It’s the beginning of the end for Amoris Laetitia, the document of Pope Francis on the family which attempted to change the Church’s teaching on admitting people in invalid marriages to Holy Communion. When the end will come is not known, but that it will come is now clear.
Recent structural changes at the pontifical institute for marriage and family studies do not indicate a confidence that the teaching of Amoris Laetitia is true and thus will be found theologically sound. Rather, it will be enforced by diktat, abrogating academic rights in order to ensure conformity to a new orthodoxy. But an orthodoxy that has to be enforced from above, that depends upon power rather than persuasion, will not endure. Bureaucratic manoeuvring can cost professors their jobs, but it cannot establish the truth.
