Return to Tradition’s Amoris meeting claims fall short, and name the wrong cardinal

Leo XIV's opening address on 7 October asked participants to "preserve the discretion and confidentiality that this time of listening and discernment requires", and hoped that "a shared narrative of these ten years may gradually take shape". It gave no instruction about what could or couldn't be said of the exhortation (vatican.va). At the presentation on 2 October, the organisers said the meeting was "not about evaluating a text" and was "not a new synod on the family but a process guided by the synodal method" (NCRegister/CNA; America). The title's "synod" overstates it in the same way.

The evidence the episode offers is Fr Martin Grichting's essay, which LifeSiteNews reported on 7 October. LifeSiteNews describes it as an essay published by the blog Per Mariam "ahead of the Vatican's bishops' meeting". Grichting, emeritus vicar general of the Diocese of Chur, argues that Amoris laetitia must be corrected because "the Church's unity depends on it" (LifeSiteNews). It is a critique written outside the meeting, not something said by its participants.

The best-known early proposal came on 10 July 1993, when the three bishops of the Upper Rhine province — Walter Kasper of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Karl Lehmann of Mainz and Oskar Saier of Freiburg — issued a pastoral letter calling for dialogue with divorced and remarried Catholics. The letter suggested that in particular cases they might approach Communion after a judgement of conscience (Theological Studies). In 1994 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith answered such proposals and reaffirmed that the divorced and remarried cannot receive Communion while their situation continues (CDF letter, 14 September 1994).