By Cindy Wooden
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on
the family is an example of the “ordinary magisterium” — papal teaching
— to which Catholics are obliged to give “religious submission of will
and intellect,” said an article in the Vatican newspaper.
Father Salvador Pie-Ninot, a well-known professor of
ecclesiology, said that while Pope Francis did not invoke his teaching
authority in a “definitive way” in the document, it meets all the
criteria for being an example of the “ordinary magisterium” to which
all members of the church should respond with “the basic attitude of
sincere acceptance and practical implementation.”
The Spanish priest’s article in L’Osservatore Romano Aug. 23
came in response to questions raised about the formal weight of the pope’s
document, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”). For
instance, U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke has said on several occasions that the
document is “a mixture of opinion and doctrine.”
Father Pie-Ninot said he examined the document in light of
the 1990 instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the
vocation of the theologian.
The instruction — issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
now-retired Pope Benedict XVI — explained three levels of church teaching with the corresponding levels of
assent they require. The top levels are: “Infallible pronouncements,”
which require an assent of faith as being divinely revealed; and teaching
proposed “in a definitive way,” which is “strictly and
intimately connected with revelation” and “must be firmly accepted
and held.”
A teaching is an example of “ordinary
magisterium,” according to the instruction, “when the magisterium,
not intending to act ‘definitively,’ teaches a doctrine to aid a better
understanding of revelation and make explicit its contents, or to recall how
some teaching is in conformity with the truths of faith, or finally to guard
against ideas that are incompatible with these truths, the response called for
is that of the religious submission of will and intellect.”
“Amoris Laetitia” falls into the third category,
Father Pie-Ninot said, adding the 1990 instruction’s statement that examples of
ordinary magisterium can occur when the pope intervenes “in questions
under discussion which involve, in addition to solid principles, certain
contingent and conjectural elements.”
The instruction notes that “it often only becomes
possible with the passage of time to distinguish between what is necessary and
what is contingent,” although, as the Spanish priest said, the instruction
insists that even then one must assume that “divine assistance” was given
to the pope.
Accepting “Amoris Laetitia” as authoritative
church teaching, Father Pie-Ninot said, applies also to the document’s “most significant words” about the possibility of people divorced and remarried without an annulment receiving Communion in limited circumstances.
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