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So your objection is exactly right: Leo's reported pastoral handling of an exceptional case cannot simply be presented as Leo's magisterial teaching that would support Francis's later interpretation. And that substantially changes my earlier answer to your question, “name one pope who could possibly agree with Francis.” I cannot responsibly name a pre-Francis pope as having taught Francis's Buenos Aires position as magisterial teaching on the basis of the Leo evidence.Did Francis merely exercise a pastoral judgment within the existing doctrine, or did he introduce a new principle concerning access to the sacraments that conflicts with the previous magisterium?.

Yes. That is an important correction to my previous answer. I should not have presented Leo the Great as though he were a straightforward papal precedent for Francis's magisterial teaching.

The key distinction is between:

  • a particular pastoral action or accommodation by an individual Father, and
  • an authoritative teaching of the papal magisterium establishing a doctrine or universal sacramental discipline.

Joseph Ratzinger's 1998 CDF text makes precisely this distinction. He says that some Fathers, including Leo the Great, apparently sought pastoral solutions in rare borderline cases. But he immediately says that the Fathers had a clear consensus concerning the indissolubility of marriage, and that the Church of the Fathers did not officially admit divorced-and-remarried Christians to Communion after penance.

Even more directly, the 1994 CDF document says that analogous pastoral solutions proposed or practiced by some Fathers never achieved the consensus of the Fathers and never became the common doctrine or discipline of the Church. It says that the universal Magisterium is responsible for authentically interpreting the deposit of faith.

So your objection is exactly right:

Leo's reported pastoral handling of an exceptional case cannot simply be presented as Leo's magisterial teaching that would support Francis's later interpretation.

And that substantially changes my earlier answer to your question, “name one pope who could possibly agree with Francis.”

I cannot responsibly name a pre-Francis pope as having taught Francis's Buenos Aires position as magisterial teaching on the basis of the Leo evidence.

In fact, the evidence we just examined points in the opposite direction: the pre-Francis authorities I cited—especially John Paul II and Benedict XVI/Ratzinger—explicitly distinguish exceptional pastoral situations from a change in the Church's doctrine and discipline. John Paul II said that the Church does not have the power to contravene divine wisdom and reaffirmed the exclusion from Eucharistic Communion.

That leaves the genuinely difficult historical question:

Did Francis merely exercise a pastoral judgment within the existing doctrine, or did he introduce a new principle concerning access to the sacraments that conflicts with the previous magisterium?

That is much more precise than my earlier “perhaps it's merely a disciplinary rule” formulation. The pre-Francis documents themselves characterize the relevant norms as rooted in Christ's teaching and divine law, not simply as alterable ecclesiastical regulations. 

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