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By Fr. Brian Harrison, One Peter Five, (Complicit Clergy), August 14, 2025
His Holiness Pope Leo XIV
22 July 2025
00120 VATICAN CITY
Europe
Most Holy Father,
I address to you this heartfelt petition regarding an urgent and practically unprecedented problem that Your Holiness has inherited from the previous pontificate. It is one which I and many other Catholics believe lies at the very heart of the mission entrusted to you by Our Lord as the Successor of Blessed Peter: that of guarding and teaching the uncorrupted doctrine of Christ that was “once and all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
1. I refer to the fact that Chapter VIII of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation of 19 March 2016, Amoris Laetitia (AL), teaches doctrines which none of its apologists have succeeded in reconciling persuasively with the bimillennial magisterial tradition of the Catholic Church, derived directly from Sacred Scripture.
2. The most pastorally pressing of these is the permission granted in footnote 351 to AL, article 305, for Holy Communion to be given “in certain cases” to couples living in “an objectively sinful situation,” notably, those who had been validly married but have since divorced and civilly remarried, and continue to live more uxorio. This is not indeed a ‘blanket’ permission for all such persons to receive the Eucharist. But the clear tradition of the Church has been that in no case whatsoever may persons in that situation be given Holy Communion. Therein lies the very troubling contradiction.
3. Those who try to reconcile this teaching with Catholic orthodoxy point out that it is possible to commit what is objectively a mortal sin (“grave matter”), but still be in the state of grace owing to subjective mitigating factors: lack of full consent of the will and/or lack of knowledge that one’s act is gravely immoral. That is true, but beside the point. Pope Francis’s predecessors in the See of Peter were of course well aware of such mitigating factors. But they nonetheless absolutely excluded from Communion anyone living in adultery, precisely because of their objective status.
