The Synodal Stage Is Set
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
While the Culture of Death raged, Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI defended Humanae Vitae’s magisterial teaching throughout their pontificates. In fact, bishops gathered at the Synod on the Family in 2015, while acknowledging “the growth of a contraceptive mentality and abortion” (n. 7), wrote that Pope Paul’s encyclical, “ought to be taken up anew so as to awaken in people an openness to life” (n. 63).
But two years later, when Pope Francis took over the Pontifical Academy for Life, he opened a door to dissent that has pretended to speak with the Vatican’s “voice of authority” ever since.
And that dissent is getting louder.
Pope John Paul II had founded the Academy in 1994 “to study and to defend the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium,” but the Academy took a sharp left turn in 2017 after Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, a newly appointed member of the Academy, claimed that Humanae Vitae is optional.
By 2022, the spirit of “dialogue” had led to a bold, undisguised challenge to Church teaching from the Academy:
“Be careful,” it warned on Twitter. “What is dissent today, can change. It is not relativism; it is the dynamics of the understanding of phenomena and science: The Sun does not rotate around the Earth. Otherwise, there would be no progress and everything would stand still.”
Rather than condemning this pompous nonsense, Pope Francis allowed dissent to flourish at the Academy.
In fact, last month His Holiness responded to widespread criticism of the Academy’s heterodoxy by appointing Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández as the prefect for the Dicastery for Defense of the Faith.
Yes, that’s the same office that held by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger when he steadfastly defended Humanae Vitae against the attacks by the German Bishops’ Conference.
Archbishop Fernandez has a different path in mind for the dicastery. In fact, he advocates a wholesale review of the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, and objects outright to the prohibition of artificial contraception within marriage.
Fernandez will receive the red hat from Pope Francis next month. That means that Cardinal Fernandez will be the Vatican’s premier authority on Catholic moral teaching when the Synod is in session next year.
That meeting will confront a massive list of action items.
Fr. Gerald Murray, a moral theologian in the Archdiocese of New York, has studied the “working documents” submitted by various regional hierarchies, and found them wanting.
The topics suggested for discussion, he writes, include war, climate change, “an economic system that produces exploitation, inequality, and a throwaway culture,” cultural colonialism, religious persecution, “aggressive secularization,” sexual abuse and “the abuse of power, conscience, and money.”
Where are the questions addressing the moral collapse of Western society, the disintegration of the family, the hijacking of “marriage,” aggressive government population control programs, and the challenge to religious freedom?
There are none.
So, when the Synod fathers meet, they will be working with a blank slate when it comes to sexual morality, contraception, marriage, and more.
Efforts to fill in those blanks with dissent are already underway.
“We need to meet people where they are,” population controllers insist, and “98 percent of Catholics have used some form of birth control in their lives,” a dissident Catholic site says.
“Contraceptives are the greatest lifesaving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created,” says Catholic Melinda Gates, who finances population control efforts worldwide (Ms. Gates was received by Pope Francis in a private audience four years ago).
Most Western prelates have neglected Humanae Vitae since 1968. While they haven’t actively criticized its teaching, they’ve stuck it in the bottom drawer.
When the Synod meets next year, the teaching of Humanae Vitae undoubtedly be put on the table — not to preserve it, but to attack it.
Will our shepherds come to its defense when it does?
