The Vatican Is Wasting Its Authority

Y ou 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.