The Long Fast

 

Let me begin, as I so often do, with a story. It is my mother’s.

She was a devout Catholic who married my father before he shipped out to the South Pacific during the Second World War. My father had been baptized a Catholic as an infant but never catechized and never brought to the other sacraments. The Church’s teaching against artificial contraception was, to him, a rule without a reason, and so in their marriage he set it aside — not out of contempt, but so that he and my mother could plan the two children they longed for: my sister before he left for the war, and me, some years after his return.

For my mother this was no small thing. She loved her husband dearly, and she loved her Church and its teaching with equal devotion. Caught between the two, she made a decision that shaped the interior life of our home for over a quarter-century: she refrained from Holy Communion. Week after week, feast after feast, she remained in the pew while others went forward. She did this for nearly thirty years — until, through a wise and compassionate confessor, and some years before my ordination to the priesthood, she was able at last to resolve her dilemma in conscience. She finally received the Body of the Lord and continued to receive it faithfully in the years that followed, until her death eleven years ago.

I have carried that image with me through more than fifty years of priesthood: my mother, kneeling, her long fast from the table she loved. I share it now because it frames a concern that has never left me — for married couples who face the ordinary and inevitable difficulties of life, and above all for Catholic couples straining, sometimes against great odds, to respond to the grace of the sacrament they share in holy matrimony.

A precocious disappointment

As a boy I followed the Second Vatican Council with what I can only call precocious interest and fascination, unaware all the while that the drama unfolding in Rome had anything to do with why my mother did not go to Communion. I read what I could; I sensed that something new was being born.

And so I confess my disappointment when, in the years after the Council, as a college seminarian, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae (1968), reaffirming the condemnation of artificial contraception. The question had, in fact, been withdrawn from the council floor: the commission that John XXIII had established to study it was enlarged by Paul VI, who reserved the matter to himself rather than allow the Fathers to take it up directly. When his decision came, three years after the Council had closed, many of us who had hoped for some development in the application of the Church’s moral principles in this most delicate area felt the door quietly close. In retrospect I thought then of my mother, and of how many other couples would carry a similar burden.

Louvain, and the last class of Louis Janssens

Years later as a young priest pursuing my post-graduate studies at the University of Louvain, I had the good fortune to sit in on the final course taught by the eminent moralist Fr. Louis Janssens — an influential Louvain voice in the conciliar-era debates on marriage and conscience — before his retirement. The subject was the history of conjugal morality, and Janssens traced it in the inevitable Louvain manner: patiently, exhaustively, with an eye for every twist and turn, every historical development and every dead end.

I came away from that class permanently changed. What had seemed to me, as a younger man, a simple matter of a rule kept or broken revealed itself as a long and intricate tradition — one in which the human person, in the fullness of intention and circumstance, could never be reduced to the bare physical structure of an act. Janssens’ personalism gave me a more enlightened understanding of a genuinely complex question, and it prepared me, I think, for what a future pope would one day write as well as profoundly shaped me as a compassionate confessor in the years that followed.

Amoris Laetitia: not a change of doctrine, but a change in tone

Fast forward to 2016. On the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, Pope Francis signed Amoris Laetitia, “The Joy of Love,” the fruit of two Synods on the family. He did not change the Church’s doctrine on marriage. What he changed — and it was no small change — was the tone, the gaze, the pastoral posture from which the Church approaches families in all their fragility.

The heart of the exhortation, and the source of nearly all the controversy that followed, lies in its eighth chapter and its three now-famous verbs: to accompany, to discern, to integrate. Francis insisted that a pastor “cannot feel that it is enough simply to apply moral laws … as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives” (AL 305). In a footnote that would launch a thousand essays — the celebrated note 351 — he allowed that the help of the sacraments may, in certain cases, be available even to those in so-called “irregular” situations.

Many years as a confessor have persuaded me that Francis discerned something true and pastorally indispensable: we do not serve moral categories; we serve persons, each of them at a different point along the moral journey, and each of them to be met where he or she actually is. This has been the quiet grammar of my own priesthood — to listen first, and only then to administer, in the sacrament of Penance, the medicine of compassion: to heal, and not to wound.

Access to the Eucharist, as Francis loved to say, is not the prize of the perfect but medicine for the imperfect — an intuition older than he, reaching back to Saint Ambrose and echoing through Evangelii Gaudium (47). That single sentence contains, I believe, the whole pastoral revolution of this pontificate.

An honest distinction

Here I must be candid about a difference a discerning reader will note, and rightly so. My mother’s long fast was not the case Amoris Laetitia takes up. Hers was a union the Church recognized without reservation; her anguish turned on a single question of conjugal morality — contraception — of which the exhortation says nothing. What Pope Francis addresses in his eighth chapter is formally distinct: the condition of the divorced and civilly remarried, those in irregular unions where the regularity of the bond itself is in question. To fuse the two would be to confuse a discrete act within a valid marriage for a doubt about the marriage as such, and I do not wish to blur that line.

And yet her memory belongs in these pages — not because Amoris Laetitia resolves her particular scruple, but because it diagnoses the pastoral pathology beneath it. The document’s genius is not a change in any norm but a change in method: the law of gradualness, the patient labor of accompaniment, and above all the refusal to read objective disorder as an automatic verdict on subjective culpability. My mother judged herself with a severity the Church never asked of her, in an age — before Louvain sent me to Louis Janssens and the conjugal debates he had helped reopen — when conscience was too often instructed to distrust itself. What Francis restores to such souls is not permission but proportion: the recognition that the Eucharist was never meant to be a prize reserved for the perfect, but medicine for those still limping toward the Lord.

The storm, honestly recounted

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that Amoris Laetitia was received in peace. It was not. Ten years on, the honest chronicler must set down both sides of the ledger.

The critics were neither few nor quiet. In the autumn of 2016 four cardinals — Raymond Burke, Carlo Caffarra, Walter Brandmüller, and Joachim Meisner — submitted, and later published, five dubia, asking whether the exhortation could be squared with John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor and its teaching on intrinsically evil acts and the absoluteness of certain moral norms. A “filial correction” followed in 2017. In the scholarly journals — Nova et Vetera, Communio, and others — theologians pressed hard questions: Does chapter eight quietly reintroduce an “ethics of circumstance”? What becomes of canon 915 and the discipline of Familiaris Consortio? These are real questions, and worth the asking. But it is one thing to ask a question and quite another to answer it in advance by publicly charging the Successor of Peter with propagating heresy — which is what the correctio did outright, and what the dubia, for all their interrogative politeness, plainly insinuated. That is neither the interpretatio benigna the Church asks us to extend to the ordinary magisterium nor the reverence owed to Peter. On that point, I confess, my patience runs thin.

But the response was equally substantial, and to my mind more persuasive. The philosopher Rocco Buttiglione, in pages published by L’Osservatore Romano and later gathered into a book carrying a preface by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, argued that Francis had not collapsed objective moral norms at all — he had simply attended, as the whole tradition of Aquinas attends, to the subjective conditions of culpability that can diminish or remove grave sin. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the exhortation’s official presenter, and Cardinal Blase Cupich, with his “new paradigm” of accompaniment rooted in the conscience of Gaudium et Spes, developed the same insight.

The decisive confirmation, however, came from an unlikely quarter — and here I must pause to explain a piece of the story that tends to be assumed rather than told. Shortly after Amoris Laetitia appeared, the bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region, the very land Francis himself had shepherded as archbishop before his election, drew up a short set of practical guidelines instructing their priests how to apply the eighth chapter. Their counsel was modest and carefully hedged: in most cases the Church’s ordinary discipline would stand, but in certain limited situations, after a genuine and unhurried process of discernment, a divorced and civilly remarried person might be welcomed back to the sacrament of Penance and to Holy Communion. Francis wrote the Argentine bishops a private letter of thanks, declaring that their text “fully captures the meaning of Chapter VIII” and — in the phrase that would echo for years afterward — that “there are no other interpretations.”

There the matter might have rested as a local arrangement, had the Holy Father not taken a further and more consequential step. In 2017 he ordered both the guidelines and his own letter of approval entered into the Acta Apostolicae Sedis — the official register in which the Church records her binding acts — accompanied by a rescript, signed by Cardinal Parolin, raising the two documents to the rank of authentic magisterium: authoritative teaching to which the faithful owe a religious assent of intellect and will, even though it is not proposed as infallible. What had begun as pastoral advice from one region of Argentina thus became the interpretive key the Holy See handed to the whole Church. And in October 2023 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, answering a fresh set of dubia, reaffirmed precisely this reading.

Here is where I plant my own flag. In principle, the question of interpretation is settled: Amoris Laetitia belongs to the ordinary magisterium, and Rome has now told us, in its own official acts, how it is to be read. What remains unsettled is not the doctrine but the practice — a mosaic of contradictory pastoral customs varying from diocese to diocese, so that a couple may find at one Communion what they are refused at the next. That unevenness is the unfinished business of the last ten years.

The road to October

Which brings me to the reason I write now. On 19 March of this year — again the feast of Saint Joseph, ten years to the day from the signing of the exhortation — Pope Leo XIV issued a letter marking the anniversary and calling the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences and the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches to Rome. They will gather from 7 to 14 October 2026. Leo praised Amoris Laetitia as “a luminous message of hope regarding conjugal love and family life” and asked the Church for “the courage to persevere on this path.”

The published thematic framework makes clear that this will not be a legislative assembly but an “eminently pastoral journey” conducted in a synodal style — five movements ranging from the reality and beauty of families today, through the vocation of the young and the decisive first years of marriage, to the accompaniment of families “in the difficulties of life” and their mission within the Church. Several married couples will be present to share their own lived experience. It is, in other words, precisely the kind of listening that my mother never received in the long decades of her fast — and that a compassionate confessor finally offered her.

It is my hope, and my prayer, that as Pope Leo discerns synodally with his brother bishops this autumn, the Church may arrive at an ongoing maturity in the application of the principles Amoris Laetitia articulated — most especially in that thorny and genuinely exceptional area of admitting the divorced and civilly remarried, in irregular unions, to the Holy Eucharist. Not a change of doctrine. A maturing of practice, so that the lex orandi and the lex credendi may at last be matched by a lex vivendi worthy of them.

My mother’s return

I think again of my mother — of the nearly thirty years she remained in the pew, and of the morning she came forward at last to receive the Lord she had loved and longed for through all that silence.

She should not have had to wait so long. My deepest hope for the gathering in October is a simple one: that fewer of her spiritual daughters and sons will have to. That the Church which is mother as well as teacher will learn, ever more surely, to be a field hospital and not a courtroom — to offer the medicine to the imperfect rather than reserve the prize for the perfect.

Cum Petro et sub Petro, and under the guardianship of Saint Joseph — to whom both this exhortation and the coming journey have been entrusted — let us keep listening. There are more mothers in the pews than we know.

Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.