Pope used Argentinian 'ghostwriter' for controversial document on the family, claims Vatican expert

The leading Vatican commentator Sandro Magister – a conservative Catholic detested by the Pope’s entourage – this morning published an article that will severely embarrass Francis as he tries to clear up confusion over the Church’s teaching on Communion for the divorced and remarried.

Magister, stripped of his Vatican accreditation last year after leaking a draft of the Pope’s encyclical on the environment, claims that Francis employed a ‘ghostwriter’ for key sections of Amoris Laetitia, his 200-page official response to last year’s Synod on the Family.

Magister provides chapter and verse – that is, side-by-side comparisons of Amoris Laetitia, published in April, and the writings of the Pope’s friend Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, Rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina.

Here is a link to Magister’s post, which deserves to be read in full.

Fernández, made a bishop by Francis, is a not especially distinguished liberal theologian. It seems incredible that he should be the source of some of the most controversial passages in the Pope’s exhortation, those dealing indirectly with the question of whether the divorced and remarried can receive Holy Communion.