Church leaders hail document's mercy but caution against hurried reading

By Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — Church leaders from around the world hailed the tone of mercy in Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), but cautioned against a hurried reading of the document.

“What is new about this exhortation is its tone,” Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of Durban, South Africa, told Catholic News Service after the document’s release April 8. He said it calls on all ministers “to be warm and caring in the way they deal with people in difficult circumstances.”

“There is no one-size-fits-all” approach and “local churches are urged to adapt church teachings from the synod to their particular circumstances,” he said, noting, for example, that “different cultural understandings of marriage within South Africa would give the church here different challenges to those faced by churches in other parts of the world.”

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin called “Amoris Laetitia” an “encyclopedic document and, like all encyclopedic documents, much of its most valuable content runs the risk of being bypassed by a preoccupation with one or two of its aspects.”

“It is not just a collection of separated chapters,” Archbishop Martin said in a statement. “There is a unifying thread: The Gospel of the family is challenging and demanding, but … with the grace of God and his mercy, is attainable and fulfilling, enriching and worthwhile.”

The exhortation reflecting on the 2014 and 2015 synods of bishops on the family contains no new rules or norms. However, it encourages careful review of everything related to family ministry and, particularly, much greater attention to the language and attitude used when explaining church teaching and ministering to those who do not fully live that teaching.

“It is a long document. As Pope Francis says, you can’t whiz through it. It needs reflection,” said Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, England, a synod participant and chairman of the English and Welsh bishops’ Committee for Marriage and Family Life.

“It has particular focus on the need to walk with those of us who feel excluded and to let everyone know that they are loved by God and that that love is a tender love, but also a love that challenges us all to change,” he said.

“Some people will be disappointed that it is not full of black-and-white solutions but, as Pope Francis says, every situation is different and needs to be approached with love, mercy and openness of heart,” Bishop Doyle said.

In the pope’s home country of Argentina, Bishop Pedro Maria Laxague of Zarate-Campana, president of the laity and families commission of the Argentine bishops’ conference and participant in the last synod, said the document embraced the papal vision of the church being a field hospital, treating the wounded and attending to those with needs.

“There is not a good family or a bad family,” he said. “All require pastoral attention.”

He said the exhortation “touches all the realities that a family might experience.”

“Today the church can say that it has woken up to the realities of the family,” he told CNS. “We will be able to accompany (all) types of families as a church, as a community, in all situations.”

Father David Neuhaus, patriarchal vicar of the Hebrew-speaking community of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said people looking for “juicy” headlines would be disappointed. He said the exhortation was meant for people to read and ponder and said the document could help priests and bishops realize that “nobody is beyond the care of the church.”

“No one is outside, no matter what the circumstances … you can’t just take out the law book and say ‘You have gone out of the boundaries.’ Every person has to be treated with love and respect,” said Father Neuhaus.

He added that, in the Holy Land, families are meeting challenges such as poverty, tensions and the breakdown of the family, a reality he described as “true for us and the whole world.”

Australian Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, who attended the 2015 Synod of Bishops on the family, said the document “is full of contemplative vistas but also down-to-earth practical wisdom which could come only from long pastoral experience of spouses and their families. It moves constantly between the ideal and the real.”

In an article for The Weekend Australian, he said the exhortation “insists that we have to deal always with the facts, however messy they may be; we have to be in touch with the reality of marriage and the family, not clinging to some romanticized sense of what the family should be. A genuinely pastoral approach to marriage and the family begins with the facts.

“Francis doesn’t claim to be the final word settling every controversial question. Nor does he claim to offer a comprehensive pastoral plan to be implemented around the planet. His claims are more modest — and for that reason more compelling,” he said.

Many bishops said they did not receive the document ahead of time, as the Vatican seemed to want to prevent the media leaks that occurred with Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical.

The secretary-general’s office of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences did not have an advance copy, but received a link to the exhortation via the Vatican website, available for downloading only once it was announced at the media briefing. Cardinal Orlando Quevedo of Cotabato, Philippines, told Catholic News Service in an email he did not have an early copy of “Amoris Laetitia.”

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Contributing to this story were Bronwen Dachs in South Africa, Simon Caldwell in England, David Agren in Mexico, Judith Sudilovsky in Israel and Simone Orendain in the Philippines.