By FR. BRIAN W. HARRISON, OS
A storm worthy of the windswept sands of Arabia was immediately whipped up in the media last week by Pope Francis’ signing of a document along with Ahmad Al-Tayyab, the Grand Imam of
Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, an institution widely regarded as the most authoritative source of Sunni Islamic theology. This joint declaration, “On Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” was signed on February 4 in Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates.
While much of the document is fairly uncontroversial for Catholics — it emphasizes the need for mutual tolerance between Christians and Muslims and an end to terrorism and violence initiated in the name of God — the eye of this desert storm is the paragraph that reads thus (with emphasis added):
“Freedom is a right of every person: each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept.”
A retired American bishop, the Most Rev. Rene Gracida, immediately denounced the Pope’s action in his “Abyssum” blog under the heading, “Bergoglians are the party of Apostasy, and none can deny it now.” Bishop Gracida claims that Francis has “apostasized” by signing the above affirmation, and so is clearly not a true Pope. He thus urges all Catholic laity to insist to their priests — shouting it out to them during Mass if necessary! — that they must cease mentioning “Francis our pope” in the Eucharistic Prayer.
With all due respect to His Excellency, who has long been a stalwart defender of orthodoxy, this reaction goes much too far; and I am afraid runs the risk of crossing the line into schism.
His basic argument for claiming Francis has apostasized is this:
“If you were to say God wills that religions be different and many, then you have…apostasized, because you are saying that God is indifferent to religion. But the god who is indifferent to religion is not the Christian God. So by saying such a thing, you have taken as your god, the Father of Lies.”
Now, apostasy (according Canon 751 of the 1983 Code, and the whole of Catholic tradition) means the “total repudiation of the Christian faith.” It’s distinguished from heresy (cf. same canon), which means the obstinate repudiation of one or more particular dogmas while still professing others, and so still claiming to be a Christian. But in order to “totally repudiate the Christian faith” in the sense intended by Catholic law and doctrine, Pope Francis would need to do a lot more than just sign a single statement that by itself implies, or seems to imply, such repudiation. Canon 18 of the Code declares that laws which prescribe a penalty (as the law against apostasy does) “are to be interpreted strictly.”
That means in practice that if there’s any reasonable doubt about whether a person has committed the offense in question, he is to be given the benefit of the doubt and so doesn’t incur the prescribed penalty. (In the case of apostasy, that would be automatic excommunication and loss of ecclesiastical office.)
So to be deemed guilty of committing apostasy — and thereby leaving the Church, incurring excommunication, and falling from office — Pope Francis (or any other erstwhile Catholic) would have to make it unambiguously clear by his whole pattern of behavior that he had given up Christian faith altogether. In other words, he’d need to be consistently and openly admitting that he’s no longer a Christian believer, and to be acting consistently with that admission.
That would entail, for instance, ceasing to celebrate Mass and the sacraments or to profess the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed (which are included in every Rosary and Sunday Mass respectively). But in fact, of course, Pope Francis is not doing that — or anything remotely approaching it! Quite apart from his daily Masses and (I think), Rosary, Francis constantly professes in many official acts and statements his faith in Christian revelation.
Still, in the sentence in italics above (third paragraph), it is terrible to put diversity of “religions” alongside that of “color, sex, race and language” and to say all these diversities are “willed by God in His wisdom.” For that ignores the vital factor of truth. There is no “true or false” sex, race, skin color, or language. But there certainly is true and false religion. So the sentence, just as it stands, seems to imply, as Bishop Gracida points out, that God is indifferent to religious truth.
However, if we were to ask Pope Francis directly if he thinks God the Father is indifferent as to whether people believe in Jesus as his only-begotten Son or not, I doubt that he would give a simple affirmative answer. And after all, it is still possible to give an orthodox reading to the above statement by making the traditional theological distinction between two types of “will” on the part of God: his absolute (or positive) will and his permissive (or contingent) will. The first refers to what God actually wants to be done by us: love him and our neighbor, obey the Commandments, etc. The second refers to what God wills to permit, or allow to happen, as a result of the free will he has given us.
Since we are not programmed to automatically do good like robots, it follows that we are capable of abusing the freedom God has given us by turning sinfully against him, or rebelling. And that rebellion and sin is “willed” by God in the sense that he positively wills us to have the real freedom that makes it possible. Remember that Scripture itself makes statements like “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” against Moses and the people of Israel.
And since the paragraph of the Abu Dhabi document denounced by Bishop Gracida is mainly about the freedom God has given us, it is possible to interpret the offensively ambiguous part in this orthodox sense.
The legitimacy of such an interpretation is also supported by the Pope’s own comment on the document he signed, given in an airplane interview on the way back to Rome from Abu Dhabi. He was reported as telling a journalist that his theories are in “the line of inter-religious dialogue pursued by the Second Vatican Council,” adding that the Abu Dhabi text does not “distance itself even a millimeter from the Second Vatican Council.”
Well, actually it does — and by a good deal more than a millimeter. Vatican II nowhere makes any indifferentist-sounding affirmation to the effect that the existing diversity of religions is “willed” by God. In Nostra Aetate and Lumen Gentium the Council does indeed speak of elements or “rays” of truth being found in all non-Catholic and non-Christian religions. But that’s what they have in common with the true religion. “Diversity,” on the contrary, refers precisely to those points on which they diverge from the true religion, and on which, therefore, they depart from the truth.
Nevertheless, Pope Francis’ appeal to Vatican II to justify the “Human Fraternity” document is at least evidence that in his own mind he had no intention of “totally repudiating the Christian faith” by signing it. And that in turn is further evidence, in the light of canon 18, that he hasn’t incurred the penalties for apostasy: excommunication and loss of the papal office.
That said, I don’t want to downplay the harm and confusion likely to be caused by Francis’ joint statement with the “moderate” Muslims of al-Azhar University. The papal signature to this document is indeed scandalous, not only because it fails to make clear the above distinction between the different ways in which God “wills” things, but also because it appears to put diversity of religions — which is in itself a bad thing, and therefore “willed” by God only according to his permissive will as an offshoot of the free will he has given us — on the same level as diversity that is positively good in itself (of race, sex and skin color).
(It’s perhaps debatable whether diversity of language is good in itself or not, since the Scripture teaches it originated at Babel as the result of human sin and pride.)
The statement is scandalous also because it seems to conflate and confuse two very different types of human freedom: ontological freedom (the fact of our being endowed with free will) and moral freedom (what we have a moral right to do, or at least to be allowed by human powers and authorities to do).
Let us continue to pray and do penance for an end to this continuing doctrinal confusion being diffused by none other than Peter’s Successor.
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