You don’t have to be a Catholic theologian, journalist or even that much of a Church-watcher to understand that there has been a battle afoot during the Francis pontificate. It is a struggle for hegemony between two competing accounts of morality. That conflict has been notably more pronounced in the past three years with often very public manifestations.
From the promulgation of the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the ensuing firestorm over what exactly it implied about Holy Communion, divorce and remarriage; to the reconstitution of Rome’s John Paul II Institute, the unprecedented firing of two tenured faculty members and the hiring of two moral theologians known to challenge the Church’s teaching on contraception and homosexuality; and to the German bishops, led by Cardinal Reinhard Marx, embarking upon a “synodal process” apparently contrary to Pope Francis’s wishes, and unmistakably aimed at rethinking priestly celibacy and certain of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. It’s all connected.
