LETTERS FROM THE SYNOD – 2024: #11

As Synod-2024 limps toward the finish line, with everyone experiencing Synod Exhaustion Syndrome—the exceptions being the indefatigable activists who came here to transform this month into the “Vatican III” of progressive Catholicism’s dreams, and their media allies—conversations are turning to the questions that surfaced during the Synod’s discussions: questions whose resolution in the next years and decades will shape the Catholicism of the twenty-first century, especially among the struggling local churches of the West, some of which are on life-support.

Synod-2024 has made at least one thing abundantly clear: Africa has set its course into the future, guided by dynamic orthodoxy and committed to the New Evangelization in full; its bishops have defended that course this month with intelligence, vigor, and courage. But what about the Catholicism of the “Old World” and its formerly colonial outposts in North America and Oceania? What about Latin America, which seems to have forgotten the Aparecida Document and its robust call to the New Evangelization? Judging by what their representatives have said at Synod-2024, Peru, Brazil, and other local churches between the Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego are reverting to the incoherence that marked the decade following CELAM’s 1968 Medellin Conference, which marked the heyday of the various theologies of liberation. And then there is the vastness of Asia and Oceania, where some local churches seem to be advancing with confidence, guided by the teaching of Vatican II as authoritatively interpreted by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, while others are marching backward to the 1970s in the name of a “progress” that seems ephemeral when measured by indices of Catholic practice.

This has been, in many respects, a Synod dominated by the concerns found primarily in the West, which has meant that moribund or dying local churches have been setting the agenda of discussion. Nonetheless, globalization means that the cultural and theological drivers behind those Western agendas will inevitably touch the local churches in the rest of the world. So the two issues explored here are of global significance, even as those issues express themselves in different keys throughout the world Church. XR II

Professor Rex’s Signs of the Times: A Missed Opportunity for the Synod

by George Weigel

Richard Rex is Professor of Reformation history in the faculty of Divinity and Polkinghorne Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies at Cambridge University’s Queens’ College. In a brilliant review article published in 2018, Prof. Rex argued that Catholicism today is in the throes of the third great crisis of its bimillennial history. Had Richard Rex given the opening address to the Synods of 2023 and 2024—had his analysis of the signs of these times as laid out in that article framed the Instrumentum Laboris for each Synod—the past two Synods might have been spent in serious conversation about the twenty-first-century cultural environment and its implications for the Church’s contemporary mission, rather than in the quicksand pits of ecclesiastical self-referentiality.

So what did the Synod miss by missing Prof. Rex? What were those first two great crises—and what is the third, through which we are living?  

Three Crises

The first crisis was the lengthy, often fierce, Church-dividing debate over “What is God?” 

It was triggered in the early fourth century by the Alexandrian theologian Arius, who taught that what Christianity knew as the “Son” was a sort of demiurge, through whom the world was created but who was not co-eternal with the Father; in Arius’s formulation, there was a time when “the Son was not.” The debate over “What is God?” was then extended and amplified and by the heresy of Monophysitism, according to which Jesus’s humanity was not-quite-real, but rather a kind of Superman costume masking his divinity.  The question “What is God?” was definitively answered by the First Council of Nicaea I (A.D. 325), which condemned Arius and gave us the Creed we recite today, and the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), which, influenced by Pope Leo the Great and his famous “Tome,” took the hammer to Monophysitism. Nicaea I affirmed that Jesus is truly God, the second person of the eternal Trinity; Chalcedon affirmed that, through the Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, divinity and humanity are united in the one person of Jesus Christ. Nicaea I and Chalcedon thus secured the trinitarian and incarnational foundations of Christian orthodoxy for all time.

The second crisis, which led to the fracture of Western Christendom in the various sixteenth-century Protestant Reformations, revolved around the question, “What is the Church?” Did the Church have a definitive form or constitution given it by Christ, a form that included the seven-part sacramental system? Over the three periods of its work (1545–47, 1551–52, and 1562–63), the Council of Trent gave the orthodox response to that question: Yes. Trent’s ecclesiology was then refined over the succeeding centuries by Pope Pius XII’s renewal of the Church’s self-understanding in the 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ); by the Christocentricity of Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations), the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church; by the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, which synthesized Vatican II’s teaching by describing the Church as a communion of disciples in mission; and by John Paul II in the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), which vigorously defended the permanence of the Church’s missionary mandate in every time and place, while calling every Catholic to live out the meaning of baptism in a life of missionary discipleship. 

And the third crisis, through which we’re living? That, Prof. Rex argued, involves “a question that would once have been expressed as ‘What is man?’ The fact that this wording is now itself seen as problematic is a symptom of the very condition it seeks to diagnose. What is it, in other words, to be human?” That, Rex rightly contends, is what’s at issue in “an entire alphabet of beliefs and practices: abortion, bisexuality, contraception, divorce, euthanasia, family, gender, homosexuality, infertility treatment,” and so forth and so on, across the cratered, Verdun-like landscape of a culture war that, beginning outside the Church, is now being fought within the household of faith. And the stakes could not be higher. For as Rex wrote six years ago, “If Catholicism were to reconcile itself to the new moral order of Western society, then it would be abandoning its past, its tradition, and thus its identity. It would give up its claim to truth and, therefore, its claim upon our faith.” 

So, first, a “theological” crisis, in the literal meaning of theology: “speaking about God.” Then an ecclesiological crisis. And now an anthropological crisis. The previous two crises were Church-dividing. The third could well be, as the divisions displayed at the Synods of 2023 and 2024 (and in fact in the Synods of 2014, 2015, 2018, and the 2019 Amazonian Synod) ought to have demonstrated, given the abandonment of Catholicism’s biblically-grounded understanding of the human person by prominent bishops, theologians, and activists on those occasions.

The Third Crisis Illustrated

The question “Who are we as human beings?” is most sharply posed by the evolution of the LGBTQ+ agenda to include the transgender insurgency. This plague, a farrago of bad science married to barmy ideology, has now infected education throughout the Western world. A particularly striking example of it was reported by Mary Wakefield in the London-based Spectator last year: “a drag queen on the Isle of Man had informed Year 7 pupils that there are exactly 73 genders. When one brave child insisted that there were only two, the drag queen allegedly responded ‘You’ve upset me’ and sent the child out.” 

There is something even worse than this abandonment of any pretense to educational seriousness, however, and that is the abandonment of any pretense to medical professionalism and medical ethics by American doctors who, influenced more by gender ideology than by “the science,” and affirmed in their irresponsibility by the American Academy of Pediatrics, prescribe puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones to children suffering from the serious mental health problem of gender dysphoria. This therapeutic cave-in to wokery in the U.S. was challenged in 2023 by the editors of the venerable British newsmagazine the Economist (firmly center-left in its politics), whose editors noted that “the medical systems of Britain, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden” have “all . . . raised the alarm, describing [these] treatments as ‘experimental’ and urging doctors to proceed with ‘great medical caution.’” That alarm bell was rung even more loudly this year by the Cass Report commissioned by England’s National Health Service, in which the former president of the Royal Society of Pediatrics and Child Health urged “extreme caution” in the use of hormone therapies for youth and young adults. 

Physicians who follow the science and not the ideology are not the only ones sounding the alarm over the harm being done by this latest perverse twist of the sexual revolution. Thus Cole Aronson, an Orthodox Jew and keen student of philosophy, published a devastating ethical critique of “sex-reassignment” surgeries on the website Public Discourse last year. Aronson concluded by observing that it’s not only those on the political left who must reconsider gender ideology and transgenderism: “Conservatives need to choose between their impulse to let people live as they damn well please and their opposition to the grisly stuff being done by scientists and surgeons.”

Why is the Church’s voice often muted, or confusing, in this contest for the human future? I suggest that it’s because Prof. Rex is right and that the Church, primarily but not exclusively in the Western world, is ensnared in a crisis over “us”: a crisis over the nature and destiny of the human. The gospel demands pastoral charity toward those suffering from gender dysphoria and experiencing same-sex attraction. That charity, however, must include truth-telling about who we are, which we learn from divine revelation and human reason. And what we learn from those sources is that gender ideology and the transgenderism for which it advocates is as false a god, and as destructive of body and soul, as Baal and Moloch. 

But was this said at Synod-2023 or Synod-2024? No. Rather, in the off-Broadway part of the “synodal process,” Pope Francis spent over an hour with a delegation of LGBTQ+ activists, including transgender people and a surgeon who performs “sex-reassignment” procedures. One of those present later alleged to the press that the pope had indicated that sensitivity toward transgender people would be among his criteria for choosing bishops. Whether Pope Francis said that or not, this unprecedented meeting hardly advanced the Catholic conversation about the third great crisis in the Church’s history. 

Bubbles and Missed Opportunities

As noted before in these LETTERS, the debates of this past month have often seemed to be taking place inside a vast ecclesiastical bubble. That palpable sense of detachment from the many grave problems of the contemporary world, and especially from what could be termed the “human nature crisis,” might have been obviated, or at least mitigated, if the Synod managers had thought to invite Prof. Rex and others with a keen insight into the cultural and ecclesiastical signs of the times to help frame the Synod’s work. Wouldn’t a triennial “synodal process” built around Richard Rex’s argument that we are living through the third great crisis in the bimillennial history of the Church have been more fruitful—more “relevant,” to use that favorite progressive Catholic term—than the circularity and self-referentiality of a “Synod on Synodality”? Might such an exercise in reading the signs of the times in light of the gospel have gotten the world’s attention (and the Church’s) in a way that this process manifestly has not?

It was not to be, however. That was a great lost opportunity. It was a lost opportunity to strengthen Catholicism amidst the third great crisis of its history. But it was worse than that. Because the Church’s lost opportunity was also a lost opportunity for a world that badly needs to hear a gospel-informed, compassionate word of sanity in response to the question, “Who are we?”

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.  

Lax Legalism

by Stephen White

Several of the problems inherent in a proportionalist approach to moral theology have been previously discussed in these LETTERS. Not the least of these problems is that proportionalism denies that any acts violate the moral order by their very nature. This objection—and the fact that proportionalism flatly contradicts Veritatis Splendor—ought to be sufficient reason to avoid proportionalism.

The problems with proportionalism go beyond its refusal to recognize the category of intrinsically evil acts, however. By severing moral action from the objective character of concrete moral acts, we are left with a theory of moral action that is not only incapable of identifying things we must never do, but that reduces the moral life from a God-given path to true freedom to a means for assessing, assigning, and, when possible, mitigating guilt. 

To understand what is meant by this, consider the questions Pope John Paul II poses at the outset of Veritatis Splendor: “[D]o the commandments of God, which are written on the human heart and are part of the Covenant, really have the capacity to clarify the daily decisions of individuals and entire societies? Is it possible to obey God and thus love God and neighbor, without respecting these commandments in all circumstances?”

Obedience to the divine moral law is not, in the first instance, a matter of avoiding guilt. The moral law is given to us as a path by which to grow closer to God, indeed, to grow more like God. This connection between moral choice and our own being and becoming is not merely a subjective or psychological connection, still less a means for determining our own guilt or innocence.

Some actions can be bad or evil without imputing guilt to the one who commits the act, such as in the case of invincible ignorance. But such actions, even when guiltless, still have other consequences. For one, our actions habituate us. Good moral habits (virtues) make us more free: that is, more readily able to choose the good. Bad moral habits (vices) make that more difficult, chaining us to sin, clouding our conscience, and making it more difficult for us to love God and neighbor as we ought.

A vicious man might be so wedded to his sin that his culpability for that sin is close to nil. But would anyone seriously argue that his comparative lack of culpability is a good thing? Is he better for this? Is anyone else better for this?

Let’s go back to those questions posed by John Paul II. Is the moral law given to us to help us become more like what we were made to be (to grow in perfection, as we used to say), or was it given to us as a subjective measure of our guilt or innocence? 

Proportionalism strains this connection between the order of creation and the moral order—between what we are and what we are meant to be—to the breaking point. In so doing, it weakens the connection between moral reasoning and, as John Paul II put it, “the conditions for the moral growth of man, who has been called to perfection.” This growth begins with obedience to the moral law—written in the hearts of men, codified in the Decalogue, and fulfilled in the person of Christ—and finds its fullest expression in the perfections of the Beatitudes.

Proportionalism promised a humane alternative to the legalistic moral theology of the manualists, which (fairly or not) earned the reputation for reducing moral reason to mere rule-following, minimizing the proper role of conscience through a sort of Pharisaical algorithm with defined outputs for every conceivable input. 

But by untethering the conscience from the objective character of moral acts, proportionalism fails to free the conscience so that it might choose the good. Instead, it “frees” the conscience from the “burden” of law, which is to say from the “burden” of having to conform moral action according to objective reality.

In doing so, proportionalism leads the conscience to a position in which the moral law is either rejected outright (a jarringly unappealing option for most), or in which the work of conscience is to be constantly searching for workarounds and exceptions to the “constraints” of the moral law. Rather than embracing the moral law as a gift, meant for our own growth and holiness and as an aid on our path to salvation, proportionalism supplants this positive aim of moral action with a fundamentally negative aim: It becomes a way to avoid the imputation of guilt through discovering an ever-expanding matrix of mitigating subjective circumstances.

In this way, proportionalism would replace the strict legalism of the manualists with a lax legalism of its own.

Rather than seeking human freedom in conformity to God’s own ordering of reality, many Catholics behave as though freedom exists in the “spaces between” the moral teachings of the Church. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is a childish, legalistic view of morality which asks, “What’s the most I can get away with?” For this sort of lax legalism, “mercy” means little more than lowering the threshold by which the minimum requirements of the law might be satisfied.

This also explains the tendency among some Catholics—perhaps including some among the Synod participants—to treat discernment as a sort of dialectic. Listening to the Holy Spirit begins with a presumption of change; Church teachings are submitted to a pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and the desired result is a progressive expansion of justifiable moral outcomes. Discernment can lead to gradual changes, or it can lead to rapid changes, but the one thing discernment must never do is allow the Church to remain what she has always been. For Catholics who see discernment (synodal or otherwise) in this instrumentalized way, the Holy Spirit is never supposed to say, “No.”

Meanwhile, St. Paul’s exhortation remains: “Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught” (2 Thess. 2:15). 

Stephen White is a Fellow in Catholic Studies at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Those coping at the grassroots level with the two issues addressed in this LETTER may wish to consult an important new book, Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders (En Route Books and Media). XR II

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by Vyacheslav Argenberg, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.