Divorce, Annulment, and Communion

As I am not a Roman Catholic, I cannot pretend to have any stake in—or, for that matter, any particular right to an opinion regarding—the controversy surrounding Amoris laetitia. From the vantage of Eastern Orthodoxy, there is nothing particularly scandalous in the document—certainly nothing repugnant to the Eastern Christian tradition's understanding of Scripture, ecclesial law, or pastoral practice—but that is an observation of only the most boringly incidental kind. I do, however, know enough about the development of Christian tradition, both East and West, to note that many of the claims made by Catholic traditionalists have been wildly inaccurate. Not that this is surprising. It is always the "traditionalists" (Orthodox no less than Catholic) who tend to have the most tenuous and idealized concept of the actual traditions of their churches, and necessarily so. The one thing they cannot tolerate is ambiguity. But, alas, history is nothing but ambiguity, and the actual historical record is very rarely the traditionalist's friend.