When is fornication not really fornication?
Well, if reports are accurate, according to Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, dubbed by some as Pope Francis’ “closest theological adviser,” if a sexually active, unmarried couple lives together, he says it is “licit to ask” whether such sexual activity “should always fall, in its integral meaning, within the negative precept of ‘fornication.’”
Remember the good old days, when Catholic moral theology was actually quite concretely based upon objective moral norms? Surprise! Nowadays, if something is not “gravely dishonest in a subjective sense,” why then I guess the merely observable fact that the same something remains gravely dishonest in an objective sense is no longer that important.
But wait—aren’t there really objective moral norms? Sure. But, according to Fernandez (again, if accurately reported), there’s a big problem—not with the norms, but with their formulation: “It is the formulation of the norm that cannot cover everything, not the norm in itself,” the archbishop says. He says that a formulated norm is “incapable of addressing each and every situation.”
Got it?
So, fornication is always wrong as a general norm. But, when you fornicate with the same person under the same roof, that’s a situation that falls outside the norm’s “formulation” and might really be “subjectively honest” and therefore shouldn’t really always count as violating the negative precept against fornication. [..]
Just like the illogic of fornication in self-defense, there is simply no way to make “adultery in self-defense”—that is, attempting marriage again, without annulment, after separation from one’s legitimate spouse—justifiable or logical.
Yet, that is what is now happening before our very eyes. Highly placed churchmen are moving away from months of ambiguity regarding Amoris Laetitia and now making unambiguous claims about its intentions. Tragically for the universal Church, these profoundly bankrupt claims are being hailed by some as genuine “progress.” Yet, I can think of nothing quite so regressive, nothing quite so reckless and damaging to souls. Just like the nonsensical concept of fornicating in self-defense, assertions that fornication isn’t fornication and adultery isn’t adultery are indeed not the least bit pastoral. Furthermore, such “accompaniment” of wounded souls will only lead them further away from God’s kingdom, not closer to it.
