The Revenge of Amoris Laetitia

By Eamonn Clark, STL ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 15, 2026

The backstory of Amoris Laetitia starts in Egypt.

No—not in the Book of Exodus. But in Cairo in the 1960s.

The auxiliary bishop of Cairo, Elias Zoghby, came to the Second Vatican Council with a unique and shocking proposal: copying the Eastern Orthodox in their discipline of allowing for divorce and remarriage in some cases, with admittance to Holy Communion.

Zoghby’s intervention was so offensive to Paul VI that he forced Cardinal Mercier to stay up late into the night writing a rebuttal to be delivered the next day. Zoghby then made a strong counter-rebuttal, and the Council session moved on.

Those looking for a summary of Zoghby’s address can simply read the more recent speech of Cardinal Kasper, at the consistory of cardinals in 2014 before the Extraordinary Synod on Marriage and Family.

The controversy over the infamous footnote in Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’s 2016 post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation on marriage, is not going away, even if attention has subsided. Now with another high-level Roman meeting on marriage looming, we will be rehashing the same conversation which was happening globally in the mid-2010s, which was happening in Germany in the 1970s, and which was happening at the Council and in Egypt before that. Can the divorced and civilly remarried (“D&R”) Catholic receive Holy Communion, if living “as married” with his or her new partner?

The question is not theoretical. How many priests have been taking their cue from Amoris Laetitia and simply ignoring the Church’s grave requirements for such people, namely, the need to petition for a declaration of nullity and the proper celebration of a new marriage if possible, while living as brother and sister in the meantime?

I wager that it is many—and I further propose that many of these priests are terrified of the cognitive dissonance that is introduced by the thought that they have in fact been giving terrible advice in the confessional for decades, ruining souls and imperiling their own. My prayer is that such men are confronted in this life by a “putative spouse” who wishes to know why his or her spouse is receiving Holy Communion while living in open adultery. “DID YOU KNOW HE LEFT ME?” The wrath of the “putative spouse” whose rights have been utterly tramped by Fr. Merciful is a meager foretaste of what is to come on the day of judgment.

While there are some cases where a person may be trapped in a living situation and does not willingly engage in adulterous acts, and such people could receive Holy Communion, this is not the norm, and reception is probably better done in private to avoid scandal—which is the main concern of the oft-cited and nearly-universally misunderstood c. 915, not the state of the recipient’s soul. (See the 1917 Code of Canon Law’s treatment of the topic of “secret sin” and withholding Holy Communion even in private [c. 855 §2], which law helps us to understand how to read the 1983 Code.)

The normal case is that a person is simply unwilling to do the difficult work of rectifying their situation, or is perhaps almost altogether unaware of the obligation to do so. (Such ignorance would lessen culpability, but there remains a serious obligation to educate oneself about something as serious as marriage—so it is ultimately not an excuse, as if ignorance were an advantage.) Perhaps it involves possible economic hardship. Probably it involves an excruciatingly difficult conversation and giving up many kinds of comforts that are part of one’s life. Almost certainly it involves heartache—gut-wrenching pain and even trauma.

This is what the Cross is like.

Silver lining: the call to immediate heroism

Many of those who have dug themselves a deep hole by divorcing and “remarrying” are actually in an excellent position for quick growth in the spiritual life. In order to get right with God, they need to become saints. Like St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi, the misguided clergy who tell the D&R Catholics they do not need to carry their cross are thinking like men, not like God (Matthew 16:21-23). On the contrary, heroic virtue is now the calling of such men and women. What kind of virtues might a D&R Catholic wishing to rectify this difficult situation need to display in legitimizing and especially breaking from his or her current illicit union?

Temperance. Most obviously, one must break with the desire for adulterous pleasures to which one has become accustomed. However, temperance also includes the virtues of humility and the moderation of anger. Humility is required in the subjection of oneself to the ecclesiastical tribunal process and accepting whatever result it produces, even an undesirable one. Certainly, this could produce understandable yet sinful anger; also obvious is the possible need to restrain wrath when one’s illegitimate partner does not understand why he or she is suddenly being treated as something other than a spouse.

Fortitude. Courage is required to do the very difficult thing, to have potentially the most difficult conversation of your life; to know—or not know—the seriously negative consequences that will follow is anxiety-inducing. The bad effects which result could require extraordinary patience and perseverance, instead of canceling the effort and going back to the way things were, abandoning the right path due to its difficulties.

Justice. The fundamental concern of the Church in these cases is justice between spouses. This is why a court system is used in investigating petitions for nullity. In a marriage, the spouses owe one another themselves for the rest of their lives. The desire to “set things right” is the deepest motivation for extracting oneself from an illicit union, or for rectifying it through convalidation.

Prudence. Clearly, navigating the practicalities of how to tell someone you have lived with for years or even decades, that you have had and raised children with, and so on, that you no longer consider them to be your spouse is something which demands tact, as can arranging for one’s needs after the news is broken. Will you live in the same house? In what way? How will you tell the kids what is going on? What practical things could change in how you are interacting with them as a result of this? Are you going to divide your finances, and how? How does a civil divorce play into this? Should you try to get them to understand your side, or just let them be angry? Etc.

Faith. To value the invisible goods of the spiritual life implies knowing them, which comes through faith. To feel the import of the truths of salvation—and the fear of the loss of one’s soul through negligence or disdain for the moral law—is rooted in faith and is stronger in accord with the depth of one’s habit of faith.

Hope. God helps us to do the difficult things He requires of us. This is perhaps the paramount virtue in the whole discussion. A person who can trust in the grace to overcome the temptations faced in life, especially in the most trying times, is a person ready for the spiritual combat, even if they are occasionally or even frequently knocked down. D&R Catholics need hope, they need the assurance that in fact, despite the enormous challenge, they can do this.

Charity. Of course, the love of God makes burdens for His sake easier, even when painful. This is the Cross. Surely, someone who is exhibiting the foregoing virtues will be striving to set her life right out of love for God and His will.

These are the virtues which are being allowed to wither away and die by the soothsayers who tell D&R Catholics they do not need to pick up their cross and carry it.

But what about “mitigating circumstances”? Isn’t it true that a difficult situation can diminish culpability for an objectively bad action?

Yes, but one must be cautious here.

Some very vocal commentators try to see the entire issue through this lens, appealing especially to the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s paragraph on self-abuse, almost as if the CCC was the same as Scripture, when in fact it is simply an important tool for helping to understand and to teach the Faith whose content it expresses, much like other catechisms have.

It is granted that there is lesser guilt in doing something objectively gravely evil (adultery, murder, perjury) with a repugnant will, recoiling from the deed rather than taking pleasure in it. Such an act can also be lessened in culpability due to the involuntary passions which tempt one towards sin in the first place. However, the fact is that it was still a gravely evil act. Various factors or “circumstances” which make one unable to think totally clearly can leave a truly human act about a grave object still “imperfect,” like a sudden movement of anger causing one to think seriously uncharitable thoughts, or the thrill of the chance to take a large sum of money making one start to desire it. If this happens before one has really considered or had a real chance to consider what one is doing and what it means in light of its effects, grave sin cannot necessarily be imputed.

However, not all acts are sudden and unreflective, and this is significant. The key is to understand that the process of deliberation before committing such an act “ties” the person to the gravity of the object—a gravely sinful object (murder, adultery, blasphemy, etc.) will always constitute a grave sin, even if less grave on account of passions and a repugnant will. For example, even if someone were really averse to destroying someone’s reputation unjustly through calumny because he wanted to do the right thing, but he considered the damage that would occur and did it anyway, we would charge him with the grave sin of calumny. This is true even if calumniating helped him to avoid a great deal of suffering or gained him some other significant advantage. (A good historical example of this kind of tension was the Novatian Schism and the moral crisis over the lapsi, Christians who became idolaters—many out of fear for their lives.) Even though displeasure with the act lessens one’s guilt, as it manifests some desire to do the will of God, one remains guilty of a grave sin. Only a kind of fear or other dissociating affliction intense enough to take away the ability to think about the consequences and meaning of acts would suffice to excuse one from grave sin. When this kind of dissociation is persistent, we call it a psychological pathology, a mental illness.

This same structure applies to adultery, especially adultery chosen over years and decades. This is not a sudden movement of desire or a flash in the imagination. It is a way of life that one has consciously chosen, formalized by a legal arrangement, and cultivated into a habit—a vice. Those in difficult “remarriage” situations may indeed be afraid of the consequences of breaking from adultery—yet adultery it remains, even if done with a repugnant but still deliberate will.

St. Thomas discusses this topic in the Summa Theologica I-II q. 77, in Articles 6 through 8. It is a well-treated area of moral psychology. In Article 8, he concludes:

When anyone proceeds from passion to a sinful act, or to a deliberate consent, this does not happen suddenly: and so the deliberating reason can come to the rescue here, since it can drive the passion away, or at least prevent it from having its effect, as stated above: wherefore if it does not come to the rescue, there is a mortal sin; and it is thus, as we see, that many murders and adulteries are committed through passion.

He has in mind anger and desire in mind, but fear is also a passion which can lead to either sin—and to many others.

We pray in the Our Father not to be led into temptation and to be delivered from evil. But when souls are put to the test, they need to be helped by their shepherds. Perhaps instead of looking for non-existent moral loopholes in avant-garde deepities about “discernment,” the bishops at the upcoming encounter with the Holy Father could spend some time with the blunt words of the Lord on adultery, not only His direct teaching on divorce and remarriage, but also His dialogue with the woman at the well (John 4:1-42). How are we going to inspire the D&R Catholics to the kind of transformation which she had? How are we drawing people to the Living Water? How are we helping them to become the saints that they have been put in the position to become, so that they can worship in the Spirit and in truth?