Pope Leo XIV must correct his predecessor’s letter through a magisterial act if he wishes to preserve the unity of the Church.
The apostolic letter “Amoris Laetitia” (AL) is quite a feat. It consists in maintaining the Church’s doctrine in theory while abolishing it in practice. For it now falls to priests and other “accompaniers” to carry out, in their own name, “pastoral discernments” regarding persons living in adultery. If good reasons exist, those persons may then receive the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance without changing anything in their conduct, which breaks the marital bond. The Word of God and the Church’s doctrine are pulverized into a thousand incomparable individual cases through “pastoral discernments.” And anyone whose way of life acts against the Church’s doctrine will find a sympathetic “accompanier” and “discernment-maker” who recognizes justifiable reasons that, in the concrete case, permit doing what ought not to be done. Thus the door is flung wide open to arbitrariness. Since the publication of AL, the Church no longer knows what is happening. And it does not want to know.
This is not the first time the AL maneuver has been employed. Already in the seventeenth century the Jesuits used the trick of the “justified particular case.” The only difference with respect to today is that those Jesuits were not popes.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) unmasks the Jesuit game in his “Lettres Provinciales” (“The Provincial Letters,” 1656/1657). He does so through a dialogue with a fictitious Jesuit. “There can never be too much particularizing of cases,” Pascal quotes his interlocutor (8th letter). The central axis of the Jesuit maneuver is the concept of “probability.” This does not mean “probability” in the modern sense, but an opinion that can be defended with good reasons. “It is the foundation and the ABC of our entire moral doctrine,” as Pascal’s Jesuit notes (5th letter).
According to the Jesuit Escobar, probability must be understood thus: “An opinion is called probable when it is founded on reasons of some weight. And hence it sometimes happens that a single very learned doctor can make an opinion probable. And here is the reason: because a man devoted particularly to study would not hold an opinion unless moved by some good and sufficient reason.” Pascal already intuits that this circular reasoning lies at the root of all confusion and arbitrariness, and replies: “Who assures me that in the liberty your doctors take to examine everything by reason, what seems certain to some will seem so to all? The diversity of judgments is so great…” A heated discussion ensues. The Jesuit admits that casuists often hold differing opinions: “They are also frequently of different mind, but it does not matter; each makes his own opinion probable and certain.” And that is good. Pascal replies: “But my father, a man must be very undecided to choose one of the two opinions.” To which the Jesuit responds: “Not at all, because he will take the one that pleases him most.” Pascal objects: “And if it were more probable or certain?” The Jesuit, for his part, cites an author of his order: “One may make what one thinks licit according to a probable opinion, even though the contrary be more certain; for the opinion of a single learned doctor suffices.”
The doctrine of probability is also binding for the confessor. Pascal’s model Jesuit explains it thus: “You must know that we have obliged confessors to absolve penitents who avail themselves of probable opinions, under pain of mortal sin. It is the order and disposition of our fathers, and among others of Fr. Bauny. When a penitent, he says, follows a probable opinion, the confessor must absolve him, even though his own opinion be contrary.”
Already in Pascal one can read where the probabilism trick ends. He cites a Jesuit author who maintains “that all kinds of persons, even priests, may receive the body of Jesus Christ on the very day they have committed abominable sins; that far from there being any irreverence in these communions, on the contrary they are praiseworthy; that confessors ought not to dissuade them, but rather advise those who have just committed such sins to communicate at once; because although the Church has forbidden it, this prohibition is abolished by the universal practice of the whole earth.” And Pascal notes: “See what it is to have Jesuits throughout the world. See the universal practice you have introduced and wish to maintain.” (Letter 16).
The reality created in fact thus ends by transforming the theoretical superstructure and triumphs over it. In the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx and his companions formulated it thus: “Does it require deep insight to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, change with every change in the conditions of his life, in his social relations, and in his social existence?” Marx seems an imitator when compared with the Jesuits of the seventeenth century.
The question of adultery, which AL addresses, was also debated by Pascal. He has his Jesuit interlocutor cite the aforementioned Fr. Étienne Bauny. Bauny would have permitted those involved in proximate occasions of sin to remain in that situation, “when they cannot avoid them without giving rise to murmuring or without suffering some inconvenience.” Likewise, Bauny taught: “One may and ought to absolve a woman who has in her house a man with whom she frequently sins, if she cannot dismiss him without scandal, or if she has some other reason that makes it difficult; provided she proposes not to sin again with him.” For the following applies: “It is licit to seek an occasion directly and by oneself, primo et per se, for one’s own or one’s neighbor’s temporal or spiritual good.” Pascal comments sardonically on this: “The obligation to avoid occasions is greatly attenuated if the dispensation can be founded on the fact that abandoning sin causes one some inconvenience” (Letter 10).
The importance of Pascal’s “Provincial Letters” lies, among other things, in demonstrating that recourse to probability and the concrete case can be applied to all kinds of subjects: a murder ceases to be such if it is not committed for money; the obligation to help the poor with one’s material abundance is not fulfilled in practice, because the rich legitimately have the right first to maintain their own standard of living and thus in fact nothing remains for others. Whether homicide and revenge, dueling, theft and property, usury, lying, oaths, as well as fraud and simoniacal or illicit dealings in ecclesiastical matters: the norm always remains intact in theory. But, through ever more subtle casuistic and conceptual distinctions, behavior that essentially contradicts what the norm requires is permitted in practice through “probable” opinions (6th letter and following). Pascal summarizes what this leads to by citing a critic of the aforementioned Fr. Bauny. The critic had said of the Jesuit: “Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi!” (“Behold him who takes away the sins of the world”). (4th letter).
The probabilistic and individual-case method remains universalizable today. And all the more so now that it is again being advocated by a pope. If the indissolubility of marriage can be deconstructed, anything can be deconstructed with probable and justifiable reasons. That is why AL is a boomerang that will ultimately strike the Church’s magisterium. For against everything and anything justifiable counter-arguments can be advanced. Even the positions so cherished by the last two popes on climate, just war, the death penalty, migration, and artificial intelligence will be nothing more than probable opinions, against which contrary probable opinions exist that, in each concrete case, may be preferred to the papal ones with equal right. Pascal cites in this regard the Jesuit Diana: “He says that if the pope said it as head of the Church, well and good; but he only said it within the sphere of probability of his own opinion.” And Pascal’s Jesuit interlocutor adds: “So you see that this does not offend pontifical decisions; they would not tolerate it in Rome where Diana is held in such credit; for he does not maintain that what the popes decided is not probable, but that, reserving to his own opinion the entire sphere of probability, he nevertheless says that the contrary is also probable” (6th letter).
Not only the Ten Commandments can be deconstructed, but also ecclesiastical discipline. An evolution of this AL method is a declaration of the Swiss Bishops’ Conference of November 2025. In it, consistency is no longer required of the Church’s lay collaborators. Referring to AL, the following is stated regarding laypersons living in extramarital, adulterous, or same-sex unions: “Rather, we present a reflection that takes the current realities of life seriously and invites spiritual discernment. A person’s lived reality is unique and, according to the Gospel, one can only act justly if it is taken into account in an integral manner. Two persons may do the same thing, and yet it is not the same.” Pascal would have commented on this: “They cloak their human prudence and their policy under the pretext of a divine and Christian prudence” (5th letter).
Likewise, any theology professor at a public German faculty sets forth probable opinions when he contradicts the Church’s magisterium, whether in the theology of God, ecclesiology, or ecclesiastical discipline. As long as he considers the Church’s contrary position also to be a probable opinion, he has nothing to fear. The same applies to the state bishops on their synodal path.
The AL method as “probabilism 2.0,” the opaque “discernment” of each concrete case behind closed doors through probable opinions: this is the basis of a suicidal magisterium that destroys itself. This process will stop at nothing. The de facto destruction of the Church’s doctrine of faith will increasingly undermine, in the hearts of the faithful, confidence in the divine assistance of the ecclesiastical magisterium and, with it, their faith in God. This can only be avoided by correcting AL from a magisterial standpoint, in accordance with the perennial doctrine of the Church. The Church’s unity depends on it.
In the seventeenth century the Church was aware of the danger looming over it. Thus, in the years 1665 and 1666, the Holy Office (the present Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) condemned 45 propositions of the casuists (Denzinger-Hünermann [DH], 17th edition, Freiburg/Basel/Vienna 2017, nos. 2021-2065). In 1669 another 65 propositions followed (DH 2101-2165). Among them are points that are also relevant in relation to AL. Above all, DH 2061 is pertinent: “A concubinarian must not be obliged to dismiss his concubine if she is too useful to him for his pleasure—commonly called a ‘gift’—when, lacking her, he would lead too hard a life, other food would be very disagreeable to him, and it would be too difficult to find another maidservant.” Already here one encounters the sleight-of-hand trick—condemned by the Church—that appears again and again in the debate on AL and on divorced and remarried persons: in reality it is a concubine. But, through a change of terminology, she is turned into a domestic servant. And the poor man would have to eat worse if he dismissed his “cook.” The present casuists (papal) of AL no longer invoke the excuse of less tasty food to justify maintaining a concubine, but refer, for example, to the children, who somehow must be cared for.
AL also contradicts ecclesiastical condemnations on the following points. DH 2160: “A penitent who has the habit of sinning against the law of God, of nature, or of the Church may be given absolution even if no hope of amendment appears; and it must not be denied or deferred to him, provided he verbally manifests sorrow and promises amendment.” DH 2161: “Sometimes one who is in a proximate occasion of sin may be absolved, even though he could avoid it and does not wish to do so; indeed, even if he directly and deliberately seeks that occasion or exposes himself to it.” DH 2162: “There is no obligation to flee a proximate occasion of sin when there exists some useful or honorable cause for not fleeing it.” DH 2163: “It is licit to seek directly the proximate occasion of sin for a spiritual or temporal good, one’s own or one’s neighbor’s.”
By virtue of magisterial competence and jurisdictional primacy, it falls to Pope Leo XIV to protect the Church today against pernicious doctrines. In his encyclical “Magnifica humanitas” he has shown that he also takes seriously authors who do not belong to the classical canon of Catholic masters of the faith (J. R. R. Tolkien, Hannah Arendt, Viktor Frankl). Therefore, with regard to AL, Pope Leo XIV should listen to Heinrich Heine. For it is not rare that fools speak the truth. In “Die romantische Schule” (“The Romantic School,” 1833), the German man of letters commented on Pascal’s adversaries: “Never has the human spirit devised grander combinations than those by which the ancient Jesuits attempted to preserve Catholicism. But they did not succeed, because they were enthusiastic only for the preservation of Catholicism and not for Catholicism itself. (…) But in vain did their confessors grant the most amiable absolutions and their casuists flirt with every vice and crime. (…) With reason Barrault once said: The Jesuits could not raise the earth to heaven, and they lowered heaven to earth. All their labor and their work was in vain. From falsehood life cannot blossom, and God cannot be saved by the devil.”