Since people have asked, here are my complete thoughts on Amoris Laetitia<\/em>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t care about it. At all.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Okay.\u00a0 That\u2019s probably not enough to satisfy so permit me to elaborate a little.<\/p>\n Personally, I care not a whit.\u00a0 Nothing in it concerns me since I\u2019m in a happy, stable marriage that is in no need of the pastoral care this manual (aimed at shepherds) is trying to instruct.<\/p>\n Nor am I a shepherd, canonist, counselor, or marriage healing type guy doing stuff for other people in troubled marriages and families.\u00a0 I studiously avoid handing out free pastoral advice to people for the very good reason that it\u2019s none of my damn business and I\u2019ll probably screw you up royally, so go talk to someday with letters behind their name.<\/p>\n So my interest has been low, personally speaking.<\/p>\n Professionally and ecclesially, my brief interest in the document revolved around the Great Dubia Panic that has been ginned up and maintained for what?\u00a0 a year now?\u00a0 In terms of the document itself, it is obvious to me that Francis is trying to do what he is always trying to do: proclaim good news to the poor (understood here not merely as financially poor, but as broken by the chaos in the family across the globe).\u00a0 His instinct is always to draw people toward grace and find ways for those seeking love and healing to find it, rather than to face judgment and condemnation.\u00a0 It\u2019s his first and last instinct\u2013because it\u2019s the first and last instinct of the Church.<\/p>\n But that is the opposite of his enemies, who detest him and whose first and last instinct toward sinners in the Church is to see the sacraments, not as sure encounters with grace, but as reducing valves designed to keep the maximum number of people away from God.\u00a0 So their deep and abiding suspicion, amounting to an assumption, is that Francis\u00a0(not to put too fine a point on it) means to pervert and destroy the teaching of Jesus that a valid sacramental marriage cannot be destroyed.\u00a0 In a word, the working assumption of his enemies is that Francis is a perverter of the Tradition.<\/p>\n The proof of this is everywhere:\u00a0\u201cLost Shepherd\u201d, \u201cDictator Pope\u201d, \u201cHeretic Pope\u201d, \u201cthreat to the Church\u201d, \u201cCommunist\u201d, \u201cThe Church\u2019s Obama\u201d, \u201cGaia worshipper\u201d, \u201cignore him\u201d, \u201cbully\u201d, \u201ctrying to destroy the Church\u2019s teaching on the family\u201d, \u201cworst pope in the history of the Church. Period\u201d, \u201cgay queer\u201d, \u201cStalin\u201ds Pope\u201d, \u201cThe Horror\u201d (said of him within an hour<\/em>\u00a0of his election by his passionate enemies at Rorate Coeli, relying on the word of a Holocaust-denying kook).<\/p>\n This<\/em> is the ambient noise coming from the subculture behind the AL<\/em> hysteria. And it has penetrated the discernment-free conservative Catholic mind to the degree that a friend of mine made the mistake of referring to Francis as the Vicar of Christ in a Register<\/em> combox and was denounced as a Satanist there.<\/p>\n In short, it is the norm<\/em>\u00a0among those freaking out about AL<\/em> to assume that Francis is a bad<\/em>\u00a0pope and equally the norm to assume that the nature of his badness is wilful<\/em>\u00a0and perverse hostility to the Tradition against which he is an active enemy.<\/p>\n That is the actual situation of the Francis-hating subculture I have\u00a0seen metastasizing since the day he was elected\u00a0and the face it constantly presents the world. It is centered in the US and radiates into the Reactionarysphere throughout the world. But the backbone is exactly the same Christianist demographic that adores Trump and feeds off FOX, CRISIS!!!!!!, Church Militant, EWTN, Liesite and sundry other Right Wing poison vendors.<\/p>\n Now there are genuine theological and pastoral issues to iron out.\u00a0Pete\u00a0Vere*, a Canadian canonist\u00a0has been very useful to me in sketching them. But exactly not<\/em> the way to work through them is by assuming\u2013as this subculture habitually does\u2013that Francis is the enemy of the Tradition\u00a0and is seeking to pervert the Church\u2019s core teaching on marriage and to destroy the family.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the problem in a nutshell. This is not a conversation sought by a subculture presuming the good faith of the Holy Father as the shepherd of a flock and seeking his trusty guidance. It is a subculture which regards him as an enemy and seeks his destruction, certain that God Almighty has called them to defeat him.<\/p>\n Are there people asking questions with the conviction Francis acts in good faith? Of course. But nothing like the majority in the Great AL<\/em> Panic. That\u2019s why they publish books like Lost Shepherd<\/em> and market them secure in the knowledge that the demographic for which they write agrees that Francis is the \u201cheretic pope\u201d and \u201cthe worst pope in the history of the Church. Period\u201d.<\/p>\n Outfits like 1 Peter 5 and Church Militant are kept afloat to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by a huge mob of people convinced that their mission is not to learn<\/em>\u00a0from the pope or assume his good will, but to defeat him as a\u00a0foe<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I quickly lost interest once I grasped the basic fact that Francis a) upholds Church dogma on the nature of marriage (because he\u2019s, duh, the pope) and b) he is leaving shepherds the customary flexibility and mercy to be very gentle to sinners trying to navigate the fantastic complexity of their individual lives.\u00a0 This is exactly what we see in any decent confessor: Here is the high and hard upward call in Christ Jesus to perfection.\u00a0 Shoot for that.\u00a0 At the same time, take baby steps, don\u2019t kill yourself trying the impossible and avoid vows to perform Seven Herculean Feats.\u00a0 It quickly became obvious that all the dubia crowd, getting that reply from Francis, did not have trouble understanding<\/em> it.\u00a0 They just had trouble accepting<\/em> it.\u00a0 Because their instinct is to punish sinners, not redeem them.\u00a0 So they redoubled their assault on the \u201clost shepherd\u201d.\u00a0 Because the goal was not to get information, but ammunition against him.<\/p>\n Francis, not an idiot, knows this. Which is why the silence with which he greets the ever more shrill demands to \u201canswer the dubia\u201d is<\/em>\u00a0his answer. 5000 bishops seem to be doing fine. The tiny percent who aren\u2019t and, above all, the highly energized political cultus beyond them are being told with deafening clarity that they can go stand in the snows of Canossa. It\u2019s quite old school and very Jesuit.<\/p>\n Conservatives wanted a strong pope. They got their wish. It\u2019s time for them to consider the possibility that this is a moment where Chesterton\u2019s remarks about wanting a Church that is right where we are wrong may apply even to us.<\/p>\n Beyond this is one more reason I don\u2019t take seriously the subculture of conservative Catholics pretending to care about the integrity of the Church\u2019s witness on marriage and family as they use AL<\/em> as a club to beat Francis: their transparent disinterest in real concrete assaults on the family when the Sex Predator-in-Chief they support to the tune of 60% of white conservative Catholics commits them.\u00a0 They care nothing about his adulteries.\u00a0 They care nothing about (and lie about) his confessions as a sex predator.\u00a0 They join in the re-victimization of his victims with the standard \u201csluts and nuts\u201d smears.<\/p>\n So, for instance, CRISIS!!!!!! magazine ladles out the garbage about the perils of AL<\/em> by the truckload <\/a>(somehow repeatedly linking it with the polestar of their journalism, the Transgender Menace).\u00a0 Because, gosh darn it, the integrity of the Church\u2019e sexual ethos is just so dad blamed important.<\/p>\n But when the need is to defend a racist child molester\u2019s lust for power, you know that CRISIS!!!!!!!! will be on the spot to tell you that a thirty something perv horndogging after a 14 year old is peachy because Culture and the Seventies<\/a>. (Rebecca Bratten Weiss has this miserable act of prostitution posing as a Catholic article for breakfast here<\/a>.)\u00a0 Worst of all, this craven lickspittle apologetic for a child-molester is written by a Franciscan University of Steubenville faculty member.\u00a0 Corruptio optimi pessima.<\/p>\n Likewise, the people pretending to care about \u201cFrancis\u2019 attack on the family\u201d are orgasmic with joy about the destruction of immigrant families and look with benign indifference on the impending deportation of 200,000 Salvadorans guilty of the crime of being hard workers and brown.\u00a0 Ripping apart those families is met with passionate approval by the same demographic that pretends some footnote in a pastoral care manual is the repeal of the Creed.<\/p>\n