January 5, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis has announced a full year of reflections dedicated to his most controversial and error-filled document, Amoris Laetitia.
In his Angelus address of December 27, 2020, Pope Francis announced that beginning on March 19, 2021 – the Feast of St. Joseph – a year of reflection on his exhortation Amoris Laetitia would begin. It will last until June 2022. The Pope noted that March 19, 2021 would coincide with the upcoming fifth anniversary of the publication of his controversial exhortation and that the year of reflection “will be an opportunity to deepen the contents of the document.”
These reflections, he says, “will be made available to ecclesial communities and families, to accompany them on their journey. From now on I invite everyone to join the initiatives that will be promoted during the year and which will be coordinated by the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life.”
The lead up and aftershocks of the controversial exhortation were already enough to threaten schism for the Church. And playing out that disaster all over again is fraught with danger.
Recall that the 2014 and 2015 synods in Rome were all a lead-up to Amoris, which was released in 2016. During those first couple of years the suggestion to permit Holy Communion for remarried divorcees without annulments or even the need to live in continence (as brother and sister – without sexual intimacy) was unthinkable for all Catholics who held to the constant teaching of the Church. But despite all those who believed – including Cardinals with whom I spoke at the time – that it would never and could never happen, or that if that happened the Pope would be formally corrected, here we are now five years later with that so-called teaching still standing and mass confusion rampant in the Church and not only on that matter.
Remember that the key interpreter of Amoris Laetitia, by Francis’s own definition is Cardinal Schoenborn, who said that all tradition is to be interpreted in light of Amoris rather than Amoris in light of the constant tradition of the Church. And because it is modernist and relativist, we are headed again for a crisis the likes of which the Church has not yet seen.
Here is a summary first put out by 45 eminent theologians which gave a list of some of the most egregious errors in Amoris Laetitia. The controversial papal document posited these faulty notions:
- Living according to the teachings of the Gospel may be impossible for some people
- No one is condemned to hell
- “The divorced and civilly remarried who choose their situation with full knowledge and full consent of the will are not in a state of serious sin, and that they can receive sanctifying grace and grow in charity”
- “A Catholic believer can have full knowledge of a divine law and voluntarily choose to break it in a serious matter, but not be in a state of mortal sin as a result of this action”
- “A person with full knowledge of a divine law can sin by choosing to obey that law”
- One’s conscience can “truly judge” that sexual sins explicitly condemned by the Gospel “can sometimes be morally right or requested or commanded by God”
- “Our Lord Jesus Christ wills that the Church abandon her perennial discipline of refusing the Eucharist to the divorced and remarried and of refusing absolution to the divorced and remarried who do not express contrition for their state of life and a firm purpose of amendment with regard to it”
- “Absence of grave fault due to diminished responsibility can permit admission to the Eucharist in the cases of divorced and civilly remarried persons who do not separate, nor undertake to live in perfect continence, but remain in an objective state of adultery and bigamy”
- Wives should not submit to their husbands
- That the death penalty is always unjust
Moreover, Amoris Laetitia is also tied intimately to the new push for acceptance of homosexuality in the Church. Remember during the first of the Synods on the family in 2014 when the mid-term report or relatio as it was called, called for “valuing” the homosexual sexual orientation, saying that “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community.”
That connection between Amoris and a homosexual push in the Church became more clear as Pope Francis appointed all sorts of homosexuality-friendly Cardinals such as Blase Cupich. (During the second family synod in 2015 I asked Cupich if the new approach would allow homosexual couples to receive Holy Communion as it would remarried divorcees and he responded in the affirmative.)
That connection between Amoris and the promotion of the homosexual agenda in the Church was clearly foreseen by the infamous Father James Martin at the time of Amoris’s publication.
But it could not at the time be fathomed by apologists who tried to defend Pope Francis’s orthodoxy. Yet today after his having supported and met with countless pushers of the homosexual agenda in the Catholic Church including Fr. James Martin himself; the Pope's approval of a priest who gave a homosexual blessing; and the Pope’s own public statement in favor of homosexual civil unions (and so much more), those objections have been silenced.
So, the year of St. Joseph that was announced to the joy of all Catholics has now been usurped and the good Saint is being utilized to give a holy veneer to Amoris Laetitia. But that is where the powers of darkness always fail. In trying to use St. Joseph to give a holy appearance to an evil document, St. Joseph – known as the terror of demons – will demolish the falsehoods and re-establish the Truth of His Divine Son.