The strange fruit at PAL are showing their true colors.
The Pillar noticed:
A growing body of Vatican officials and Roman academics have told The Pillar recently they’re convinced that members of the pontifical academy, along with academics at the John Paul II Institute, are waging a strategic campaign, aimed at provoking a response from the pope during the 2023 synod of bishops on synodality.
The idea floating in Rome is that Paglia, along with Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, Msgr. Gilfredo Marengo, and others, have coordinated to generate discussion among theologians, bishops, and in the media about the norms of Humanae vitae, ahead of the bishops’ synod in October 2023. That discussion would allow bishops to raise questions about the moral normativity of Humanae vitae - or the role of conscience in discernment of the contraceptive marital act - in the context of the synod’s assembly.
From there, the pope might make reference to the discussion in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation.
Even if the reference was not specific, and only mentioned that questions had been raised about the topic, it might give the impression of a kind of papal approbatio to a re-litigation of the Church’s teaching on contraception. Or it might give leeway to theologians who want to say they uphold the objective immorality of contraception, while suggesting that principles like “gradualism” give couples room to make other moral judgments for themselves.
One theologian close to the Vatican told The Pillar that those ideas are intended to chip away at the affirmation of objective morality in Pope St. John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor — and even suggested that there is open conversation about that idea in some Vatican theological circles.
The theologian added that if such a plan is successful, “within one year-and-a-half, we will see something - a footnote, perhaps - that relativizes Humanae vitae to the realm of the conscience. That’s what they’re working toward.”
The Register registered a counterargument to the PAL:
The teaching has two distinct but overlapping foundations: that human life be respected in its transmission; and that sex acts always be marital (conjugal). Like Humanae Vitae, we here focus mainly on the second. Sex acts cannot be marital unless they express, actualize and enable the spouses to experience marriage’s two defining elements: its openness to procreation (bonum prolis) and its commitment to spousal unity (bonum fidei). That was tersely articulated by Vatican II in Gaudium et Spes, 51, and there declared to “pertain to divine law” (in lege divina explicanda):
“When there is a question of harmonizing marital love with the responsible transmission of life, the moral aspect of whatever is done … must be determined by objective standards that, based on the nature of the human person and of his or her acts, preserve the full sense [full meaning] of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love.”
To make clear the demanding character of that moral standard, GS 51 immediately adds: “This [preservation of the full sense …] cannot be achieved unless the virtue of conjugal chastity is sincerely practiced.” And the following sentence states the conclusion: “Relying on these principles, [the faithful] may not undertake methods of birth control that the teaching authority of the Church, unfolding the divine law, finds to be immoral.”
GS 50 had already said that conscience, in considering responsible transmission of human life, must keep “conformity with the divine law,” and with the magisterium’s authoritative interpretation “in the light of the gospel” of that law — a law that displays marital love’s full meaning.
Humanae Vitae was essentially a reaffirming of the Council’s way of transmitting the perennial teaching in GS 50 and 51 (not forgetting GS 47’s denunciation of the profanation of marital love by “illicit practices against generation” — explained to the Council Fathers by the drafting committee as including contraception but excluding periodic abstinence [NFP]).
We should add, because of widespread dust-throwing since December 1965, that the Council subtracted nothing from that teaching when, to the sentence we just quoted from GS 51, it added Footnote 14, citing, at Paul VI’s direction, the condemnations of contraception by Pius XI and Pius XII, and with his consent, his 1964 allocution announcing that “certain questions” were being considered by a papal [birth control] commission. As Jesuit Father John Ford, a member of that papal commission but also a delegate of Paul VI to the Council’s commission drafting GS 47-51, demonstrated in America (April 16, 1966), the “certain questions,” in the mind of the Pope and Council when GS was promulgated in December 1965, concerned not the core perennial teaching against freely chosen contracepted intercourse, but particularly the question whether that teaching applies when the means chosen to prevent conception is the pill (then still a novelty).
Paul VI’s commission soon judged, all but unanimously, that there is no moral difference between a non-abortifacient pill and other ways of contracepting. But then it bolted, and in late June 1966, by substantial majority, confidentially recommended to Paul VI a radically new position: Within a marriage responsibly open as a whole to procreation, contraception can be (and often is) permissible and good. After four months’ intense consultation and reflection, the Pope, addressing Italian obstetricians on Oct. 29, indicated that the matter called for a study deeper, and more logical in its attention to doctrine, than the commission’s. He flatly denied one of the commission majority’s key premises, that the perennial teaching was in a state of doubt.
CatholicCulture lamented this return to 1960:
The Pontifical Academy for Life has released the results of a 2021 conference suggesting a “paradigm shift” in moral theology. Analysts suggest the report may become the foundation of a papal encyclical effectively redefining the intrinsic evil of contraception and other sins. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the academy’s president since 2016, describes the “paradigm shift” in moral theology. He says the shift is: “both descriptive and conceptual, as it follows a pattern that is both argumentative and narrative, theoretical and sapiential, phenomenological and interpretative.” The new paradigm promises to use big words.
Here we go again.
Many of us recognize the “new paradigm” as a rehash of the old, dissident, and discarded paradigm of proportionalism. Human Sexuality—published by Anthony Kosnik in 1977 under the auspices of the Catholic Theological Society of America—represents the same “paradigm shift” that occurred shortly after Vatican II. It reads like the playbook for all that has happened over the last 50 years.
Who knew that the tyranny of moral relativism of which Pope Emeritus spoke would be the modus operandi of his successor? Pray for Pope Francis daily.
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