Last night, I posted my thoughts on the alleged statements of Pope Francis to the Chilean bishops as regards several items of importance, including Communion for the divorced and “remarried”. If you haven’t read it yet, the gist is that he appears to have contradicted his own previous stance on this issue by saying this:

Faced with the question of the communion of remarried divorcees, the bishop explains that the Pontiff denied that his goal with the synod he called upon the family was to authorize the communion of the divorced . He told them that there is no “moral situation,” say other sources. “It’s hard for us to see the gray ones,” he would have told them when he told a personal, family affair.

“I have a niece married to a divorcee, well, Catholic, Sunday Mass and when she confesses she tells the priest ‘I know he can not absolve me, but give me a blessing.’

My contentions that this is a) hearsay and b) ultimately meaningless insofar as it represents a consistent pattern of inconsistency in his positions remain. But a third point, which I failed to make, is this:

If people believe that Francis has aligned himself with the orthodox position on Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia, it will undercut any effort of the Four Cardinals to issue a public, formal correction. 

This is incredibly important. Don’t lose sight of it. You’re likely to see this very argument — that Francis is not in fact a supporter of Communion for the “remarried” and thus cannot and should not be corrected — advanced by the papal positivists when it suits them to make use of it.