Can Church dogma just implode under new social conditions? A leading figure of the Catholic Church believes so.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, president of @ComeceEu, calls for a rethink of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality: “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct.” Source: @KNA_Redaktion
— Christopher Lamb (@ctrlamb) February 2, 2022
Cardinal Hollerich is a leading figure in the Catholic Church’s current synod. I don’t expect him to suffer from one of Pope Francis’ now endless homilies about “rigidity.” (Although, who’s to say how spicy the pillow talk gets in Rome?)
Anyway, this is not merely a simple prohibition or discipline of the church, like abstaining from meat on Fridays. It’s not even just a moral teaching by itself. Christianity has the male–female binary written into the order of creation itself. In the first chapter of Genesis, male and female, He created them. In the last pages of Revelation, there is finally the marriage between God and his bride, the church.
But, the Cardinal’s statements do reflect an ongoing drift in official statements. On the morality of the death penalty, the church has proposed (I hesitate to say, “taught”) three different and utterly contradictory positions in the lifetime of my parents. I tried to trace their logic here. If you examine them in succession, you see that the newer definitions are drained of theological content, and in place of Scriptural exegesis we now have sociological observation. Formerly the church taught the death penalty was just, and had confidence in God to bring the souls he desires to heaven, even those we humans condemned to death. Then the church under John Paul II proposed that the death penalty was usually wrong because it deprived people of the chance to repent. Under Francis, the church proposes that modern prisons are sufficient to stop men from committing more evil crimes.
This new “observation” doesn’t have any rigor, it doesn’t even try to explain when imprisonment became so effective for its purpose, or under what conditions it might cease to be. It’s just an assertion, one belied by the conduct we observe in prisons.
If a long litany of Scriptures and the entire moral tradition and theology of the church, touching the deepest propositions about man, God, and creation, can be made defunct on sociological grounds, the church loses its authority to teach at all, I would think.