Personal Experience, Not Moral Absolutes, to Guide Synod Study Group Discernment on Issues of Sexuality| National Catholic Register

VATICAN CITY — A study group founded by Pope Francis to develop a synodal method for distinguishing the Catholic Church’s teachings on so-called controversial topics, including sexual morality and life issues, has proposed a so-called “new paradigm” that relies heavily on situational ethics but minimizes moral absolutes and established ones Teachings of the Church.

The group, one of 10 study groups the pope set up in February to conduct an “in-depth analysis” of “matters of great relevance” that emerged during the Synod’s session on synodality in 2023, presented its findings on March 13 .October of the synod meeting. 2, the first day of its 2024 session. A text of the presentation was made available to the press.

The group spoke of challenging doctrine, ethics and pastoral approaches, assessing people’s lived experiences through consultations with the people of God and responding to cultural changes. The group presented these sources as places where the Holy Spirit speaks in ways that can override and seemingly contradict what the Church has already authoritatively taught.

The group, whose seven members include a controversial theologian known for questioning the existence of moral absolutes, described this approach as part of a “transformation of thought or a reform of practices in contextual fidelity to the gospel of Jesus who died yesterday and is the same today and always’, but whose ‘wealth and beauty are inexhaustible’.”

“Ethically speaking, it is not a question of applying ready-made objective truths to the various subjective situations as if they were merely isolated cases of an immutable and universal law,” said the group’s status report to the Synod on Synodality yesterday. “The criteria for differentiation arise from listening [living] Self-surrender of revelation in Jesus in the spirit’s today.”

In a possible contrast to the group’s report, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the basic “modes of transmission” of Christ’s revelation are Sacred Scripture and Tradition, and that the authoritative interpretation of these sources has been “entrusted to the living Magisterium of the Church.” Church alone.” Christian revelation also includes absolute and universal moral principles that do not appear to be subject to change based on subjective experience or extensive consultation. The study group intends to offer “concrete guidelines for discernment” based on its new paradigm on two sets of issues: global peace and responsibility; and “the importance of sexuality, marriage, the procreation of children, and the nurturing and nurturing of life.”

Like the other nine synod study groups established by Pope Francis, the group focused on discerning controversial issues has a mandate that extends to June 2025, well beyond the conclusion of the synod on synodality on October 27, 2024. It is unclear what status the study group’s final report will have.

At a news conference on Oct. 3, the synod’s special secretary, Jesuit Father Giacomo Costa, said that others could also submit proposals for consideration by the study groups and that the study groups should not be considered “final.” The General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Mario Grech, will be responsible for ensuring that the study groups proceed according to the “synodal method,” organizers said.

“I invite you not to think that these groups are separate from the life of the Church, but that they are true laboratories of synodal life,” Father Costa said. “Workshops, actually.”

According to the text of the study group’s presentation, the group emphasized the need to develop an anthropology and “cultural-historical ethics” consistent with the “Kerygma and its essential implications” and also with “the new that reveals itself in reality”.

The group linked the distinction of these “emerging states” to the Synod on Synodality’s discussion of the inclusion of non-bishops in the Church’s decision-making processes.

At the same time, the paradigm proposed by the study group repeatedly diminished the relevance of established church statements and underscored the need to go beyond “the proclamation and application of abstract doctrinal principles” and “to be open to the ever-new promptings of the Holy Spirit.” ”

“Only a lively, fruitful and reciprocal tension between teaching and practice embodies the living tradition and can counteract the temptation to rely on the unfruitful.” [rigidity] of oral statements,” says the text of the group’s report.

At various points in their presentation, the group characterizes moral truth as being subject to human salvation rather than as an integral part of it. It can be concluded that teaching on a moral issue should change if it is perceived as an obstacle to a person’s membership in the church.

The presentation text does not mention the relevance of moral absolutes for assessing ethical, doctrinal and pastoral questions. In the 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor (The Splendor of Truth), Saint John Paul II taught that, contrary to moral relativism, absolute moral truths exist, are rooted in human nature and are therefore universally applicable and accessible to human reason.

Previously, observers of the Synod on Synodality had expressed concerns that its theological foundations were based too heavily on the ideas of Father Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a controversial Jesuit theologian who downplayed the ability of doctrinal formulations to reliably relate to supernatural realities and emphasized God’s ongoing revelation through believers’ personal experience.

The study group’s members include Father Maurizio Chiodi, a moral theologian who has been criticized in recent years for defying established church teachings and denying moral absolutes.

Father Chiodi has argued that the use of contraceptives in marriage could be morally permissible under certain circumstances, saying in 2017 that homosexual relationships “under certain conditions” could be “the most fruitful path” for people with same-sex attraction to “have good relationships.” enjoy”.

The Italian priest, who is both a professor at the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute of Marriage and Family Sciences and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, was recently appointed consultant to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). by Pope Francis.

The Jesuit Father Carlo Casalone, a moral theologian at the Gregorian University who also appointed Francis to the Pontifical Academy for Life, is also a member of the study group. In 2022, he caused controversy when he supported a law legalizing euthanasia in Italy.

Other members of the group include Archbishop Carlos Catillo of Lima, Peru, also a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life; Archbishop Filippo Iannone Italy, President of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts; Father Piero Coda of Italy, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Sophia University in Loppiano, Italy, and Secretary General of the International Theological Commission; Sister of Saint Andrew Josée Nagalula from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Catholic University of the Congo in Kinshasa and member of the ITC; and Stella Morra from Italy, fundamental theologian at the Gregorian Institute and advisor to the DDF.

As a biblical model for “the paradigm shift propagated by the synodal process,” the group chose Acts 15’s account of the Council of Jerusalem, which resulted in the church no longer requiring circumcision. The study group said this event “highlighted the prohibition against hindering God’s universal will to salvation by something that no longer has effective meaning.”

The group acknowledged potential difficulties in applying its framework, including “the scarcity and unfamiliarity of the necessary vocabulary and concepts” and “implicit paradigmatic resistance,” but expressed confidence that it could develop its proposed paradigm more comprehensively.

We are “called to a complete and challenging repentance; “A conversion that takes concrete form in the way we present and translate the truth of the Gospel,” the group said in its presentation, “how it is manifested and practiced in the Agape of God in Christ.”