Charged debate around the implications of footnote 351 of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, the document with which he closed a three-year process involving two Synods of Bishops on the family, has been going on for almost 10 months, and there no signs it’ll wind up any time soon.

The footnote addresses access to the sacraments by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, and while it appeared to leave the door open for a cautious “yes,” Francis also stressed he didn’t intend to change Church teaching or law, and left the implementation of the document up to local bishops.

It’s that ambiguity which has cleared the path for bishops to interpret the implications of the pope’s ruling differently, with some taking a restrictive approach and others a more permissive line.

Several bishops or groups of bishops have commented on this and many released their own set of guidelines for the “pastoral application” of chapter eight, at times providing strikingly different answers.

Here’s a round-up of what bishops and cardinals (though technically, a cardinal is a bishop) have said so far.

The “yes, it opens the door” camp

The Maltese bishops

The Maltese bishops’ “Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of ‘Amoris Laetitia’” was signed on January 8 by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta and Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo. They released it through their website on January 13, after sending it to the country’s priests with a copy of Amoris’s chapter 8 at the end.

“If, as a result of the process of discernment,” the bishops write, “a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.”

It’s worth noting that L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, published the guidelines in full.

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego

In a pastoral message titled “Embracing the joy of love” and addressed to the people of his diocese ahead of a diocesan synod on the family to discuss Amoris Laetitia, McElroy also speaks of the discernment of conscience and of priests accompanying the faithful during the process, clearly stating that access to Communion can be at the end of the path.

“Some Catholics engaging in this process of discernment will conclude that God is calling them to return to full participation in the life of the Church and the Eucharist,” he writes. “Others will conclude that they should wait, or that their return would hurt others.”

The diocesan synod took place in October, and though the website of the church of San Diego says the bishop’s reflections should have come out in November, they haven’t been published as of yet.

However, the synod’s general assembly proposals are available and all of them have been theoretically approved and will be implemented.

The Buenos Aires bishops’ (draft) guidelines

Last September the bishops of Pope Francis’s former diocese, Buenos Aires, drafted a set of guidelines meant to help local priests implement Amoris.

The guidelines say that some civilly remarried couples who can’t adhere to the Church’s teaching of “living like brothers and sisters,” who have complex circumstances, and who can’t obtain a declaration of nullity for their first marriage, might undertake a “journey of discernment: and arrive at the recognition that in their particular case, there are limitations that “diminish responsibility and culpability.”

For these exceptional cases, the bishops wrote, “Amoris Laetitia opens up the possibility of access to the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.”

The document was a draft, meant to be discussed at a meeting with several priests from the Buenos Aires region. L’Osservatore Romano published some of its passages, yet it hasn’t been published on any official website nor in a bulletin of the Buenos Aires bishops.

In addition, the guidelines dated September 5 somehow reached the pope, who in a letter leaked to the press wrote: “The document is very good and completely explains the meaning of chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia. There are no other interpretations.”

Cardinals who spoke without releasing guidelines

German Cardinal Walter Kasper, author of the “Kasper proposal” that guided most of the Vatican’s synod of bishops when it came to a case-by-case solution to the question of divorced and remarried, is currently the president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, and as such, doesn’t have a diocese for which to produce a set of guidelines.

However, in November he said that Amoris marks a “paradigm shift” that allows for a “changed pastoral practice.”

In an article for Stimmen der Zeit, a monthly journal on Christian culture, he noted that the exhortation does not draw “any clear practical consequences,” but it does adopt premises by which “a changed pastoral practice is allowed in justified individual cases.”

“It leaves open the concrete question of admittance to absolution and Communion,” Kasper wrote.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell, formerly of Dallas but presently head of the Vatican’s office for all things laity, family and life, said that “there are all kinds of different circumstances and situations that we have to look at – each case as it is presented to us.”

“I think that what our Holy Father is speaking about, is when we talk about accompanying, it is not a decision that is made irrespective of the couple,” he said. “Obviously, there is an objective moral law,” he said, but you will never find two couples who have the same reason for being divorced and remarried.

However, in a late November Crux interview, Farrell insisted that divorced and remarried couples are not the heart of the papal document, adding that if the Church does things right, there won’t even be a need for footnote 351 in the future.

The “no, it doesn’t open the door” camp

Bishop Steven Lopes, head of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

“A civilly remarried couple, if committed to complete continence, could have the Eucharist available to them, after proper discernment with their pastor and making recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation,” wrote Lopes, head of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, a structure created to welcome former Anglican communities into the Catholic Church.

“Unless and until the civilly remarried honestly intend to refrain from sexual relations entirely, sacramental discipline does not allow for the reception of the Eucharist,” Lopes wrote.

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia

Conceding that it may come off as a “hard teaching,” last July Chaput released a similar set of guidelines, writing that living “as brother and sister” is necessary for the divorced and civilly remarried to receive Communion.

He also wrote that they cannot hold positions of responsibility in a parish or perform liturgical functions in an attempt to avoid “the unintended appearance of an endorsement of divorce and civil remarriage.”

The bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territory, Canada

Their eight-page document was signed by the six bishops leading the territory, and it too calls upon priests and Catholic communities to be prepared to welcome “these brothers and sisters of ours.”

However, they write, “It may happen that, through media, friends, or family, couples have been led to understand that there has been a change in practice by the Church, such that now the reception of Holy Communion at Mass by persons who are divorced and civilly remarried is possible if they simply have a conversation with a priest. This view is erroneous.”

Other bishops in the ‘no’ camp who’ve published guidelines are Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth in England and Archbishop Alexander K. Sample of Portland, Oregon, who has released a pastoral letter complaining of “erroneous” interpretations of Pope Francis’s document Amoris Laetitia, including the idea that there can be exceptions.

Prelates who spoke without releasing guidelines

In a Sept. 18 article published in the diocesan newspaper, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix wrote that “As a good shepherd, Pope Francis focuses special attention on those who walk on the edge of despair because of personal failures and problems they have suffered in their families, and because of the complex and contradictory situations in which they find themselves now.

“This does not, however, include receiving Holy Communion for those who are divorced and remarried,” he wrote.

In a Dec. 5 letter to the priest in his diocese, Bishop James Conley, of Lincoln, Nebraska said that God calls the civilly remarried and those who are cohabitating “to continence.”

“Like every person conscious of grave sin, divorced and civilly remarried Catholics who engage in ongoing sexual relationships may not approach Holy Communion,” he wrote.

Italian Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, former president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in a text published in October by Italian journalist Sandro Magister, wrote that Francis is in fact “opening an outlet even for admission to sacramental reconciliation and eucharistic Communion.”

Yet for him, this is not a positive thing but a risky approach, because it might lead to the “mistaken view that the church is accepting divorce and remarriage.” Considering this, he asked Pope Francis for more explicit, “more authoritative guidelines.”

Then there’s the request made by American Cardinal Raymond Burke and three other cardinals for the pope to resolve what they described as “confusion” and “disorientation” as a result of his document. Since they released what had originally been intended as a private letter, the four have spoken publicly, with the American being the most insistent.

In the words of Italian Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the retired archbishop of Bologna who was personally invited by Pope Francis to participate in both synods but who’s also one of the four who signed the dubia, “only a blind man could deny there’s great confusion, uncertainty and insecurity in the Church.”

Full story at Crux.