I hope to write something later this week rounding up the conflicted and conflicting reactions from conservative Catholics to Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia. (My own provisional reaction appeared in Sunday’s paper.) But first I thought I’d respond to my friend Alan Jacobs’s bafflement at conservative agita over the idea of giving priests formal discretion (informal, they will always have) to admit divorced and remarried Catholics to communion in the absence of an annulment.

Jacobs, a theologically-orthodox Anglican, looks at Francis’s gestures in that direction and sees what look to him like two perfectly reasonable and plausibly Catholic ideas at work:

The first is the principle of equity, which goes all the way back to Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle points out that it is in the nature of law, and of any particular law, to be deficient insofar as it is general. Equity lies in the discerning, prudential application of a general law to particular cases. Thomas Aquinas agrees with Aristotle on this … From this principle follows a second one: subsidiarity, which requires that issues that can be dealt with locally should be dealt with locally. Now, in Catholic teaching — see the Catechism, citing Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno — this principle is usually applied to governmental matters, but it seems, certainly in Francis’s view, to have relevance to the Church as well … for Francis, doctrine (in this case moral doctrine) is established by the Magisterium, where within Catholicism is the only place it can be established, but the pastoral application of discipline in light of that doctrine belongs to a subsidiary realm, usually the parish. Francis is simply declining the (inevitably fruitless) attempt to settle at the level of the Papal office, and by further specification of law, issues that can better be settled at the local level by pastors who, knowing the people they serve, can apply prudential, equitable judgment. The principles he recommends are, when they’re invoked in other contexts, universally recognized as classically Catholic and classically conservative.

Let me offer a twofold response. The problem here starts with the understanding of marriage to which the Catholic Church is committed. Per this understanding, while every individual marital union may be as different as every human being, for every given case there is still a definite, either/or answer to the question, “is this marriage real?” A Christian marriage is not a high moral goal, in other words, like charity or chastity or piety, which human beings chase after and to which they imperfectly aspire; it is an ontological and sacramental reality, created by the spouses’ vows and by God himself. In which case no power on earth can dissolve it, no feeling of repentance or regret or five-step Walter Kasper-approved “penitential path” can make it disappear, and no pastoral accommodation can transform the departure from those vows into something other than adultery, or the taking of new vows into something other than a promise to live in public defiance of the Decalogue.

This is why the description of Catholic marriage as an “ideal,” which the pope deploys so often in his letter, seems troubling or misleading to many conservative Catholics in this particular context. It risks implying that there’s a kind of continuum of marital validity, where marriages get more validly Catholic, more metaphysically real, as they approach a Biblical ideal of virtue and self-gift. Thus Mary and Joseph would (presumably) have the most valid marriage of all, Therese of Lisieux’s parents would have a very valid marriage, and so on through the pretty valid, the kind of valid, the not-so-valid, and the not-valid-at-all.

But if the sacrament has the power it’s supposed to have, then even a miserable marriage between two awful human beings could be equal in validity and dignity to the marriage of two near-perfect Christian saints. However strained that bad couple’s personal affections, however great their sins, there could be a metaphysical bond uniting them that deserves to have its reality respected, and to have its claims and duties (those that touch on children above all) honored and defended by the church. And however dubious their morals, however dreadfully they may be failing at being a good husband or wife, that couple’s marriage could still be a real Catholic marriage in a way that a proper, upright, bourgeois second marriage undertaken in defiance of earlier sacramental vows is not and cannot be.

At the very least, the miserable marriage deserves a presumption of validity. It isn’t necessarily valid, necessarily real: Because of all the complexities of individuality, some marriages clearly aren’t entered into with the understanding and intentions that are required for God to actually seal the couple in a “no man put asunder” way. And from the Catholic perspective this is where the specifics do matter a great deal, just as Jacobs suggests they should, and where “the discerning, prudential application of a general law to particular cases” comes in — in the granting of annulments, which allow the divorced-and-remarried to make a confession and receive communion in good conscience, and allows pastors to communicate them without fear any sort of sacrilege.

And then since there’s no perfect way to make those judgments, no perfect way to tell which sort of marriage (or which sort of “marriage”) is which (whatever infallibility means in Catholic thought, it certainly doesn’t apply to diocesan marriage tribunals), this becomes the case for erring on the side of, yes, mercy, the great theme of this pontificate. As Jacobs puts it in another post on this subject, most people who marry today “have been catechized quite thoroughly by a hyper-sexualized late capitalism that teaches (every day and in every possible way) the gospel of self-fulfillment.” Given this effectively anti-marital catechesis, it makes sense that more marriages entered into in such circumstances would be invalid than in the more Christian Western past, and that a church dealing with the wreckage of the sexual revolution would need to be as generous with petitioners as reason and prudence and justice all allow.

I think (and have written) that this impulse can be taken too far, and become a counsel of despair about late-modern humanity, the power of the sacraments or both. But it is certainly a reasonable impulse, and one that’s consonant with the Catholic understanding of wedlock …

… so long, that is, as it still gives the existing/first marriage a real chance to be defended, a chance to have its claims to divinely-ordained reality respected. This is why the annulment process has long included a “defender of the bond,” whose task is to advocate on behalf, not of the wife or husband, but of the marriage formed between them — treating it as something with a claim to more-than-merely-contractual reality, something that might have been created indissoluble by the works of God Himself. And this is why subsidiarity in this case simply cannot be pressed all the way down to the level of a remarried ex-husband and his confessor, because at that level there is no one available to speak for the marriage, no one capable of neutrally assessing its claim to reality and permanence, no one who can collect evidence on behalf of all the other people implicated in that reality, from the other spouse to the children and grandchildren who sprang from its one-flesh union, its possibly-irrevocable bond.

Which suggests an answer to Jacobs’ concluding question. “I don’t think many conservative Catholics have much trust in the average parish priest,” he writes, “especially here in America. But then, they don’t seem to have much trust in bishops, taken as a class, either. And from these responses to Amoris Laetitia they clearly don’t trust the Pope. So I find myself wondering in whom, or in what, they do place their trust.”

Well, there’s the words of Jesus … but on an ecclesiastical level, here’s where I’d like to place my trust: Not in any individual priest or pastor or bishop, but in a process, however flawed and fallible, that treats a broken marriage as something that might still be real, whose vows might deserve to be respected even in permanent separation, and whose participants and offspring therefore have rights and claims that deserve a hearing from someone other than the inevitably-partial, pressured and overburdened pastor of a typical Catholic congregation in the year of our Lord 2016.

And what conservatives fear, what has us grim-faced even in our relief that the pope did not do something that explicitly contradicts the church’s doctrine on marriage, is Francis’s implicit dismissal of the need for such a process in cases where the divorcee seems sufficiently “responsible and tactful,” where the second marriage seems sufficiently stable and happy and permanent and, well, bourgeois.

Because a church that tells people that no protections for their possibly-sacramental first marriage are necessary so long as they are tactful in their request, real in their regrets, and respectable in their new life, a church that does not provide any real safeguard for what it claims is an absolute and cosmic reality, an icon of Christ and his bride … can such a church be said to really believe any longer in the indissolubility of marriage, no matter what kind of flowery language its high officials use?

That is the question haunting conservative Catholics in the wake of the papal exhortation. I suspect it will haunt us for a considerable time to come.