https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/the-popes-ghostwriter-controversial-archbishop-penned-key-passages-of-exhort
The pope’s ghostwriter: controversial archbishop penned key passages of Exhortation ten years ago
Jeanne Smits, Mon May 30, 2016
May 30, 2016 (LifeSiteNews)
Extract:
– Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez Guttierrez has been presented as Amoris Laetitia’s ghostwriter since the beginning of 2016 at least: Vaticanist Edward Pentin quoted “well informed sources” at the time who named the rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires as the Apostolic Exhortation’s “chief drafter.” The publication of the deeply controversial document has all but formally confirmed this piece of information. This week, Vaticanist Sandro Magister, who blogs for the Italian newsgroup L’Espresso, published a comparison between Archbishop “Tucho” Fernandez’ former writings and the wording of several of Amoris Laetitia’s most disputed paragraphs — and footnotes. They click.
Magister has unearthed “startling resemblances between key passages of the exhortation by Pope Francis and two texts from ten years ago by his main adviser.” So startling that he doesn’t even pretend to hypothesize about the implications: “A double synod for a solution that had already been written.”
This is consistent with declarations by Fr. Claude Barthe to Corrispondenza Romana earlier this month. The French theologian, who has many connections in the Vatican, noted in his interview that Amoris Laetitia clearly intends to introduce a new element in Church teaching, and that “the text of the post-synod exhortation was broadly elaborated in September 2015, that is, before the start of the second Synod on marriage and family.”
For all intents and purposes, the same manipulation appears to have taken place for the berated Relatio post disceptationem which introduced the question of homosexual couples into the half-way document of the Extraordinary Synod in October 2014, apparently out of the blue, and for the papal exhortation which on the point of communion for the divorced and “remarried” as well as “graduality of moral law” went a step further than what the Synod fathers had actually approved.
Amoris Laetitia does in fact introduce something very new in pontifical documents that Archbishop Fernandez Gutierrez had already clearly set out ten years ago in two separate talks on Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul’s “anti-relativist” encyclical written in close collaboration with Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The Exhortation clearly echoes these words of Archbishop Fernandez: “When the historical subject does not find himself in subjective conditions to act differently or to understand ‘the values inherent in the norm’ (cf. FC 33c), or when ‘a sincere commitment to a certain norm may not lead immediately to verify the observance of said norm’ [Footnote 45].” Amoris Laetitia reads: “More is involved here than mere ignorance of the rule. A subject may know full well the rule, yet have great difficulty in understanding ‘its inherent values’ [Footnote 339: John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation ‘Familiaris Consortio’ (22 November 1981), 33: AAS 74 (1982), 121], or be in a concrete situation which does not allow him or her to act differently and decide otherwise without further sin.”
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