It is unfortunate that the most important encyclical of Pope St John Paul II’s prodigious output, Veritatis Splendor, is as relevant today as when it was promulgated 30 years ago. To be sure, aspects of it have perennial relevance, regardless of the era. Especially in its teaching on freedom and conscience, the encyclical is an illuminating exposition of the richness of Catholic moral theology, rooted in nature and burnished by grace. Those aspects of the letter are timeless. But the occasion for writing Veritatis Splendor was to address dubious trends in then-proliferating moral theology that one wishes would have been consigned to the ash heap of theological errors. To the contrary, alas, the specific theories that the pope condemned have crept from academic speculation to purported magisterial proclamation.
Whereas his predecessors had often written about specific topics in moral theology – work, peace, marriage or sexual morality, as examples – John Paul’s intention in Veritatis Splendor was to “reflect on the whole of the Church’s moral teaching”, reaffirming “certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine”. This more foundational approach was necessary because of “an overall and systematic calling into question traditional moral doctrine”, which tended to separate “freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship with truth”. Encountered “even in seminaries and faculties of theology”, this trend did not merely dissent from particular moral teachings, but threatened to undermine the very foundation of Catholic moral theology.
Veritatis Splendor emphasised that authentic human freedom cannot be separated from the truth about the human person. One is not truly free merely by having the capacity to choose X over Y, but rather by using that capacity to choose the true and good. This necessarily implies, of course, that truth and goodness lie outside the acting person as the end towards which human action ought to be ordered. An action is devoid of moral content if it is not voluntary; a human act is not judged to have moral content (for good or bad) if it is coerced, or otherwise not freely chosen. The free capacity to choose an object – or to refrain from choosing it – is the necessary condition for the choice to result in a good or bad action. But a human action cannot be morally good, regardless how voluntary it may be, if it is not ordered towards truth. And if the action is not for good, neither can it be liberating.
Nor can a moral action be good if it involves choosing an object that is intrinsically disordered, regardless of the intention of the actor or the circumstance of the choice. Some moral objects are incapable of being ordered towards the good by their very nature, without any exceptions. We call these objects “grave matter.” Their intentional choice always alienates the person from God: contraception, abortion and euthanasia are examples. Because they are never capable of being ordered towards the good, neither the intention of the actor nor the circumstance of the choice can render these objects good or result in a good moral action.
This gets to the heart of the moral error that Veritatis Splendor addresses. Some theologians had expressly denied not simply the existence of particular intrinsically disordered moral objects, but the very notion that there are such objects. Usually this did not take the form of explicit repudiation. They might not have expressly denied, for example, that extramarital sex can never be ordered towards the good, without exception. Their method was to deny intrinsically evil moral objects without saying so. Rather, they would have couched their denial in the language of “fundamental option” or “proportionate” good. Having drawn conclusions, they went in search for theories.
What is called the fundamental option contends that one cannot alienate oneself from God by the single choice of any moral object. If one has made a fundamental option for God, no specific choice of any discrete moral object can destroy or disrupt that “option”, so long as the choice is not made for the purpose of repudiating the fundamental orientation. In this theory, extra-marital sex is a “pre-moral” object, but it cannot be judged to be an evil moral object if the person engaging in it has not done so with the intention of denying his fundamental option for God.
This is where proportionalism fills the gaps. As a “pre-moral” act, extra-marital sex cannot be judged as “good” or “bad” without measuring the proportionate result of the choice. If the result of the act is more favourable than not (by some sliding scale of “favourable”), extra-marital sex turns out to be morally good. In addition to the moral theological implications of such a contention, the combination of these theories has profound sacramental import. If no moral object is intrinsically disordered – the first element of a mortal sin – there can be no such thing as mortal sin.
In 1993, these theories were largely propounded by seminary and university professors. Thirty years later, many of their students are in positions of magisterial authority. You get the point.
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