The pastoral ecclesiology of Pope Francis is the background for McElroy's essay.

Francis envisions a consciously expansive church characterized as a mother that excludes no one. A priority for the church today is to look forward, not backwards.

Francis' pastoral ecclesiology accentuates what people share rather than what divides us.

He preaches mercy, compassion and forgiveness rather than stern admonishments and condemnations.

Charity must prevail in all things.

He echoes Pope St. John XXIII: "In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity."

Francis insists that we must allow ourselves "to be surprised by God."

In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis calls for a far-reaching "pastoral and missionary conversion of the church in our time," a reexamination of attitudes, structures and church practices in light of their capacity to effectively proclaim the love and mercy of God as shown in the Gospel.

Dialogue (synodality) within the church is an essential component of this examination.

The pope's vision resonates with the opening lines of Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World:

"The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially whose who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ."

The two synods on the family (2014 and 2015) addressed a wide range of pastoral issues, including pastoral care for the divorced and remarried and those excluded from the sacrament of the Eucharist.

These concerns have been longstanding for Francis. He has no desire to reverse the church's teaching on the indissolubility of marriage.

Rather, his intention is to root the church's teaching more firmly within the scope of Christian mercy.

He would like the church to consider that there are at least some divorced and remarried couples who, in situations where renouncing their second marriage, would only compound the harm caused by the failure of the first marriage by requiring breaking the current familial commitment.

Is it not possible, Francis asks, to find signs of grace and hope in the second marriage and thereby acknowledge the value of the Eucharist for such couples as a "medicine of mercy"?

Francis' hope is to negotiate the tension between the normative claims of church doctrine and the pastoral reality.

He refuses to see doctrine and pastoral practice as mutually exclusive options and simply resolves ecclesiological tensions prematurely.

In his address at the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family in October 2014, he warned against "a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word … and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God… From the time of Christ, it is the temptation of the zealous, of the scrupulous, of the solicitous and of the so-called - today - 'traditionalists' and also of the intellectuals."

His point is clearly made when he addressed the text of Humanae Vitae:

"The object is not to change the doctrine, but it is a matter of going into the issue in depth and to ensure that the pastoral ministry takes into account the situations of each person and what that person can do."

He desires that the church and confessors "be very generous" in dealing with individual couples' "pastoral situations."

He is not advocating a pastoral compromise regarding church teaching but rather an authentic interpretation of the doctrine relating to real human persons and concrete situations.

His desire might be fulfilled by the church moving beyond a narrow analysis of an act to consider the entirety of the human person and the context.

Pope Francis calls the church to meet people "in the streets," ministering to their concerns and attending to their wounds.

He calls for a "pastoral connaturality," as theologian Richard Gaillardetz terms it, to discern how the church's doctrine can best be employed to exemplify God's solidarity with the poor and suffering and be generous with the mercy of God.

The emphasis on mercy is the hallmark of the Francis papacy. His naming of the church as a "field hospital" is especially addressed to priests who must be men of mercy and compassion, close to his people, and servants of all.

"Whoever is wounded in life, in whatever way, can find in him attention and a sympathetic ear," he told parish priests in Rome in 2014. Continue reading

• Gerald D. Coleman is a retired professor of moral theology, St Patrick's Seminary & University, Menlo Park, California, and Graduate Department of Pastoral Ministries, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California. As long-ago he was the moral theology professor of now-Cardinal Robert McElroy,

Since that time, the positions I presented have received both substantial support and significant opposition.

The majority of those criticizing my article focused on its treatment of the exclusion of those who are divorced and remarried and members of the L.G.B.T. communities from the Eucharist.

Criticisms included the assertion that my article challenged an ancient teaching of the church, failed to give due attention to the call to holiness, abandoned any sense of sin in the sexual realm and failed to highlight the essential nature of conversion.

Perhaps most consistently, the criticism stated that exclusion from the Eucharist is essentially a doctrinal rather than a pastoral question.

I seek in this article to wrestle with some of these criticisms so that I might contribute to the ongoing dialogue on this sensitive question—which will no doubt continue to be discussed throughout the synodal process.

Specifically, I seek here to develop more fully than I did in my initial article some important related questions, namely on the nature of conversion in the moral life of the disciple, the call to holiness, the role of sin, the sacrament of penance, the history of the categorical doctrine of exclusion for sexual sins and the relationship between moral doctrine and pastoral theology.

The report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the synodal dialogues held in our nation last year pointed to the profound sadness of many, if not most of the people of God about the broad exclusion from the Eucharist of so many striving Catholics who are barred from Communion because they are divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T.

In January, I proposed that three foundational principles of Catholic teaching invited a re-examination of the church's practice in this area.

The first is Pope Francis' image of the church as a field hospital, which points to the reality that we are all wounded by sin and all equally in need of God's grace and healing.

The second is the role of conscience in Catholic thought.

For every member of the church, it is conscience to which we have the ultimate responsibility and by which we will be judged.

For that reason, while Catholic teaching has an essential role in moral decision-making, it is conscience that has the privileged place.

As Pope Francis has stated, the church's role is to form consciences, not replace them. Categorical exclusions of the divorced and remarried and L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist do not give due respect to the inner conversations of conscience that people have with their God in discerning moral choice in complex circumstances.

Finally, I proposed that the Eucharist is given to us as a profound grace in our conversion to discipleship.

As Pope Francis reminds us, the Eucharist is "not a prize for the perfect, but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak."

To bar disciples from that grace blocks one of the principal pathways Christ has given to them to reform their lives and accept the Gospel ever more fully.

For all of these reasons, I proposed that divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics who are ardently seeking the grace of God in their lives should not be categorically barred from the Eucharist.

In the weeks since my article was published, some readers have objected that the church cannot accept such a notion of inclusion because the exclusion of remarried women and men or L.G.B.T. persons from the Eucharist flows from the moral tradition in the church that all sexual sins are grave matter.

This means that all sexual sins are so gravely evil that they constitute objectively an action that can sever a believer's relationship with God.

I have attempted to face this objection head-on by drawing attention to both the history and the unique reasoning of the principle that all sexual sins are objectively mortal sins.

For most of the history of the church, various gradations of objective wrong in the evaluation of sexual sins were present in the life of the church.

But in the 17th century, with the inclusion in Catholic teaching of the declaration that for all sexual sins there is no parvity of matter (i.e., no circumstances can mitigate the grave evil of a sexual sin), we relegated the sins of sexuality to an ambit in which no other broad type of sin is so absolutely categorized.

In principle, all sexual sins are objective mortal sins within the Catholic moral tradition.

This means that all sins that violate the sixth and the ninth commandments are categorically objective mortal sins.

There is no such comprehensive classification of mortal sin for any of the other commandments.

In understanding the application of this principle to the reception of Communion, it is vital to recognize that it is the level of objective sinfulness that forms the foundation for the present categorical exclusion of sexually active divorced and remarried or L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist.

So, it is precisely this change in Catholic doctrine—made in the 17th century—that is the foundation for categorically barring L.G.B.T. and divorced/remarried Catholics from the Eucharist.

• Does the tradition that all sexual sins are objectively mortal make sense within the universe of Catholic moral teaching?
• It is automatically an objective mortal sin for a husband and wife to engage in a single act of sexual intercourse utilizing artificial contraception. This means the level of evil present in such an act is objectively sufficient to sever one's relationship with God.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to physically or psychologically abuse your spouse.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to exploit your employees.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to discriminate against a person because of her gender or ethnicity or religion.
• It is not automatically an objective mortal sin to abandon your children.

The moral tradition that all sexual sins are grave matter springs from an abstract, deductivist and truncated notion of the Christian moral life that yields a definition of sin jarringly inconsistent with the larger universe of Catholic moral teaching.

This is because it proceeds from the intellect alone.

The great French philosopher Henri Bergson pointed to the inadequacy of any such approach to the richness of Catholic faith: "We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living.

Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use…. Intuition, on the contrary, is moulded on the very form of life."

The call to holiness requires both a conceptual and an intuitive approach leading to an understanding of what discipleship in Jesus Christ means.

Discipleship means striving to deepen our faith and our relationship to God, to enflesh the Beatitudes, to build up the kingdom in God's grace, to be the good Samaritan.

The call to holiness is all-encompassing in our lives, embracing our efforts to come closer to God, our sexual lives, our familial lives and our societal lives.

It also entails recognising sin where it lurks in our lives and seeking to root it out.

And it means recognizing that each of us in our lives commits profound sins of omission or commission.

At such moments we should seek the grace of the sacrament of penance. But such failures should not be the basis for categorical ongoing exclusion from the Eucharist.

It is important to note that the criticisms of my article did not seek to demonstrate that the tradition classifying all sexual sins as objective mortal sin is in fact correct, or that it yields a moral teaching that is consonant with the wider universe of Catholic moral teaching.

Instead, critics focused upon the repeated assertion that the exclusion of divorced/remarried and L.G.B.T. Catholics from the Eucharist is a doctrinal, not a pastoral question.

I would answer that Pope Francis is precisely calling us to appreciate the vital interplay between the pastoral and doctrinal aspects of church teaching on questions just such as these. Continue reading

In his 'First Things' magazine article, conservative prelate and canon lawyer Thomas Paprocki (pictured) cites an unnamed cardinal's views on how the Church should minister to LGBTQ people and divorced and remarried Catholics.

While he doesn't name Cardinal Robert McElroy, Paprocki quotes directly from a 24 January article the cardinal wrote for America magazine.

In it, McElroy called for a Church that favours "radical inclusion" of everyone, regardless of circumstances and conformance with Church doctrine.

To back his views, Paprocki's essay cites several passages in the Code of Canon Law and draws on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St Pope John Paul II's Ad Tuendam Fidem ("To Protect the Faith").

Pointing to these, he said anyone who denies "settled Catholic teaching" on issues like homosexuality and "embraces heresy" is automatically excommunicated from the Church.

The pope has the authority and the obligation to remove a heretical cardinal from office, or dismiss outright from the clerical state, Paprocki wrote.

Referencing McElroy's critique of "a theology of eucharistic coherence that multiplies barriers to the grace and gift of the eucharist," Paprocki claimed: "Unfortunately, it is not uncommon today to hear Catholic leaders affirm unorthodox views that, not too long ago, would have been espoused only by heretics."

Although McElroy and Paprocki were both available for comment, in a 28 February interview Paprocki said he did not intend to single out a particular cardinal for criticism. Rather, he "intended the discussion to be more rhetorical.

"I think the reason I did this is because this debate has become so public at this point that it seems to have passed beyond the point of just some private conversations between bishops."

The bishop's explanation struck some observers as disingenuous.

Jesuit Fr Tom Reese, a journalist who has covered the US bishops for decades, says Paprocki's essay reflects deep divisions in the US Catholic hierarchy, plus a level of public animosity, open disagreement and strident rhetoric among bishops.

Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI would not have tolerated it, he says.

"On the other hand, there wouldn't have been this kind of discussion under John Paul II because the Vatican would have shut it down.

"Francis has opened the Church up for discussion again and [conservative bishops] just don't like it. They're trying to shut it down by using this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, even against cardinals," Reese said.

Cathleen Kaveny, a law and theology professor, says Paprocki "should know better as a canon lawyer" than to accuse someone of heresy - which is a formal charge.

Paprocki is running together statements and teachings of different levels of authority in the Church and claiming any disagreement amounts to heresy. "And that's just false," Kaveny says.

"The underlying question ... is whether development in church doctrine can take place.

"I would recommend people read John Henry Newman on that, and look at the history of the church's teaching on usury while they're at it."

Source

• NCR Online

It was an era of civil unrest, race riots, anti-war protests, and the sexual revolution.

One of the popular bumper stickers at the time stated: Question Everything.

These societal events coincided with the sessions of the Second Vatican Council and its early implementation.

The council brought beautiful and much-needed renewal to many aspects of Catholic life.

Sadly, there was also a serious misinterpretation of the council that fostered moral confusion. The poisonous ideas of the sexual revolution crept into the Church.

A great cultural myth was propagated that one could not be happy or fulfilled unless you were sexually active.

The rate of divorce rose dramatically within society and the Church.

Traditional sexual morals were considered antiquated.

The virtue of chastity was mocked. Influential voices within the Church sought to use the "spirit of the council" to change Catholic sexual moral teaching and practice.

With the availability and cultural embrace of oral contraceptives, Pope Paul VI warned that sexual intimacy outside of the marriage covenant would become commonplace, and the harm inflicted on children, women, men, and society would be catastrophic.

The Holy Father was prophetic.

• Out-of-wedlock births, abortion, and pornography became common.
• Sexually transmitted diseases reached epidemic levels.
• Contrary to the predictions of advocates for contraception and abortion, child abuse and child trafficking hit record levels.
• The unparalleled happiness that proponents of so-called sexual freedom promised never materialized.
• Instead, we find among young adults alarmingly high levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
• Pornography and other forms of sexual addiction have become rampant and enslave many at a young age.

The unravelling of sexual morals has continued for decades.

Among the cultural fallacies is a prevalent notion that homosexual activity is healthy and normal, just another lifestyle choice.

In recent years, our cultural confusion has now spawned gender ideology, asserting that human beings can deny their biological gender.

Tragically, many young people have been pressured to undergo gender-transitioning hormonal regimens and to mutilate their bodies by "gender reassignment" surgeries.

Gratefully, St. John Paul II, with his landmark teaching on the theology of the body, gave us new language to articulate the beauty of human sexuality and to help restore moral sanity.

Pope Benedict also provided clear teaching in these important areas.

Pope Francis has spoken plainly and strongly about the evil of abortion and the danger of gender theory.

I have been saddened that in the preparation for the Synod on Synodality, there has been a renewed effort by some in Church leadership to resuscitate moral confusion on human sexuality.

The German Synodal Way is a striking example.

The leadership of the German bishops' conference has rejected correction from Pope Francis.

Most troubling has been statements by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, who asserts that Church teaching related to homosexuality is false because he believes the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct.

Cardinal Hollerich's statements are particularly concerning because of the leadership role that he has been assigned as relator general for the Synod on Synodality.

Most recently, Cardinal Robert McElroy's article in the Jesuit journal America Magazine has charged that the Catholic Church "contains structures and cultures of exclusion that alienate all too many from the Church or make their journey in the Catholic faith tremendously burdensome."

Cardinal McElroy champions what he terms radical inclusion that embraces everyone into full communion with the Church on their terms.

The mandate of Jesus given to the apostles to make disciples of all nations is construed to mean to enlarge the tent of the Church by accommodating behaviours contrary to Our Lord's own teaching.

Cardinal McElroy appears to believe that the Church for 2,000 years has exaggerated the importance of her sexual moral teaching and that radical inclusion supersedes doctrinal fidelity, especially in the area of the Church's moral teaching regarding human sexuality.

In my opinion, this is a most serious and dangerous error.

Our understanding of sexual morals significantly impacts marriage and family life.

The importance of marriage and family to society, culture, the nation, and the Church cannot be overestimated.

Proponents of radical inclusion cite Our Lord's association with sinners.

In the face of harsh criticism of religious leaders, it is true that Jesus manifested great concern, compassion, and mercy to sinners. Continue reading

• Joseph F. Naumann is Archbishop of Kansas City, Kansas
• He is writing in response to recent statements by Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego