Published October 19, 2024
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.
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George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.