About the dubia

Mark Shea quoting Where Peter Is:

Take, for instance, Amoris Laetitia‘s (AL) opening of communion to divorced and remarried people who may have mitigating factors diminishing their subjective culpability, so that they are not in mortal sin. The format of the dubia, demanding yes-or-no answers, does not take into account the nuance demanded by this document, and the way the questions are framed tries to force Francis to chose between open heresy or forfeiting his manifest will. In this way, answering the dubia on their own terms would actually cause more harm than good.

In fact, while "affirmative" and "negative" are the most common traditional answers to dubia, one can find things like "if you mean so and so, yes" or "if this is what you mean, no."

Negative, excepto casu in quo, salvis sensu ac iudicio Ecclesiae, solidis argumentis probetur:

1° Hagiographum alterius dicta vel documenta revera citare;
et 2° Eadem nec probare, nec sua facere, ita ut iure censeatur non proprio nomine loqui.

CIRCA CITATIONES IMPLICITAS IN S. SCRIPTURA CONTENTAS
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19050213_cit-implicitas_lt.html

With my personal translation here:

In the negative, except the case in which, saving the sense and judgement of the Church, it be proven with solid arguments:

1° That the Hagiographer (holy author) is really citing the words or documents of someone else;
and 2° That he is neither approving them, nor making them his own, so that he can be rightly considered as not speaking in his own name.

Creation vs. Evolution : When Are Implicit Citations Licit?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2017/07/when-are-implicit-citations-licit.html

So, the dubia, as a form, do not require yes or no answers with automatic gagging of all nuances.

Thank you, Fr. Fleming! You have both shown that dubia can be answered with nuances, and that a perhaps better way of asking if "Pope Francis" is a heretic is asking whether "Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI" were so when back in 90's giving very clear favour to non-creationist readings of the books of Moses.

Now, is the truth humble? Personal virtue in a man on earth usually is. It wasn't quite known back when Moses said "I'm a humble man" but it is still true. However, there is a certain attitude among the liberal Anglicans and for that matter Agnostics of England a few generations ago, when Chesterton commented on it. Some have transferred, he said, humility as being about ambition, to being about certitude. Certitude and truth are not meant to be humble or quiet. Why am I saying this? See this quote within the latter of the articles I quoted from:

“Express how you feel, and then be quiet. Because the truth is humble. The truth is silent. The truth isn’t noisy. It’s not easy, what Jesus did. But the dignity of the Christian is anchored in the power of God. With people lacking good will, with people who only seek scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family: silence, prayer.”

— Pope Francis, Homily at Casa Santa Marta, Rome, Sept 3rd, 2018

With such a silence, one can so to speak "say" without "actually saying" that one thinks and wants one's faithful to think, that so and so (for instance Cardinal Burke) is only seeking division. As to "within the family" I have seen situations where silence is no help. Also, with certain procedures of psychiatric evaluation, while silence may be a real right, morally, as holy or even holier than Miranda rights, it is not always a very good solution, which some of those tyrants are quick to point out.

Father Brown, a fictitious Jesuit, actually was silent after speaking up to a scandal journalist, who was unaware of who was the husband and who was the adulterer, and that the physical elopement from a hotel was a moral return to home, but he was silent about other journalists repeating the scandal which the first journalist was honourably trying to correct.

"Pope Francis" is more as Father Brown had been if the accusation "you helped her to elope" had been met with dignified silence, so the poor prejudiced Protestant could continue thinking the Jesuit favoured the adultery for some dark Jesuit schemed reason.

Because, a church man telling a pope "you spoke heresy" or asking him "were you speaking heresy?" is not to be considered lightly a scandal monger. There was a schism in Illyria who considered Vigilius an antipope (and apparently not a "bad pope" whom one should recognise but resist), and the error of his temporary admissions to an Emperor (Justinian, I think) were partly helped to correction by that schism, and partly by some others still recognising him, but resisting him on this point.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Parmentier library, Paris
Immaculate Heart of Mary of
Octave of Assumption
22.VIII.2019

PS, I think I detected a reference to a Gospel text, when Our Lord was silent in answer to reproaches. Yes, there was at least one such occasion, the night leading to Good Friday. But on that occasion, He very exceedingly well knew that He was up with a rigged trial, and had already said so indicating they could have caught Him earlier in the open, had He really said sth that merited any reproach.

So, they were quoting or rather misquoting him from verbal memory, and even then on one point, there was a clergyman, of the then Jewish Church, whose name was the Hebrew version of Aramaic Kephas, who was in a better position than simple false witnesses to ask, with a question better suited for answering than reference to false witnesses, and Christ answered with a non-nuanced "I am", which is "yes" (see Mark 14).

Burke, whose non-cardinality is more about who named him than about himself, is actually referring to a published and therefore consultable text, available both in paper and on internet./HGL