I have heard that in the Synod on Synodality there is a study group on sexual morality which has proposed changes to the church’s teaching in this area. I thought this was an area where the teaching cannot change. Can you please clarify what is going on?
The background is that in this year’s second session of the Synod—which began last year— some of the more controversial topics, like women deacons, priestly celibacy, LGBTQ outreach, sexual morality and marriage, etc, will not be discussed in the synod itself, but dealt with by ten study groups established by Pope Francis, that will continue to meet until June 2025.
The group on sexual morality, marriage and life issues, reported to the synod assembly on 2 October, raising some concerns when referring to discerning doctrine, ethics and pastoral approaches by gauging people’s lived experience through consultations with the People of God and by being responsive to cultural changes.
It described this approach as part of a “conversion of thought or reform of practices in contextual fidelity to the gospel of Jesus, who is ‘the same yesterday today and always,’ but whose ‘richness and beauty are inexhaustible.’”
One section of the report stated, “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.”
The report diminished the relevance of established church teaching, underscoring the need to move beyond “proclaiming and applying abstract doctrinal principles” to “be open to the ever-new promptings of the Holy Spirit… Only a vital, fruitful and reciprocal tension between doctrine and practice embodies the living Tradition and is able to counteract the temptation to rely on the barren [rigidity] of verbal pronouncements.”
As is to be expected, this language gave rise to serious concerns in the minds of many, appearing to deny the importance of objective truth, of universal laws when it comes to sexual morality, in favour of a morality based on people’s individual experience in each situation.
This approach is akin to “situation ethics”, a theology proposed by Joseph Fleming and others in the first half of the twentieth century, according to which the morality of an act is to be judged—not based on objective, universal moral laws—but rather by looking at what is right in each situation.
Situation ethics was condemned by the Congregation of the Holy Office, now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 1956.
That declaration stated that, “in order to safeguard the purity and intactness of Catholic doctrine, this Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office interdicts and prohibits this doctrine of ‘Situation Ethics’ from being taught or approved, under any name whatsoever it may be designated” (2 February 1956).
That same theology, under the names of “consequentialism” and “proportionalism”, was later rejected by Pope St John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis splendor (1993).
“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,” the pope wrote.
“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” (VS 80).
Of particular concern to many was the inclusion in the study group of Fr Maurizio Chiodi, an Italian theologian, who has been criticised for denying moral absolutes and for arguing that the use of contraception in marriage could be morally permissible in some circumstances.
In any case, regardless of what the final report of this study group says, it does not constitute the official magisterium of the church. Only the pope with his dicasteries in the Holy See, or with the bishops in communion with him, can teach in the name of the church.