I've Given up on Amoris Laetitia

I'm only a mortal man.  I can't get through it all.  I can't even tough it out to get to the juicy part.  In fact, I'm just exhausted by the whole subject.  Three years, Two Synods, "Five Cardinals" book, an "Eleven Cardinals" book, Kasper's book and a critique of Kasper's book, an entire issue of Communio devoted to the subject and a 300 page non-doctrinal exhortation, not to mention my own 25+ years of marriage and the marriages of my family and friends, and apparently nothing much has changed.  And actually, the juicy part affects me very little. In the worst case scenario (or best case, depending on your point of view), Francis leaves that up to the pastor or bishop to decide and I'm neither of those. (Though I suppose I'd be more curious about it if I was divorced.)

So what was the point?

I'm just burned out by the whole subject.  I just have no strength to devote to either the document itself or the voluminous commentary about it.  I can't get fired up about who's a heretic this week or who's standing up for the faith this week.  Marc Barnes, who's a better thinker and writer in his sleep than I am when fully engaged, wrote a relatively modest 1800-word essay on the matter and I couldn't even get all the way through that -- though to be fair I read 1700 of them and enjoyed them all.

This is a grace.  Normally I would obsess for weeks about this stuff, but in this case I'm able to worry about other things.  Like my life -- my poor hail-damaged roof, my job, my bank account, my family's health, my own health, spiritual attack ... you know, trivial things like that.

I guess that, as a catechist, I'm mainly curious as to whether I need to update any of my talks about marriage and such.  But from the sounds of it, I'm not going to get any such advice from this document.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I kind of expect my bishop and pastor to read this stuff and make sense of it and tell me what it means.   I mean, they went to priest-school and bishop-school and got enrolled in the hierarchy and all that.  I have a Catechism. Unless I need to replace it with a new document from the Vatican, I don't think it's really important for me to keep up with the Pope's latest unfocused commentary.  Unless I personally enjoy reading him the way I'd enjoy reading any other author.  And, in fact, I do not.

So there.