Rome’s Mario Cuomo Is Gone

The Vatican announced May 19 that Baldassare Cardinal Reina would become the grand chancellor of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences. He succeeds Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the Pope Francis sycophant who presided over the demolition of the original John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and the cashiering of many senior faculty. Francis’s apparent goal was to align the institute’s work with his larger deconstruction of theology into “pastoral theology,” more preoccupied with “accompanying” the twists of the Zeitgeist than with clear theoretical foundations, rooted in unchanging human nature, to guide people’s moral choices.  

Paglia replaced many of the original faculty with people far more willing to waffle on sexual ethics and, in the name of “pluralism” and “dialogue,” often hosted thinkers whose stated commitments in practice rejected the Catholic vision of marriage and family life. Such feints were ostensibly in the name of promoting “dialogue” and “research,” although there was no dearth of secular institutions where such work could occur, in contrast to the institute being among the few worldwide bodies committed to the Catholic vision of the person, marriage, and family life St. John Paul II so eloquently defended.

Where I came to be at loggerheads with Paglia was in spring 2023. Italy was debating physician-assisted suicide, which was legalized in 2019 with strict limits. Paglia delivered and subsequently published a speech in which he dodged and weaved, without clearly voicing an ecclesiastical non possumus to death-by-doctor.

In the worst of ecclesial submission to the dictatorship of relativism, Paglia was out of the gate with the nostrum that the “Church does not have a package of ready-made truths, as if it were a dispenser of pills of truth.” Instead, he proposed a “relationship of mutual learning” between “believers and non-believers.”  

Paglia’s views were curious for a Catholic prelate, even more so for the leader of a papal pro-life institute. The Church does have some “ready-made” moral principles that apply always and everywhere. Like “it is morally wrong directly to take an innocent life.” Like “suicide is immoral.” These are not speculative theses about which the Church needs to “learn” more. They were once upon a time not even disputed by civil society. To have even suggested something like that fifteen years ago in the Church would have led to losing one’s position, with a penance of studying Remedial Moral Theology 101.  

Though the Church is clear about its position on the inviolability of directly taking innocent human life, the archbishop still left a loophole, channeling his inner Mario Cuomo to separate the moral and political orders. Cuomo, most notably in a 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame, argued he could personally oppose abortion on moral grounds without imposing that belief legislatively in a pluralistic society.  

There are all sorts of reasons why secularism is ascendant in western European societies, including Italy. But it is also clear that the socio-cultural forces of Italy’s Catholic culture are comparatively stronger than those in, say, France or Britain, in opposing a secularized culture of death. Paglia, however, was already waving his white flag, erecting the intellectual framework that knocked the floor out of pro-life politicians in the U.S. Democratic party.  

At the end of his speech, Paglia opined that the 2019 Italian Constitutional Court ruling on assisted suicide articulated the criteria by which the most achievable “common good” could be pursued in a society where assisted suicide is legal. No doubt if pressed, Paglia would interpret the Court’s criteria—using language such as “irreversible pathology,” “intolerable physical or psychological suffering,” and “fully capable informed decision[s]”—in the narrowest and most restrictive terms possible. But Paglia is not so intellectually blighted as not to know such restrictive terminology, when it comes to euthanasia, is always window dressing that sooner rather than later is read so widely as to admit a Mack Truck. One can, therefore, legitimately ask whether such “common good” arguments are not merely preemptive surrender covered by an ecclesiastical fig leaf (not unlike the loin cloth covering Paglia’s likeness in the Last Judgment mural he commissioned for his cathedral).

Paglia performed a similar song-and-dance routine when it came to not challenging the legal status of abortion in Italy. He and his defenders quickly invoked John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae to argue a Catholic could vote for the most restrictive abortion law “possible,” even if it was broadly permissive of many abortions, especially early in pregnancy. But he ignored the fact that (a) such determinations are not the exclusive province of politicians; (b) the assessments of “what is possible” are dynamic, not static or one-time; and (c) the constant return to the issue—even sometimes including strategically chosen defeats—serves to challenge the coalescence of a pro-death political settlement. I would expect a Catholic politician looking for excuses to placate a pro-abortion constituency to leave out those considerations. I would expect a Catholic prelate charged with making the case for life to include them. Vincenzo Paglia should not be Mario Cuomo.

When pressed, the Vatican circled wagons as it often did with Pope Francis’s equivocations: It was a “miscommunication,” he was not “understood,” he didn’t “mean” X, and so forth. In that sense, Paglia was the perfect Bergoglian to deconstruct clear and traditional Catholic bioethics, to “make a mess” of received moral teaching. One hopes that Pope Leo—a son of Augustine, for whom “peace is the tranquility of order”—recognizes in the fight for a culture of life the defining sign of our times.