By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday, August 31, 2022
You may not have noticed, but the Vatican
under Pope Francis is busy destroying the Catholic Church’s own
claims to divine authority to instruct man about matters of faith and morals —
its claim to be Mater and Magister, mother and teacher. To take the latest
example, look to the recent televised interview of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia,
president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, in which he said that
the law that liberalized abortion in Italy was “now a pillar of our social
life.” When pressed on whether it was up for debate, Paglia said, “But no, absolutely
not, absolutely not.”
An Italian commentator Thomas Scandroglio said, “We have
hit rock bottom. We are at a point of no return, at ground zero of morality,
faith, reasonableness and consistency. We have the president of an academy
founded to protect life protecting a law that destroys life.”
This is an image of the Church in auto-demolition mode.
With Rome having taken revenge on Benedict’s detested liturgical restoration,
it’s not a surprise to see Rome now taking further actions against John Paul II
and Paul VI’s legacy in moral theology.
It’s not controversial to notice that, officially, the
Catholic Church’s position on sexual morality and matters of human reproduction
is at odds with the zeitgeist. In fact, it might be more appropriate to say it
is at odds with the prevailing norms of human civilization. The Church is
against abortion and euthanasia. It’s against divorce, and premarital sex. It’s
against in vitro fertilization. And, most controversially, in 1968 of all
years, the Church reiterated its opposition to artificial contraception in a document called “Humanae Vitae” (Of human
life). This was a position that had been common among confessional
Christians until the Anglican Church abandoned it at Lambeth in 1930. All of these position flow, logically, from the Church’s
other moral and theological commitments: that our reproductive capacity is
good; that children deserve to be raised by their parents in committed
families; that all human acts, including sex, have a non-self-referential
purpose. Under John Paul II, the Church reaffirmed that all these teachings flow from the moral law, and that they are entailed in the very order of
creation, in a document called Veritatis Splendor (The
splendor of truth). These are not mere ideals that are proposed by the Church,
and conformity to them is not a matter of individual conscience or some supererogatory feat
reserved only to the most special saints. These moral laws are binding on
everyone at all times, in all places, in any psychological, social, or cultural
condition.
Those two documents, Humanae Vitae and Veritatis
Splendor, were seen by conservative Catholics as vindication of the
Church’s perennial moral teachings, its theological commitments about the moral
law, and the sufficiency of God’s grace to assist Christians in obeying it. And
to consolidate this understanding of morality and theology in the Church, the
Vatican founded the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) in 1994 as a kind of
ongoing think-tank dedicated to doing research on new biomedical issues and
technologies and to promoting the protection of human life in biomedical
fields.
But the Church’s internal critics of Humane Vitae and Veritatis
Splendor did not go away. And under Pope Francis, they have captured
momentum and the institutions of influence, even at the Pontifical Academy for
Life. Pope Francis ended all the lifetime terms of the members of the Academy
in 2016, making the new terms five-year renewable appointments. He dropped a
requirement that members sign a document promising to defend life in accordance
with Church teaching. Earlier this year, the PAL published a book — a summary
of a seminar — in which Church teaching was often repudiated. The introduction,
written by Archbishop Paglia, presented it as an authentic development of
Christian doctrine and as a “paradigm shift.” The first claim is made dubious
by the credibility of the latter one.
The theology that the critics promoted recast the laws of
God as mere “ideals” that the Church proposes. By doing so, they largely make a
hash of the Church’s teaching on sin, repentance, and actual grace. For if
these are all ideals, and the Church is just accompanying people from where
they are now, closer to the ideal later, then so long as one’s individual
conscience approves of an act, all those actions formerly understood as sins
are recast as approximations of the ideal. This radical rewrite of Christian
morality already gained purchase in Pope Francis’ encyclical Amoris
Latetia, which tried to find a way to allow remarried Catholics back to
Holy Communion. In the months ahead, it is rumored, this relativizing
understanding of conscience will be applied even more fully to the matters of
contraception in another encyclical being prepared by members of the Pontifical
Academy for Life.
So long as an active conscience is detected, who can say
there is really sin? By such an understanding, the prophet Nathan could have
excused King David as merely imperfectly approximating the idea for marriage
when he sent the husband of Bathsheba to the front lines to die.
Under Francis, the Church is trying to swallow its own
tail, to use the extraordinary authority granted to the Apostles and to Peter
to question the Church’s own divine mission. If even the Catholic Church can no
longer tell us what’s right and wrong, to hell with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment