Placuit Deo

I have been finding the recent Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on Certain Aspects of Christian Salvation a somewhat difficult read. As an attempt to explain the way in which two particular references in the ordinary magisterium of Pope Francis should be understood, my first instinct is to think that such an exploration might have more suitably come from the International Theological Commission rather than from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The authorship by the Congregation appears to me to constrain the range of the conversation contained in the letter to more strictly doctrinal/dogmatic sources (cf the footnotes to the Letter).

I suspect strongly that, if we want to really grasp Pope Francis use of the terms "neo-Pelagianism" and "Gnosticism", we need to look at his familiarity with the charism and life of Communion and Liberation, just as this familiarity also enables us to understand what Francis meant when he referred to the possibility that the Christian life can be lived as an "ideology".

See here for my post on Pope Francis' talk when presenting Luigi Giussani's book The Religious Sense in Argentina in 1999. The text of Pope Francis' address can be downloaded from this page.

See here for an account of his talk when presenting the book The Attraction that is Jesus, also by Giussani. I do not have a copy of this book, so cannot fully verify Pope Francis' words in relation to what might be considered their original source. I posted on this when part of it was used as a meditation in MAGNIFICAT.

This address during Pope Francis' visit to Brazil also expands on the three themes of ideology, Pelagianism and Gnosticism, and suggests an origin in the Aparecida meeting of Pope Francis' thinking.

Those who are not familiar with these wider conversations in the life of the Church will inevitably find Pope Francis' references to ideology, neo-Pelagianism and Gnosticism somewhat disconcerting.

There is a further term in Pope Francis' lexicon that is worth a similar background search. One place in which the term "ideal" is used is in Amoris Laetitia n.292:

Christian marriage, as a reflection of the union between Christ and his Church, is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful and exclusive love, who belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life, and are consecrated by the sacrament, which grants them the grace to become a domestic church and a leaven of new life for society. Some forms of union radically contradict this ideal, while others realize it in at least a partial and analogous way.

Those who might want to criticise the use of the word "ideal" here might do well to carefully read how that term is understood in the early experience of the Focolare Movement (cf the text entitled "The Beginnings" in Chiara Lubich's Essential Writings) and in Luigi Giussani's Generating Traces in the History of the World.