March 18, 2018 - "Cardinal Wuerl's Pastoral Plan" continued

Cardinal Wuerl promulgated a Pastoral Plan to implement Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, on Sunday March 4, 2018.  I am going to devote several columns to this Pastoral Plan, as Cardinal Wuerl hopes that parishes, priests, deacons, religious, and laity will reflect on the following:
 
· The richness of the Church’s perennial teaching on love, marriage, family, faith, and mercy.
· The essential aspect of pastoral ministry, called accompaniment
· Several significant themes such as the New Evangelization, the role of conscience, and the privileged place of the parish where we find and experience Christ’s way of living and loving.
 
In this column today I want to continue the presentation of the points in the Executive Summary of the Cardinal’s Pastoral Plan for implementing Amoris Laetitia.
 
Conscience
At the core of accompanying people on the faith journey and helping them appropriate the church’s teaching stands the humble recognition that the culpability of any of us does not depend solely on exposure to the teaching.  It is not enough simply to hear the teaching.  We have to be helped to grasp and accept it.  We must have “experiential” and not just “objective” moral knowledge, to use the language of Saint John Paul II in his encyclical letter, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).  Priests are called to respect the decisions made in conscience by individuals who act in good faith since no one can enter the soul of another and make that judgment for them.  As Pope Francis teaches, “We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them” (AL, 37).
 
The Importance of Parish Life
As Pope Francis notes in Amoris Laetitia, the Church is a family of families, and the home of pastoral accompaniment is the parish.  The parish has a central role in making clear the Gospel vision for marriage and family life.  For this reason, the Pastoral Plan concludes by offering a wide variety of resources and suggestions on how to implement the ministry of accompaniment at the parish level.  Our parishes, as sites where people most experience the life of the Church, must be places of welcome, where everyone is invited, particularly anyone who might be disillusioned or disaffected by contemporary society or even by our faith community.
 
Conclusion
Amoris Laetitia is a call to compassionate accompaniment in helping all to experience Christ’s love and mercy.  Neither the exhortation nor this Pastoral Plan presents a list of answers to each individual human concern.  Rather, both call for a pastoral approach to many people—married, single, and divorced—who are struggling to face issues in life, the teaching of the Church, and their own desire to reconcile this.

As we carry out our pastoral responsibilities , and share the joy of love in marriage and family life, we thank God first of all for the call and then for the guidance that we receive from his Holy Church and particularly from our Holy Father, Pope Francis.
 
Thus ends the Executive Summary of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Plan for implementing Amoris Laetitia in the Archdiocese of Washington.  After Easter I plan to take up in this column some of the resources and suggestions on how to implement the ministry of accompaniment at the parish level.
 
Until next week,
Fr. John Dillon