Synodal Sophistry

Is Catholic Moral Teaching Unscientific?

The Vatican’s ongoing synod on synodality (officially the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops) has been widely considered the most important event for the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council.

While the Bishops who recently met in the Vatican have now gone back to their dioceses, the synod officially continues until October 2024, when they will meet again to finish it. Meanwhile, the participants will work in the interim to prepare for next year’s meeting.

What’s it all about? Quite a lot, but from the perspective of the secular media, it’s all one thing… sex. And while that may be oversimplified, it is true that many Northern European bishops hope to use the synod as an opportunity to reevaluate LGBTQ issues in light of Pope Francis’s concern for increased "inclusivity," "diversity" and of disavowal indietrismo ("backwardness").

The Catholic faithful are unclear exactly what concepts like inclusivity, etc. mean in practice. Is Pope Francis simply concerned that we love the sinner while not approving of the sin? Or does he envision that a more fundamental shift in church teaching is on the horizon - perhaps one that will normalize same-sex relationships? Many people feel the latter is the case, and it is not hard to see why. From Pope Francis's decision to give transgender people VIP status at his Wednesday general audiences, to his appointment of Archbishop Fernandez as the Vatican's chief of doctrine, it seems that the pieces are being put in place for a complete renovation of church teaching. LGBTQ Catholic groups, long agitating for theological revisionism, are practically ecstatic over these developments, even though the Pope's views on the subject are ambiguous and seem to be evolving.  This lack of clarity prompted five cardinals recently to write to Pope Francis, asking,

Does the teaching upheld by the universal ordinary magisterium, that every sexual act outside of marriage, and in particular homosexual acts, constitutes an objectively grave sin against God’s law, regardless of the circumstances in which it takes place and the intention with which it is carried out, continue to be valid?

The Roman pontiff never directly answered this question, though he hinted that the church might start blessing same-sex unions. The synod’s 41-page report, recently secured through a two-thirds majority, built on this by hinting that the church’s moral teaching on sexuality might indeed require updating in light of modern science.

Of course, nobody wants to be against science, which is why debates on everything from vaccines to climate change to evolution tend to be framed as conflicts between the forces of science vs. anti-science. Recently, issues relating to homosexuality and transgenderism are also being caught up in this narrative. For example, people frequently say to me statements like, “science shows that some people are born in the wrong body,” and “modern genetics now proves that some people are born gay,” and so forth. One friend recently suggested to me that because science has enabled us to understand sexuality so much better than our forefathers, Christian teaching on homosexuality may be insufficiently agile to take into account the modern situation. As Pope Francis himself puts it, the Catholic Church's teachings on sex is "still in diapers."

The synod’s report, though couched in sophistic vagaries, seems to make a nod to these types of concerns, for it states:

Certain issues, such as those relating to matters of identity and sexuality…are controversial not only in society, but also in the Church, because they raise new questions. Sometimes the anthropological categories we have developed are not able to grasp the complexity of the elements emerging from experience or knowledge in the sciences and require greater precision and further study.

Bishop Barron, who serves in the Diocese of Winona-Rochester (Minnesota), responded to these concerns in a much-discussed article, “My Experience of the Synod.” If Pope Francis's modus operandi is vagueness and sophistry, Bishop Barron is known for his incisive clarity. He applauded the synod for emphasizing the need to extend love to LGBTQ brothers and sisters, noting,

Practically everyone at the synod held that those whose sexual lives are outside of the norm should be treated with love and respect, and, again, bravo to the synod for making this pastoral point so emphatically.

For many clergy in the Catholic Church who see themselves as forward-looking, this imperative to love can mean only one thing: an overhaul of the Church’s sexual teaching. But Bishop Barron emphasizes that this would be a mistake:

…when the terms are rightly understood, there is no real tension between love and truth, for love is not a feeling but the act by which one wills the good of another. Therefore, one cannot authentically love someone else unless he has a truthful perception of what is really good for that person. There might, I argued, be a tension between welcoming and truth but not between authentic love and truth.

And what about the concern regarding science? Is it time to update Christian morality to take into account new discoveries about the epiphenomena of same-sex attraction? Bishop Barron thinks not, given that science can only ever tell us what is the case, and not about what is right and wrong.

A final point—and here I find myself in frank disagreement with the final synodal report—has to do with the development of moral teaching in regard to sex. The suggestion is made that advances in our scientific understanding will require a rethinking of our sexual teaching, whose categories are, apparently, inadequate to describe the complexities of human sexuality. A first problem I have with this language is that it is so condescending to the richly articulate tradition of moral reflection in Catholicism, a prime example of which is the theology of the body developed by Pope St. John Paul II. To say that this multilayered, philosophically informed, theologically dense system is incapable of handling the subtleties of human sexuality is just absurd. But the deeper problem I have is that this manner of argumentation is based upon a category error—namely, that advances in the sciences, as such, require an evolution in moral teaching. Let us take the example of homosexuality. Evolutionary biology, anthropology, and chemistry might give us fresh insight into the etiology and physical dimension of same-sex attraction, but they will not tell us a thing about whether homosexual behavior is right or wrong. The entertaining of that question belongs to another mode of discourse. It is troubling to see that some of the members of the German bishops’ conference are already using the language of the synod report to justify major reformulations of the Church’s sexual teaching. This, it seems to me, must be resisted.

Hovering behind what Bishop Barron calls "reformulations of the Church’s sexual teaching" is the powerful movement of "gay-friendly" theology that seeks revisionist readings of the Bible. The arguments are becoming familiar: the sexual complementarity of Genesis 2 doesn’t apply to the postlapsarian condition; Leviticus and Deuteronomy passages are part of the ceremonial law that was rescinded with Christ or part of the civil law that only applied to Israel; Romans 1:26-27 is not referencing long-term and stable homosexual partnerships; the inclusion of homosexuality in lists of sins in passages like 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:9-10 refers only to pedophilia or lustful behaviors, etc. What are we to make of these concerns? What does the Bible actually teach about same-sex relationships? That will be the topic for another article.

* image credit: Stefano Bolognini