Cardinal Fernández's First Year: Undermining His Own Magisterium?

By Fr. Raymond J. de Souza Víctor Manuel Fernández has been busy during his first year in office. But has he been effective? Appointed one year ago this week as prefect of the Vatican's doctrinal office - in the past known colloquially in Rome as "La Suprema" and now officially as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) - Cardinal Fernández has had an intense year, giving official responses to questions about Holy Communion for couples living together outside valid marriages, transgender godparents, freemasonry, and cremation; declarations on blessing same-sex couples and human dignity; a note on the valid administration of the sacraments, and norms on judging supernatural phenomena. Yet amidst this flurry of magisterial activity, Cardinal Fernández may have undermined the very magisterium he has so vigorously exercised. He has taught energetically, but in a manner that makes unclear what is being taught. Such an approach can erode magisterial authority, not because Catholics might dissent from magisterial teaching, but because it is no longer clear what magisterial teaching is. Three instances from the past year illustrate the problem. One. Returning to Amoris laetitia Just weeks after taking up his duties in Rome, Cardinal Fernández returned to Amoris laetitia, a document where it was shown that he was a key influence, likely the principal drafter. The 2016 apostolic exhortation struck many as contradicting what St. John Paul II taught in Veritatis splendor. Fernández defended Amoris laetitia, but while the thoughts of a ghostwriter are of interest, they are not magisterial. Thus, early on as prefect, Fernández sought to shore up a salvage operation on Amoris laetitia, of which he was a participant. Answering questions submitted to the DDF, Fernández repeated in September 2023 that the definitive interpretation of Amoris laetitia was given by Pope Francis in a letter he wrote to the bishops of the Buenos Aires pastoral region in September 2016. In that letter, the Holy Father said that there were "no other interpretations." The Buenos Aires guidelines were more restrictive than was widely reported. For example, they were more strict than the Malta guidelines proposed by Cardinal Mario Grech - now head of the Vatican's synod secretariat - when he was a bishop in Malta. He was joined by Archbishop Charles Scicluna, adjunct secretary of the DDF. If there are truly "no other interpretations," it means that Grech and Scicluna were wrong. Leaving that aside, the manner of the Buenos Aires maneuver was most remarkable. I described it then as "magisterium by stealth." The ambiguous parts of Amoris laetitia were clarified by guidelines from the Buenos Aires bishops, among whom was Fernández, at that time a bishop in Buenos Aires as rector of the Catholic University of Argentina. The guidelines were then approved in a letter from Pope Francis to the Buenos Aires bishops, leaked to the press when the guidelines were released. Fernández subsequently argued that a leaked letter could be a magisterial act. Could a leaked letter clarify magisterial teaching, especially when it appeared at variance with the teaching of an encyclical (Veritatis splendor)? That was not persuasive to many, so in 2017 Pope Francis declared, ex post facto, that his letter to Buenos Aires was now an apostolic letter, and thus part of the magisterium. For over a year there was an "apostolic letter" that no one knew was such, a hidden deployment of magisterial authority. Upholding this unusual maneuver was the subject that Cardinal Fernández chose to address first as prefect, namely that the magisterium could be exercised by manner of press leaks. Once hidden, it could then become retroactively a magisterial teaching, which no one suspected had been offered. Why would the prefect make that his first priority? Perhaps because it was important to emphasize that the magisterium is whatever the relevant pastors decide that it is. Two. Flip Flops on Fiducia...