But I am con­fused. Dr. Brug­ger tells us that the pope is right to say we must not judge, he tells us that we can’t judge, and yet the pope is wrong because he tells us we should be judg­ing. The pope tells us not to judge, and he is right; but he asks us to judge, and he is wrong. If this makes sense to you, dear read­er, let me know. Dr. Brug­ger goes on to explain why priests can not ren­der a judg­ment on a person’s soul, but that was nev­er what Pope Fran­cis had asked us to do in the first place. This is a dis­cus­sion of pas­toral care, not sote­ri­ol­o­gy.

At Catholic World Report, Dr. E. Chris­t­ian Brug­ger has post­ed an arti­cle enti­tled “Five Seri­ous Prob­lems With Chap­ter 8 of Amor­is Laeti­tia.” It is a long arti­cle, which my own nev­er are; a full five thou­sand four hun­dred twelve words; longer than Chap­ter 8 itself. So this will take some time to work through. Dr. Brugger’s arti­cle — unlike so many wail­ing pan­ic attacks about Amor­is Laeti­tia that can be briefly scoffed at, and refut­ed, and left to dry up like a raisin in the sun — is, or aims to be, ana­lyt­i­cal and schol­ar­ly. It requires care. I don’t dis­agree with every­thing Dr. Brug­ger says.

In Chap­ter 8 of Amor­is Laeti­tia, Pope Fran­cis speaks of the “law of grad­u­al­ness”; John Paul II was the first to write of such a law, in Famil­iaris Con­sor­tio 34. Here is what John Paul II says: “It is always very impor­tant to have a right notion of the moral order, its val­ues and its norms; and the impor­tance is all the greater when the dif­fi­cul­ties in the way of respect­ing them become more numer­ous and seri­ous.” Very much so. That is the very sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves, in an increas­ing­ly sec­u­lar, even pagan, cul­ture. We have lost “the right notion of the moral order.”