In an era of misinformation and false news, where errors commonly go viral on social media but their corrections almost never do, seeking to combat distortions of the truth can seem a Sisyphean task.
However when such misrepresentations occur in published books, which have some pretentions to scholarly creditability, it may still be a worthwhile service to correct the record where it has been distorted.
This article will therefore seek to address two such errors arising from books published over recent years, which directly relate to both Pope Francis’ Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and to a number of articles previously published on this blog.
1.0 Wounded Shepherd and the Ipsi Namque
The first of these errors comes from a 2019 book authored by Austen Ivereigh, Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church, and relates to the so called “ipsi namque” clause in Pope St John Paul II’s own Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio.
In paragraph 84 of that document, in relation to reaffirming the then discipline of the Church that the divorced and remarried were strictly barred from receiving Holy Communion, the Pope stated:
“However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted [Ipsi namque impediunt ne admittantur] thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.” [Emphasis added]
In relation to this passage, in Chapter 9 of Wounded Shephard, Ivereigh makes a rather surprising accusation against John Paul II – That his teaching represented a doctrinal rupture rather than an expression of continuity:
“Some might not be in mortal sin, in other words, but the greater good demanded their exclusion. In support of this argument, John Paul II added a & new doctrine. The divorced and remarried were outside the sacraments, he said, because “their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist.” This became known, after its original Latin, as the ipsi namque clause, and it was troubling to theologians who were concerned for doctrinal continuity because it had appeared nowhere in the synod and had no provenance in the Church’s teaching documents on marriage. The metaphorical description of the Church as the “bride of Christ” had never been wrapped into eucharistic theology, and certainly it had never been used to bar the remarried from receiving the sacraments.” [Emphasis added]
This accusation is reiterated in the footnote Ivereigh provides for his argument, where he states:
“5. Ipse Namque has no provenance in the councils (Trent, Vatican I, Vatican II) nor in the two papal encyclicals on marriage: neither Casti Connubii of 1930 nor Humanae Vitae of 1968. Clifford Longley, “Is a Pope Bound by Every Letter of Previous Catholic Teaching?,” The Tablet, December 8, 2016. On Familiaris 84, see Stephen Walford, Pope Francis, the Family and Divorce: In Defense of Truth and Mercy (New York: Paulist Press, 2018), ch. 1.”
The problem however, is Ivereigh’s accusation is entirely false, and easily shown to be so. John Paul II’s idea that an “objective contradiction” prevented the reception of Holy Communion of the divorced and remarried did appear in the documents considered by the 1980 Synod on the Christian Family which preceded Familiaris Consortio, and was sourced in previous Church teaching on marriage.
The key precedent in this regard is a text by Fr. Gustave Martelet S.J, entitled “Christological Theses on the Sacrament of Marriage”, which was endorsed and published by the International Theological Commission in 1977. In the 11th and 12th Theses provided in this document, the ITC stated:
“Even if it can claim some consideration under some aspects, above all when we deal with a case of the party who is unjustly abandoned, the new marriage of the divorced cannot be a sacrament, and it creates an objective incapacity to receive the Eucharist …
Without refusing to examine the attenuating circumstances and even sometimes the quality of a second civil marriage after divorce, the approach of the divorced and remarried to the Eucharist is plainly incompatible with the mystery of which the Church is the servant and witness. In receiving the divorced and remarried to the Eucharist, the Church would let such parties believe that they can, on the level of signs, communicate with him whose conjugal mystery they disavow on the level of reality. To do so would be, moreover, on the part of the Church to declare herself in accord with the baptized at the moment when they enter or remain in a clearly objective contradiction with the life, the thought, and the being itself of the Lord as Spouse of the Church. If the Church could give the sacrament of unity to those who have broken with her on an essential point of the mystery of Christ, she would no longer be the sign of the witness of Christ but rather a countersign and a counterwitness. Nevertheless, this refusal does not in any way justify any procedure that inflicts infamy and that contradicts in its own way the mercy of Christ toward us sinners”. [Emphasis added]
This document, which preceded the 1980 Synod by several years and formed part of the preparation for it, is therefore clearly the source of John Paul II’s teaching – Outlining as it does a link between the Church as the bride of Christ, eucharistic theology and barring the remarried from Holy Communion.
Accordingly it can be said with complete confidence that Ivereigh’s claims regarding “ipsi namque” clause is simply wrong – The result of nothing more than shoddy scholarship and poor research.
This does not of course mean that John Paul II’s teaching regarding “objective contradiction” was unchangeable doctrine, or that Pope Francis erred in Amoris Laetitia by altering the discipline formerly established by Familiaris Consortio. A better-founded argument for why these teachings regarding “objective contradiction” do not preclude Pope Francis’ approach, without recourse to errors such as relied upon by Ivereigh, can be found on this blog in my own consideration of the doctrinal implications of Objective Contradiction.
But even sound conclusions can not be supported by flawed arguments – Such falsehoods obscure the splendour of truth which our arguments should help shine forth.
2.0 Fr. Theodore Davey and the Internal Forum
The second error comes from a source, which is closely connected both to Wounded Shepherd and to this blog, Pedro Gabriel’s 2022 book The Orthodoxy of Amoris Laetitia. Its link to Wounded Shepherd, ironically enough, is that it favourably repeats the very misinformation outlined above regarding the “ipsi namque” clause. In Footnote 484 of Gabriel’s book, he states:
“It is interesting that, while papal critics defend the Ipse Namque as being the “constant teaching of the church,” it is possible to argue that it was actually an innovation from St. John Paul II. This does not mean that it is illegitimate, but it certainly weighs in favor of it not being as perennial as previously thought. See Ivereigh, Wounded Shepherd, 249–50, 361–62 …”
Which just goes to show the damage wrought by such misrepresentations, as they are uncritically repeated and their reach multiplied by unscholarly readers, who do not bother to independently verify these kinds of baseless claims.
The link to this blog however is perhaps more serious, and represents the second error, which this article seeks to address. In what might have been a welcome acknowledgement in better circumstances, Gabriel cites my work several times in his book, listing a number of pages on this blog under my name in his bibliography as follows:
“Smith, Scott. “Amoris Laetitia and the 1917 Code of Canon Law.” Reduced Culpability (blog), February 13, 2018. https://reducedculpability.blog/2018/02/13/amoris-laetitia-and-the-1917-code-of-canon-law/.
———. “The Internal Forum.” Reduced Culpability (blog), January 19, 2018. https://reducedculpability.blog/2018/01/19/the-internal-forum/.
———. “Public Scandal.” Reduced Culpability (blog), January 18, 2017. https://reducedculpability.blog/2017/01/19/3-0-public-scandal/.”
The difficulty however, is that one of these pages *isn’t* my work at all, and should under no circumstances have been attributed to me.
The piece hosted on my blog as The Internal Forum, as clearly stated multiple times on that page, is in fact a 1991 letter by Fr Theodore Davey – Which was initially published by the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet in July of that year. As outlined in my explanation of the letter, found here, in 2018 I made Fr Davey’s letter available on my blog because:
“I think it may be possible to … think of the arguments regarding Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried as an interior dialogue within the thought of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who has taught both in favour and against the practice in various guises over the years.
One key example of this, often referred to and quoted yet seldom read, is the then Cardinal Ratzinger’s intervention in support of the discipline of Pope St John Paul II in a letter to the Tablet newspaper published in 1991, in response of an article by Canon Lawyer Fr Theodore Davey which favoured a more liberal praxis with reference to an earlier 1972 article of Ratzinger.
The full text of this letter as it relates to remarriage and Holy Communion, as well as the article which prompted it, do not however appear to be freely available online. Accordingly, to assist those who may be interested in this part of the history which has lead in our present time to Amoris Laetitia, I here provide a transcription of both these texts:
This misattribution, as unintentional as it presumably was, amounts in a scholarly context to a form of plagiarism – Which would be frowned upon even in an undergraduate essay, let alone a published book. For example the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Guide on Research Integrity provides that:
“It should be noted that errors made unwittingly in relation to the use of source material such as mis-reporting a source or mis-attribution (attributing a source wrongly) are also considered plagiarism.”
And such plagiarism is a serious issue. Both due to the ethical requirement to properly acknowledge authors for their work, and because of the sloppy scholarship such inaccurate citations represent, indicating an author has not understood the sources they are purporting to engage with.
And if we turn to how Gabriel has cited Fr Davey’s letter, it can be seen this sloppy scholarship is indeed associated with a complete failure to understand the source, since in his Footnote 341 he states:
“For more information on the internal forum, see Smith, “The Internal Forum.””
Which is to say, as he also later confirmed, Gabriel endorses Fr Davey’s letter as a good primer on the application of the concept of the Internal Forum as it relates to the divorced and married. But is it a good primer on that topic? Well not according to the then Cardinal Ratzinger, whose critical response to Fr Davey is also provided on my blog, and who stated:
“Please permit me to correct two misrepresentations of my position which appeared in your publication … The second misrepresentation concerns the problem of divorce and remarriage as presented by Theodore Davey in the issue of 27 July 1991 …
There are other errors and distortions in Fr Davey’s position amounting to an all but rhetorical repudiation of the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage”.
It would therefore seem that not only did Gabriel not understand the author of the text, or the historical context which I made it available to help illustrate, but he also did not appreciate all the distortions within it identified by Cardinal Ratzinger. All of which make it eminently unsuitable as a source of information for interested readers to better understand the Internal Forum.
3.0 Broader Context
As a final note, as this article has focused on specific narrow examples of poor scholarship within much larger works, the question does arise as to what these issues mean for the reliability of these two books more broadly.
To that issue, it must be acknowledged this article does not constitute a comprehensive academic book review, not least because I am not qualified by education or profession to provide one. As I often remind people, I am not a Theologian, and nor do I play one on the Internet. The problems raised here were identified, mainly because they direct impacted on pieces I have previously written myself, and not based on any fulsome survey of all the claims and citations made in these books.
Accordingly while my experience with these specific matters, does not give me great confidence that everything else presented in these books have been competently researched, it does remain possible what I have identified are merely isolated errors. It may very well however be wise to consider them marked caveat lector – The printed page heavy with footnotes is no guarantee of reliability.
Reduced Culpability 