Six years in gestation, John Paul’s long-promised and much-revised encyclical paints a Cassandra-like picture of a church racked by conflict over sexual morality. “Numerous doubts and objections,” he writes, threaten the unity of Catholic morality and have produced a “genuine crisis” in the church. It is “no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent,” the pope warns, “but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine.”
The spirit of the age -moral relativism-is not part of the pope’s message. He reminds Catholics that their faith in Christ also requires living like Christ. Although each Catholic must follow his own free conscience, John Paul argues, “conscience is not infallible.” Citing the words of Jesus -“You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32) the pope insists that “human freedom and God’s law are not in opposition.” Everyone, including Christians, therefore, is obliged to discover what is true in questions of right and wrong. Sincerity or the feeling of “being at peace with oneself,” he writes, is no justification for making immoral choices. Reiterating the church’s traditional natural-law theory, the pope insists that reason can arrive at ;,objective" moral truth, and that this truth is the reflection of God’s law “written on the human heart.”
The core of “Veritatis Splendor” is an extended criticism of various approaches to moral problems that the pope labels as incompatible with church teaching. Essentially his objection is that they violate natural law, which holds that some acts are objectively evil regardless of one’s intentions. This is precisely the argument Paul VI used in condemning contraception. But moral theologians who think contraception is not always immoral find the pope’s reasoning specious-and his intentions suspect. “I know of no Catholic theologians-and I know them all-who believe there is no such thing as intrinsically evil acts,” says Jesuit moralist Richard McCormick of the University of Notre Dame. “What the pope is saying is that any moral analysis which ends up justifying a contraceptive is going to be wrong, period.”
No pope ever has the last word. But there are many conservatives in the church for whom the hard line taken in “Veritatis Splendor” is as good as it gets. Undoubtedly they will pressure bishops to rid Catholic universities of dissenters, thereby provoking painful tests of academic integrity. Just as certain, the pope’s opponents will take their case to the public–further justifying the pope’s sense of the church as a disorderly house. Which is why, it is widely rumored in Rome, the pope is preparing a second, more pointed encyclical on sexual morality. That could indeed produce a crisis of conscience in the church.
