception is for a lower law to cede to a higher law. Exceptions are not the suspension of law but the affirmation of its hierarchy.

Therefore,  attacking those who '[apply] general rules' seems all the more difficult to interpret charitably (although we must try). If we are being urged to give way to a higher law, then let the higher law be stated without ambiguity.

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And thus to the post-dubia Church. No amount of letter writing could have pierced the papal plan of largely ignoring critics of Amoris Laetitia. But dubia are different. They are like a lever reaching into the machine, forcing it to perform key processes that belong to the constitution of the Church. To do nothing in response to them - or to simply give yet more newspaper interviews making allusions to rigourism and psychological problems - is not to do nothing at all. In some ways it is to break the machine; or to change the metaphor, it is to block an essential function of the organism. And, as we all know, if you block a function at one end, you often get the consequences at the other end!

These last few weeks, we have seen a rising tide of objections being made, inducing counter-attacks from the other side. Fr Spadaro has become embroiled in the most ludicrous spats on Twitter; the pope has continued to talk to the press about rigidity; murmurs of canonical sanctions have been made by senior ecclesiastical judges. And thus we begin to see the undoing of one of those curious phrases the pope has used several times: time is greater than space...

The pope who seems to love all kinds of modern theories appears not to have done his homework on social acceleration. Theorists have been speculating about this for some time, but let us cut to the chase. Time is only greater than space when it is a constant. When time is accelerating, then the same may not be true. In fact, the risk is one that we all face every day: we simply run out of time.

And now Finnis and Grisez are entering the fray: Finnis, one of the most distinguished lay Catholic philosophers alive, and Grisez, one of the touchstones of orthodox, moral theology. These men have been charitable to a fault in joining in the fiction that Amoris Laetitia can be read in continuity with the past, and warn the pope against possible manipulations of the document. It is a way of allowing the pope a gracious way of backing down from the precipice over which he appears to want to drive us. At this point, I'm not convinced its subtlety will be appreciated in the Casa Santa Marta.

Time is greater than space ... except when it's not; except when we are in a moment of acceleration. The dubia have opened up the injectors in the Church's engines, and we are now being catapulted towards some Gargantuan moment where this pope and this papacy may find that both time and space are bent out of all recognition by the gravitational singularity of God's saving plans.