LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #9

The Synod and the War Against Veritatis Splendor

by George Weigel

Although the progressive theologians’ guild imagines itself to be the cutting edge of Catholic thought, the guild actually displays a certain atavistic character reminiscent of the Bourbons, as the French dynasty-in-exile was famously described by that slippery character, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” In the former category of ignorance is the guild’s refusal to concede that some matters of doctrine and morality have been definitively settled. In the latter, the guild has never forgiven John Paul II for issuing the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) on the authentic reform of Catholic moral theology. 

Why Veritatis Splendor?

To make matters simple and reasonably brief:

John Paul II, a thoroughly modern intellect, was firmly convinced by his own philosophical studies and his pastoral work that, given contemporary confusions, the defense and promotion of human flourishing and social solidarity required the Church to reaffirm the reality of what are technically known as “intrinsically evil acts”—acts that are gravely wicked in and of themselves and that no combination of intentions and consequences can ever justify. Human beings of a normal ethical sensibility grasp this point immediately: Torturing children is always gravely evil; so is rape; so is homicide; so is stealing a loaf of bread from a starving man. Nothing could possibly justify the Holocaust of the European Jews, just as nothing could possibly justify Stalin’s terror famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. Normal people, as I say, get this, and without much difficulty.

Certain kinds of intellectuals do not, however—which goes to prove Orwell’s dictum that “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them.” There are many reasons for this obtuseness, among them a certain paralysis caused by what these intellectuals take to be Immanuel Kant’s demolition of classical metaphysics, and thus of the idea that there are deep truths built into the world and into us that we can know by reason. The challenging spiritual and pastoral problems posed by the breakdown of European moral culture before, between, during, and after the two world wars of the twentieth century also played its role in leading more than a few Catholic theologians to propose a new way of doing Catholic moral theology: a calculus of intentions and consequences would be deployed to judge the morality or immorality of particular acts. If, post Kant and David Hume, we could not know with certainty that some things are permanently off-the-board, morally speaking, then the best we can do is to create a framework of reflection (intention + act + consequence) that permits us to make what seem to be the most reasonable moral judgments possible.

This method, usually known as “proportionalism” (or, in its really down-market form, “situation ethics”), was the hot thing in the mid-1960s, when it played a key role in the Catholic controversy over the morally appropriate means of regulating human fertility: the so-called “birth control” debate. It’s worth pausing a minute here to recall that Catholicism in those days taught that couples did indeed have a moral responsibility to plan their families, taking into consideration various circumstances, including health and material resources. The real question was, what means of fertility regulation are most congruent with the dignity of the human person, the dignity of marriage, the dignity of human love, and especially the dignity of women? Resisting both the fierce cultural headwinds generated by the sexual revolution and the vigorous campaign conducted by proportionalist moral theologians, Pope Paul VI concluded that using the natural rhythms of biology to regulate fertility was the only method that achieved those dignitarian ends. So he declined to adopt a proportionalist approach to the “birth control question” in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which would have legitimated the use of chemical and mechanical contraceptives. 

Heads exploded in the progressive theologians’ guild. The pope was derided as a theological imbecile; dissent was carefully organized and widespread; bishops around the world caved in to the pressure and distanced themselves from papal teaching; the bright promise of the Second Vatican Council was said to have been snuffed out. Paul VI never issued another encyclical during the remaining decade of his pontificate, which became a prolonged agony.

On his election as Bishop of Rome, Karol Wojtyła—who agreed with the conclusions of Humanae Vitae on the specific question of contraception but wished for a different kind of presentation of the Church’s thinking in these matters—sought to re-position the “birth-control controversy” on more humanistic terrain. For the controversies of 1968 had not remained static. In the 1970s, proportionalism dominated moral theology departments throughout the Western world, not least at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and proportionalist analyses were being applied to virtually every other aspect of the sexual revolution, to the point where a study officially commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America (Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought) could not manage to condemn bestiality as morally depraved, always. As a close student of modern philosophy and psychology, John Paul II knew that a repetition of the old moral formulas would not get traction in an increasingly disoriented culture. So over five years he articulated what became known as the “Theology of the Body,” which drew on biblical, literary, philosophical, and theological resources and insights to make the case for the Catholic ethic of human love. In the living parts of the world Church, the Theology of the Body has dramatically reformed catechetics and marriage preparation, and many Catholics live its teaching joyfully. 

Time to Confront the Proportionalist Juggernaut

But the guild, learning nothing from this creative development of thought on human love and continuing to smart from the beatdown it had taken in Humanae Vitae (especially paragraph 14) continued to beat the proportionalist drums, its campaign now being driven by what we have come to know as the LGBTQ+ issues and agenda. John Paul II, sensing the need to accelerate the reform of Catholic moral theology (already being renewed through the recovery of Aristotelian/Thomistic virtue ethics by such thinkers as Servais Pinckaers, O.P.), and looking to put down a firm marker as cultural erosion intensified throughout the Western world, issued Veritatis Splendor after extensive consultation with many very intelligent people. In that encyclical’s second chapter, John Paul taught the following, drawing on the Second Vatican Council: 

Reason attests that there are objects of the human act which are by their nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image. These are the acts which, in the Church's moral tradition, have been termed “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum): they are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances. Consequently, without in the least denying the influence on morality exercised by circumstances and especially by intentions, the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.” The Second Vatican Council itself, in discussing the respect due to the human person, gives a number of examples of such acts: “Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”

Then came the decisive rejection of proportionalism:

In teaching the existence of intrinsically evil acts, the Church accepts the teaching of Sacred Scripture. The Apostle Paul emphatically states: “Do not be deceived: neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstances can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain “irremediably” evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person. “As for acts which are themselves sins (cum iam opera ipsa peccata sunt), Saint Augustine writes, like theft, fornication, blasphemy, who would dare affirm that, by doing them for good motives (causis bonis), they would no longer be sins, or, what is even more absurd, that they would be sins that are justified?”

Consequently, circumstances or intentions can never transform an act intrinsically evil by virtue of its object into an act “subjectively” good or defensible as a choice.

The Proportionalist Pushback

These somewhat technical paragraphs of Veritatis Splendor (#80–81) are worth citing at length because they are the gravamen, the bottom of the bottom line, the casus belli of the War Against Veritatis Splendor that has been conducted by the progressive theologians’ guild and its ecclesiastical allies since that encyclical was issued in 1993. The aggressors in that war have made some territorial gains over the past decade. One example may be found in the deconstruction of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University, which now features proportionalist theologians on its staff (even as its student body has evaporated). Then there is the Pontifical Academy for Life, which in 2022 issued “Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, Practical Challenges,” which was largely a proportionalist tract.   

Now comes the latest battlefront in that war, Synod-2024, with the proportionalist flag now flying under the motto “Lived Experience.” Or, as the study group tasked by Pope Francis with examining “controversial” issues of Catholic teaching put it in an interim report given to the Synod, “Ethically speaking, it is not a matter of applying pre-packaged objective truth to the different subjective situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law.” 

It isn’t? Do these people really mean to suggest that the “subjective situation” of the participants in the Wannsee Conference in 1942 must be taken into account when assessing the moral responsibility of those who planned and later carried out the murder of millions of Jews? That the “pre-packaged” (cf. the Fifth Commandment), “immutable,” and “universal” proscription of murder did not prima facie condemn the Holocaust, without any further cavil? How about what Hamas did in Israel on October 7, 2023? Or what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995? Or what the torturers in Russian camps are doing to Ukrainian prisoners of war as you’re reading this? 

The study group deplored the mere “proclaiming and applying [of] abstract doctrinal principles,” which it claimed impeded an openness to the “ever-new promptings of the Holy Spirit.” As with all such gabble, those who are indulging in such proclamations and applications are never identified, perhaps because they are hobgoblins of the proportionalist imagination. Moreover, does the Holy Spirit “prompt” us to morally affirm today what the Holy Spirit had condemned for millennia as humanly degrading—and thus an offense to the God who made us in the divine image? Is the Holy Spirit “self-referentially inconsistent,” as the philosophers would say? Or is all this blather about “the today of the Holy Spirit” leading us to “contextual fidelity to the gospel of Jesus” just a Kamala Harris word salad masking the determination to declare that what the Church long believed and taught to be disordered acts are really okay these days, thanks to our more refined appreciation of “lived experience”?   

The game here is given away when one notes that the members of that study group include Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, a professor of moral theology and recently-named consultor to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. For Fr. Chiodi, who has publicly challenged the truth of Humanae Vitae’s teaching on contraception, opined in 2017 that “under certain conditions,” homosexual relationships could be a morally acceptable way for those experiencing same-sex attraction to “enjoy good relations.” 

The call for pastoral charity toward those experiencing gender dysphoria and same-sex attraction is entirely welcome. The campaign to install proportionalism as the quasi-official moral method of the Catholic Church in order to advance the LGBTQ+ agenda is not, because that agenda is incompatible with divine revelation as well as human reason. It is also, in the case of “sex-reassignment therapies,” increasingly seen to be, from a scientific point of view, a species of technological witchcraft and a betrayal of the medical arts, with no long-term capacity for improving mental health. 

It is unlikely that this brace of issues will be addressed directly in the Synod’s final report. Nonetheless, the proportionalist war against Veritatis Splendor has been a leitmotif of every Synod since 2014; the war will continue to be fought out in the study groups that are to report to the pope in June 2025 (although the one featuring Fr. Chiodi is thoroughly in favor of the proportionalists); and the proportionalist juggernaut must continue to be resisted.  Fidelity to the truth, authentic compassion, and genuine pastoral charity demand no less. 

Larry Chapp’s Synod Diary

October 18, 2024

Once again, Jonathan Liedl of The National Catholic Register has given us an excellent report on the various issues swirling around the Synod. Yesterday, he gave us the welcome news that there was significant pushback on the Synod floor, by what appeared to be an overwhelming majority of Synod participants, against the proposal that national episcopal conferences be recognized as “ecclesial subjects” in their own right, and therefore should be granted the authority to make their own doctrinal adjudications.  

This is extremely important on a number of levels. First, as with last year’s synodal pushback against including a statement on “LGBTQ+” issues in the Synod’s final text, we see here that a majority of Synod participants are not fully on board the progressive change train that has garnered the majority of media attention. What would be interesting would be to see if the majority of those opposed to these proposals were bishops, or some equal number of bishops and non-episcopal voters. But whatever that case might be, the fact remains that the proposal to concede some measure of doctrinal authority to national episcopal conferences was so fulsomely criticized this week that the Synod organizers felt the need to salvage some semblance of respectability for the idea, so they took the very unusual step of having a theologian give a short speech in support of the proposal on the grounds that there is precedent for this in Church history.  

But that is a dubious claim, since national episcopal conferences are a modern novelty.  There were indeed local synods in the patristic and medieval Church, but they were more centered on common linguistic factors rather than the ever-changing borders of various kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and so forth. Indeed, the “sovereign nation-state” had not yet been invented, and this concept really did not come into its own until much later in history. Furthermore, the exact doctrinal authority of these various local synods remained vague, with many synods even being repudiated as false synods owing to defects, or manifest heresy, in their theological positions.  

A second reason why criticisms of the proposal were significant is that, as Archbishop Anthony Fisher, O.P., of Sydney noted, the Church’s unity would be destroyed if, for example, the German Church teaches and does one thing and the Polish bishops another. It simply cannot be the case that what is true and moral in one country can be false and immoral in another. The proposal runs the risk, if enacted, of reducing the Catholic Church to a mere confederation of local churches with the pope being a largely toothless, symbolic figurehead of unity, rather than its guarantor. The specter of the Anglicization of the Catholic Church thus looms over this debate.   

There are few theologians who would disagree with the idea that we need a decentralization of governing authority in the Church, less centered on Rome. But governance is one thing and doctrinal authority a very different thing. Furthermore, as some Synod participants apparently pointed out, the papacy and the episcopacy are of divine origin and national episcopal conferences are not.  

This fact was highlighted by none other than Joseph Ratzinger. In the interview that came to be published in 1985 as The Ratzinger Report, he noted that Vatican II was not focused on synodalism but on increasing the authority of the local bishop by emphasizing that the three munera (functions) of the bishop—teaching, governing, and sanctifying—accrued to the bishop by divine right in virtue of his consecration, and not as something delegated to him by the pope. This was the now famous teaching on collegiality and was the Council’s attempt to nuance the teaching of Vatican I on papal authority since that council was cut short and interrupted by political events in what was becoming Italy.  

Therefore, those who claim that granting national episcopal conferences doctrinal authority is an implementation of the teachings of Vatican II are wrong. And there is the further danger that this proposal actually undermines the teaching of Vatican II on the authority of the local bishop—which is, to repeat, a divinely constituted authority—by focusing instead on the ersatz invention of the doctrinal authority of the national body. The authority of the local bishop fades, insofar as there will inevitably arise pressures to conform to whatever decisions are reached on a national level.  

The Ratzinger Report sums this up as follows: Vatican II “wanted specifically to strengthen the role and responsibility of bishops,” Ratzinger wrote. However, there were difficulties in putting this teaching into practice, for 

the decisive new emphasis on the role of the bishops is in reality restrained or actually risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureaucratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a practical concrete function. . . . No episcopal conference, as such, has a teaching mission; its documents have no weight of their own, save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops.

Ratzinger goes on to reference Germany during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s; there, the truly courageous opposition came from a few local bishops while the annual national meeting of German bishops, the Fulda Conference, was far more cautious and restrained. And there is a lesson here for our own “signs of the times.” All bureaucracies seek their own preservation, which often requires compromise with the powers that be when, in fact, the crisis of the moment requires a more prophetic response. Furthermore, this spirit of compromise, largely for reasons of political expediency, will then have the effect of marginalizing the truly courageous and prophetic individual bishop who will now be characterized as an idiosyncratic anomaly, best ignored and treated as an antiquarian relic “out of step” with the “complex circumstances of today.”  

It would seem, therefore, given the pushback against the current proposal to concede doctrinal teaching authority to national episcopal conferences, that the spirit and legacy of good Papa Benedict live on. 

Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology at De Sales University and co-founder of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania.

Furthermore . . .

National Catholic Register’s Jonathan Liedl recently published a fine piece on the inside/outside (or, as we prefer, Broadway/off-Broadway) dynamic at Synod-2024, written in Liedl’s typically sober, authoritative style. A week earlier, we received from a German friend, Dr. Manfred Spieker, emeritus professor at the University of Osnabrück, the following edition of Synod mit Söding (Synod with Söding), a daily blog distributed by the Central Committee of German Catholics and written by Dr. Thomas Söding, a German “theological expert” at the Synod. We publish it here in Google translation, slightly edited for clarity, as a telling expression of the cast of mind and the passions of no small part of the off-Broadway activists at Synod-2024. XR II   

This is the fourth World Synod in which I am participating as a theological expert. Not only the themes, but also the context of the Synod have changed significantly. In the past, I remember, traditional and traditionalist groups tried to dominate the images surrounding the Synod, led by the Legionaries of Christ and other spiritual communities who wanted to give the impression of being something like the elite of the Church.

Since last year, the first General Assembly on the subject of synodality, the picture has changed—and now, this year, at the second General Assembly, even more so. The traditionalists have disappeared. But they are not gone, they are certainly waiting for “better” times. But others are there: many reform groups. They support those who are now opening doors and going through them, even if there are too few of them.

In the many places around the Synod Hall, it is clear that the Catholic Church is no longer simply represented by bishops. There are Catholic groups from many countries around the world, both older and newer, who are flying the flag: most [importantly] when they . . . offer places where Synod members can have a real conversation with people who are serious about what Pope Francis has declared as a slogan: the periphery is the center.

Today, the entire synod day is filled with free speech contributions that respond to the seven key questions on “relationships” that were formulated yesterday after the “language tables” had submitted their reports. There, I tried to help for eight different Relators from the “circuli minori,” who all had clear ideas and many good ideas, to lead to a problem-oriented focus that helps the Synod . . . move forward. Result? A partial success.

During the lunch break, I took the opportunity to go outside for a few minutes, to the auditorium of the Jesuit Generalate. James Martin, a Jesuit from New York and well-known LGBTQ pastor, had invited me there, to the global command center of the order, so to speak, for an event [sponsored by Outreach]. James Martin was a digitally connected guest at the general assembly of the Central Committee of German Catholics some time ago: a man with authority, even among those who are skeptical about his commitment. At 1 p.m. there was something to eat, followed by a panel discussion in the Jesuit lecture hall.

Going from the Synod to this meeting is a statement. Not many people are making it, but some are. The opening prayer was spoken by Cardinal Stephen Chow Sau-yan [S.J.], Bishop of Hong Kong. The closing prayer was spoken by Julia Osęka, an American student, the youngest member of the Synod. James Martin moderated the panel, which included Juan Carlos Cruz from Chile, Janet Obeney-Williams from England, and Christopher Vella from Malta, while Dumisani Dube from Zimbabwe and Joanita Warry Ssenfuka from Uganda joined in the digital space. All are strongly committed; Juan Carlos Cruz, for example, is a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. They all bore witness: to their history, to their faith, to the discrimination they are exposed to, to the liberation that it means for them to be able to be recognized as an LGBTQ person in the middle of the Church. For all of them, Rome is important as the Catholic center—and [so is] the Synod, in which they place a little hope.

It is well known that the Catholic queer movement is strong in the United States. The meeting showed that the LGBTQ community is present not only in economically developed countries, but worldwide. Reports of experiences were heard, some of them embarrassing; testimonies of faith that demanded justice, recognition, and participation were heard, and they were more than justified. “The Catholic Church is my home,” explained Joanita Warry Ssenfuka; she will not allow herself to be pushed out because other, even high-ranking Church people, deny [that] the Church [was taught] love for [the] neighbor by Jesus. And it is because of him that the Church is . . . the Church. “He healed me,” says Dumisani Dube from Zimbabwe. “I was abused, why did I allow this?” This question almost killed him, said Juan Carlos Cruz, but he discovered that Jesus loved him unconditionally. And he asked where the bishops were when discrimination was being intensified in countries like Uganda, to the point of draconian punishments. “Talk to us,” was Christopher Vella’s demand to the Synod. And Janet Obeney-Williams, a doctor by profession, opened our eyes to women's rights: “The time when we were happy to be able to bake cookies is over.”

In the Synod Hall, however, the cultural differences are very strong. It is said again and again how much the Catholic Church must improve to be a house of faith for LGBTQ people, where they are not just guests, but owners. But there are also voices that not only criticize the movement—supposedly a pressure group—but also deny that there are people with their sexual orientation beyond the binary code at all.

There is a lot to do here. The Synod will not solve all the problems. But it must not weaken anti-discrimination work, but rather strengthen it. . . . 

Note of the Day

The Swiss Guards do their duty in an exemplary and friendly manner and separate inside and outside nicely: who is allowed in and who is not. But thoughts are free. The exchange between the spheres is crucial. The LGBTQ initiative was a stroke of luck for the Church and for the Synod—even if not all members have yet understood how lucky they are in the Catholic Church.

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A rather different perspective on the Church and the twenty-first-century challenge to chastity was offered several months ago in an article by Fr. Robert Sirico, who discussed the evangelically anemic aspects of the declaration Fiducia Supplicans (which addressed the issue of “blessings” for those in same-sex relationships) while suggesting that Synod-2024, like its predecessor last year, would have been enriched by the “lived experience” of a ministry like Courage, which serves Catholics with same-sex attraction who want to lead lives in concord with the Church’s ethic of human love. The article is available here. And it should be required reading for all Synod-2024 participants, both on and (perhaps especially) off-Broadway. XR II

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Those interested in exploring further the questions raised by the turn to “lived experience” in the campaign to reorient Catholic reflection on the moral life will want to obtain a new book, Lived Experience and the Search for Truth, edited by Deborah Savage and Robert Fastiggi and published by En Route Books and Media. The book’s genesis, purposes and perspective are summarized here. XR II  

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