VATICAN CITY — A study group established by Pope Francis to develop a synodal way of discerning Catholic Church teaching on so-called controversial issues, including sexual morality and life issues, has proposed what it calls a “new paradigm” that is heavy on situational ethics but minimizes moral absolutes and established Church teaching.
The group, which is one of 10 study groups the Pope created in February to provide “in-depth analysis” of “matters of great relevance” that had emerged during the Synod on Synodality’s 2023 session, presented its findings to the synod assembly on Oct. 2, the first day of its 2024 session. A text of the presentation was shared with the press.
The group spoke of 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. The group presented these sources as places where the Holy Spirit speaks in a way that can override and apparently 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 “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.’”
“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 group’s status report said before the Synod on Synodality assembly yesterday. “The criteria of discernment arise from listening to the [living] self-gift of Revelation in Jesus in the today of the Spirit.”
In a potential contrast to the group’s report, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the fundamental “modes of transmission” of Christ’s revelation are Scripture and Tradition and that the authoritative interpretation of these sources ”has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone.” Christian revelation also includes absolute and universally applicable moral precepts, which do not appear subject to change based off subjective experience or widespread consultation.The study group intends to offer “concrete guidelines for discernment” based on its new paradigm to two sets of issues: global peace and stewardship; and “the meaning of sexuality, marriage, the generation of children, and the promotion and care of life.”
Like the other nine synod study groups established by Pope Francis, the group focused on discernment of controversial issues has a mandate that extends until June 2025, well beyond the Oct. 27, 2024, conclusion of the Synod on Synodality. It is unclear what status the study group’s eventual report will have.
At a press conference on Oct. 3, special secretary of the synod Jesuit Father Giacomo Costa said that others would be able to submit proposals to be considered by the study groups and that the study groups should not be thought of as “enclosed.” The secretariat general of the Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Mario Grech, will be responsible for ensuring that the study groups proceed in “the synodal method,” organizers said.
“I invite you not to think that these groups are separated from the life of the Church, but they are true labs of synodal life,” said Father Costa. “Workshops, really.”
According to the text of the study group’s presentation, the group emphasized the need to develop an anthropology and “cultural-historical ethics” that are harmonious with the “kerygma and its essential implications” and also with “the new that is revealed in reality.”
The group linked discernment of these “emerging states” to the Synod on Synodality’s discussion of involving non-bishops in the Church’s decision-making processes.
At the same time, the study group’s proposed paradigm repeatedly diminished the relevance of established Church pronouncements, underscoring the need to move beyond “proclaiming and applying abstract doctrinal principles” so as 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,” the text of the group’s report said.
At various points, the group’s presentation characterizes moral truth as subservient to, rather than an integral part of, human salvation. The implication is that teaching on a moral matter should change if it is experienced as a barrier to someone’s membership in the Church.
The presentation text makes no mention of the relevance of moral absolutes in the discernment of ethical, doctrinal and pastoral issues. In the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), St. John Paul II taught that, contrary to moral relativism, absolute moral truths exist, are rooted in human nature and therefore universally applicable, and are accessible to human reason.
Previously, observers of the Synod on Synodality have expressed concerns that its theological underpinning are overly reliant on the thought of Father Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a controversial Jesuit theologian who downplayed the ability of doctrinal formulations to reliably refer to supernatural realities and emphasized God’s ongoing revelation through the personal experience of believers.
The study group’s members include Father Maurizio Chiodi, a moral theologian who has been criticized in recent years for defying established Church teaching and denying moral absolutes.
Father Chiodi has argued that contraception use in marriage could be morally permissible in some circumstances and said in 2017 that homosexual relationships “under certain conditions” could be “the most fruitful way” for those with same-sex attraction “to enjoy good relations.”
The Italian priest, who is both a professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, was recently made a consultor for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) by Pope Francis.
Jesuit Father Carlo Casalone, a moral theologian at the Gregorian University who is also a Francis appointee to the Pontifical Academy for Life, is also a member of the study group. He caused controversy in 2022 by supporting legislation to legalize assisted suicide in Italy.
The group’s other members 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, a professor of dogmatic theology at Sophia University in Loppiano, Italy, and the secretary-general of the International Theological Commission; Sister of St. Andrew Josée Nagalula of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a professor dogmatic theology at the Catholic University of the Congo in Kinshasa and a member of the ITC; and Stella Morra of Italy, a fundamental theologian at the Gregorian and consultor to the DDF.
As a scriptural model of “the paradigm shift being propagated by the synodal process,” the group selected 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 “the prohibition to hindering God’s universal salvific will with anything that no longer has any efficacious meaning.”
The group acknowledged potential difficulties in applying its framework, including “the scarcity of — and unfamiliarity with — necessary vocabulary and concepts” and “implicit paradigmatic resistances,” but nonetheless expressed confidence that it could develop its proposed paradigm more fully.
We are “called to a complete and challenging conversion; a conversion that takes concrete shape in the way we present and translate the truth of the Gospel,” the group said in its presentation, “as manifested and practiced in the agape of God in Christ.”
