Stephen Walford has become the unlikely English defender of Pope Francis’ mission of mercy when it comes to marriage and the family. A married father-of-five living in Southampton, on the south coast of Great Britain, is a conservative Catholic who teaches the piano and has a sideline in writing theology.
His previous books were on topics such as the end-times and on saints received official endorsements from the likes of United States’ doctrinal scholar Fr Thomas Weinandy, a member of the International Theological Commission who has criticised the Pope for spreading “chronic confusion” with the apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia.
But Mr Walford is not confused by the Pope’s document and has written a new book on the topic “Pope Francis the Family and Divorce: In Defence of Truth and Mercy” for which Francis wrote a preface.
The book came after he burst into the “Amoris debate” in a series of articles for Vatican Insider here, and here and earned him respect from senior figures in the Vatican and saw him and his family received in a private audience with the Pope.
His strident defence of Amoris Laetitia has come at a cost, seeing him subject to ridicule and criticism from certain quarters of the Church. Ever since its publication, there has been a vocal minority arguing this papal teaching is ambiguous - or, worse, a break with traditional tradition - because it opens up the possibility for divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion.
“I see no ambiguity in that document whatsoever,” Mr Walford says. “People are looking for ambiguity when it’s not there. The Pope hasn’t changed the general teaching on confession and holy communion [for divorced and remarried], but he’s opened a pathway in certain cases.” That pathway, he explains, his built on discernment and the Church’s long tradition of moral theology which combines both proclaiming unchanging truths but applying those truths to people’s lives.
Mr Walford, 44, says he entered the debate when he saw that four cardinals had submitted a series of “dubia” to the Pope urging him to clarify his teaching on the divorced and remarried while fellow Catholics were indulging in vociferous criticism of the Pope over Amoris Laetitia.
“What got me concerned was when I saw Catholics similar to myself, starting to be swayed by the traditionalist rhetoric such as ‘is this an anti-Pope?’ Mr Walford explains in an interview with The Tablet, the British Catholic weekly.
“According to our understanding of the papacy, and the magisterium, the Pope can’t be corrected in matters of faith or morals.” Cardinal Raymond Burke, who led the cardinals’ initiative on the dubia, has suggested Francis could be formally corrected.
Mr Walford cites Pius XII’s encyclical “Mystici Corporis Christi” in his argument against the Francis dissenters and a possibility of correcting a pontiff. That papal teaching sets out that Christ rules the Church “through him who is His representative on earth,” namely the Pope.
“Pius XII said it doesn’t matter who the man is - what colour he is - Peter will always live in him. And that applies to every Pope until the end of time,” Mr Walford explains.
“Of course some traditionalists have been up in arms for years about anyone since John XXIII. To me, is it really that far from Protestantism? It’s a pick and choose Catholicism now for people who would suggest they hold the teachings most dear, the purest form of Catholicism. And yet the hypocrisy is astounding. They are saying ‘we’ll accept this from this Pope, and we won’t accept that.’
He goes on: “If there’s something we genuinely don’t understand, it’s not up to us to say to the Pope ‘you’re wrong’ it’s up to us to say to ourselves, and not accuse the Pope of spreading heresy or being heretical.” On the question of whether divorced and remarried Catholics can receive communion, Mr Walford explains how he understands the Pope.
“He is saying to everybody ‘no matter what your situation, no matter how messy your life is from a moral point of view, or how far away you are from a sinful point of view, do not despair, there is a path forward. The Church is a mother, and the Church wants to be there to guide you to God. To help you on that spiritual assent’,” Mr Walford says.
“We’ve got the truths of the Church - and we all know Benedict XVI was a great Pope for the clarity of teaching in terms of what the truths were - but there’s also the element of the truth of each individual’s situation. Why is this person in an irregular marriage? What led to this situation. There’s a certain element of truth the Church has to get to.”
Discernment, he goes on, is crucial and helps the Church distinguish different cases. The single mother with children who is abandoned by her husband and enters into a new marriage is different from a man who leaves his wife and family for another woman.
“The critics of the Pope they don’t really care about looking at all of that, they’re not interested in discernment, they’d rather just bracket everybody, and I think that’s a scandal,” Mr Walford says. “As we read in the Book of Samuel, man judges by appearances, God judges the heart. And that’s what Pope Francis really understands, and that’s what he should as a compassionate Church understand.”
He adds: “I’m not saying we don’t tell people the truth about the teachings, but Pope Francis says ‘we’ll walk with you and we’ll try and help you. If you’ve got goodwill and good intention, God’s with you.” The Pope, Mr Walford explains, is a “Christian realist” who sets out what it means “to live a radical, Christian life without any hypocrisy,” in his daily homilies in the chapel of his residence, the Casa Sant Marta. “Just read his Santa Marta homilies every day. I don’t know who could call Pope Francis a liberal,” he says. “I refer to the Pope has being a Christian realist, formed from his time in Buenos Aires. He understands that if a prostitute is doing that work because she has no other way of feeding her children, he’s not condemning that. We know its sinful, but only God knows the struggle that person is going through.”
Mr Walford was married in 1997 and has children ranging from ages nine to eighteen. He says he’s happiest being a low key member of his parish. He has a Music degree from the University of Bristol and has played Rachmaninov’s 3rd concerto in public. But faith is at the centre of his life which he says includes daily prayer, Eucharistic adoration, the Mass, rosary and regular confession. Mr Walford says he remains a traditionalist, or traditional Catholic, in the fullest sense of the word.
“If someone wants to be a traditionalist, I’m for that. But - traditionalism - let’s take it all the way back to 2,000 years ago and how Jesus lived and acted with sinners,” he says. “If we are really going to go traditional let’s go all the way back, not to some imaginary golden era a few centuries ago that never existed, let’s go all the way back to the start. And to me that’s what Pope Francis is amazing at.”
He may not be a polished theologian with lots of letters after his name, but it’s his clear-sighted theological thinking which gives this defender of Francis’ mercy mission such a powerful voice.
