Several topics will be discussed at the consistory of cardinals called by Pope Leo XIV for June 26-29: the international situation and its effects on local Churches; key themes in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas; the next steps in the Synod on Synodality.
At first blush, these three agenda items may seem a bit disconnected. In fact, they are closely linked by what the Pope rightly identified in his encyclical as the civilizational crisis of the moment: the deep confusions over the very nature and destiny of the human person.
Despite its now being pigeon-holed as “the AI encyclical,” Magnifica Humanitas pointedly asks us to reflect deeply on the question posed in the Bronze Age by Psalm 8: “What is man…?” (Ps 8:4). For that is the ultimate question posed by the development of artificial intelligence: Who are we? Are we simply walking algorithms, about to be outdone in computional, then cognitive, then decision-making capacity by other algorithms? Are our capacities for love, regret, shame, altruism, wickedness, compassion, speculative thought, and learning from our mistakes merely a function of neural connections in our brains that for millennia we mistakenly thought of as “consciousness”–connections that can be replicated, even improved upon, by the development of what is known as General Artificial Intelligence?
The answer biblical religion gives to that question is the answer implied by the key paragraph, #99, in Magnifica Humanitas: algorithms, no matter how refined, do not and cannot have souls, and the immortal soul, created by God, is what differentiates the human person from everything else in creation. It is that “ensouledness” that is the ultimate reason why we can discern right from wrong, distinguish the noble from the base, feel shame when we choose what degrades others and ourselves, repent, and rise from the dust to try to do better in the future with the help of grace.
The defense and promotion of that biblical idea of Who We Are is thus the connection between the three consistorial topics.
The connection is most obvious in the international situation, for the major aggressors in today’s conflicts all wreak havoc because of distorted conceptions of the human person. To jihadist murderers and kidnappers, the Christians they persecute have no claim to human dignity because they decline to chant “Allahu Akbar!” To Vladimir Putin, Russian soldiers are meat to be fed into a meat grinder in the cause of the new Russian imperialism. To Iran and its Hezbollah and Hamas clients, Jews are subhumans to be exterminated (in the case of Hamas, after they have been raped and tortured while iPhone cameras record their brutalization). To Xi Jinping, the people of China (and, in the future, the people of Taiwan) are mere clay to be formed into the desired communist mold by omnipresent surveillance systems that determine who is worthy of education and prosperity.
There is also a strong connection between the defense of the dignity of human personhood taught by Magnifica Humanitas and the future of the Synod on Synodality.
Recently, an international controversy broke out over the report of Synod Study Group #9, which committed an act of calumny against Courage International, the American-founded ministry to those with same-sex attraction who wish to live chastely as the Catholic Church understands chastity. That breach of ecclesial solidarity was made possible in part by what the Synod General Secretary has described as the Study Group’s “valuable work”–a characterization of the report’s theology that deserves serious scrutiny, leading to serious challenge, even repudiation, at the upcoming consistory.
Shortly after the report of Synod Study Group #9 was released, a knowledgeable friend, fully aware of some of the good things that happened at the Synods of 2023 and 2024, nonetheless wrote me that the biblical text that kept coming back to me as he read Study Group #9’s report was, “The sheep will not follow a stranger; they will run away from him because they do not recognize the voice of strangers” (John 10.5). The voice in that report, he continued, “is simply not recognizably Christian. The content is bad, to be sure, but even prior to that, there is something alien about the way [the report] speak[s] of the faith.”
And the reason for that, I suggest, is that Synod Study Group #9’s report is a continuation of the war against Pope St. John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor. That war has been waged by aggressive parties within the Catholic theologians’ guild and certain bishops’ conferences (notably Germany and Belgium) since the encyclical was issued. The war intensified during the previous pontificate, and the assault on Veritatis Splendor has now been given what some will take as quasi-official sanction, given that Study Group #9’s report was issued by the General Secretariat of the Synod (the official stationery of which does not, it might be noted, refer to a Synod of Bishops.)
Veritatis Splendor was a robust defense of the classic Catholic understanding that some acts are intrinsically evil and can never be justified morally by any calculus of intentions and consequences. That defense was set within the broader context of John Paul II’s call for a renewal of Catholic moral theology centered on the Beatitudes and the virtues, a summons reflecting the influence of Father Servais Pinckaers, OP, and his masterwork, The Sources of Christian Ethics, on the development of Veritatis Splendor.
To the immediate point, however, Veritatis Splendor was a defense of the dignity of the human person, a dignity embodied in our ability to distinguish between good and evil and our capacity under grace to choose the good. In the perspective of John Paul II’s Christian personalism, to deny that there are intrinsically evil acts–acts including rape and torture that in and of themselves degrade and debase the humanity of both perpetrator and victim–is to empty the moral life of its inherent drama, indeed its inherent humanness.
Why would the members of the theologians’ guild and even bishops deny what any person of normal moral sensibilities instinctively understands: that rape and torture are always wrong? One can burrow into the weeds of post-Kantian epistemology to find what are sometimes said to be the reasons for re-thinking the concept of intrinsically evil acts. But such philosophical gamesmanship is more an excuse than a cause: an excuse that seeks to give cover to the determination to declare the Catholic ethic of human love, and particularly its understanding of contraception and same-sex acts, untenable today.
Synod Study Group report #9 is thus in an unresolvable tension with the teaching on human dignity of Magnifica Humanitas. And that raises the most serious questions about the future of the synodal process that began in 2021, five years and tens of millions of dollars ago.
That process has produced some good results–such as an awareness in the most clericalized parts of the Church that all the baptized have been given the Great Commission of Matthew 28.19 and are therefore called into evangelical mission–and those results should by all means be applauded and implemented.
But if, as Synod Study Group #9’s report makes unmistakably clear, the synodal process has also been the occasion for settled matters of Catholic faith and pastoral practice to be unnecessarily called into question, creating the kind of ambiguity that makes evangelization difficult if not impossible, then a hard question should be raised in the June consistory: Why is this vastly expensive and time-consuming synodal process to be continued?
And if the answer to that question is that it is necessary to give unheard voices a hearing, the answer to that, frankly, is “Bosh.”
It is not that the voices that seem to have largely shaped the content of Synod Study Group report #9 were previously unheard. Those voices had been heard for decades. But when the teaching authority of the Church did not agree with those voices, aggressive theologians and some local Churches refused to accept the correction and the call to authentic theological and pastoral renewal given in Veritatis Splendor: in part, because they insisted that the Church’s ethic of human love is an impediment to evangelization, which it manifestly is not in the living parts of the world Church, and in part because of a supine surrender to the cultural Zeitgeist of the West.
I hope that some brave members of the College of Cardinals raise these points of connection among the consistory’s agenda items in their conversations later this month. Doing so might enliven what are too often rather dull exchanges, while drawing attention to the urgent message of Magnifica Humanitas, which is the defense of human dignity.
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‘In defense of the soul’* it is essential to see the soul as both a spiritual and an embodied reality.
*p18, Keith Ward. 1992,1998.
Before der Synodal Weg was ever imported as a template for equally amnesiac “synodality” in Rome, yours truly already noted the disconnect from “Veritatis Splendor,” in a 2018 CWR article, and ended with this:
“What would be the future for such a surely hypothetical, secular/Fabian strand of ‘gradualism’ once we no longer do or clearly remember what we believe but believe only what we do? Is the Eucharistic Church to remain a hierarchical communion (Lumen Gentium, Ch. 3, Prefatory Note), or more of a Roman-style pantheon of national conferences of bishops, or maybe only a schismatic and flat ‘congregational theocracy’ more like Islam? The ‘smell of the sheep’ is one thing; the smell of wolves in sheep’s clothing would be another.” https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/05/17/lay-evangelization-and-the-smell-of-the-sheep
From the back bleachers, just another “unheard voice”! Is synodality nothing more than a booster rocket to get the thinking (?) of Study Grope #9 (“experience” replacing “abstract” principles) into orbit?
Viva Veritas Splendor!
I taught at an independent school for over 20 years. During my time there, a particular headmaster instituted a certain program that involved both students and teachers and that the headmaster was sure the school needed. (It didn’t.) The program staggered along for the rest of his tenure. After he left and a new administration was in place, I was talking to the school secretary and mentioned the program; she smiled slyly and said, “We’re just going to let that die a quiet death.” The program was simply never mentioned again, and neither students nor faculty seemed to notice. How I’d hoped a similar fate awaited “Synodality”!
“Why is this vastly expensive and time-consuming synodal process to be continued?”
There can only be one reason, so that those who insist on allowing this heretical questioning of The Word Of God to continue can create a god in their own image who ipso facto would be anti Christ.
The question is on whose authority has this heresy, which denies The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Infinite Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son Jesus The Christ, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ?
Certainly not Jesus The Christ.
For we can know through both Faith and reason rightly ordered to our Catholic Faith, that Perfect Divine Eternal Infinite Love does not divide, it multiplies, as in The Miracle Of The Loaves And Fishes.
Division is not of The Holy Ghost; division comes from those who deny The Unity Of The Holy Ghost.
“Tens of millions of dollars ago”?
So much for the poor.
I have more faith in Elon Musk’s ability to get us to Mars (though not likely within our lifetime) than I have in the Hierarchy’s ability to get anything right at this point.
.
They can’t even get such straightforward a thing as intimate relations right–most likely because their own are highly suspect. And to be sure Musk’s personal life is rather at variance with Church teaching, but he isn’t even Catholic, much less speaking for The Church, or claiming to.
.
So, yeah, the voice of strangers.
An acquaintance was telling me about an older lady she knew who was receiving romantic messages & photos from Elon Musk. Elon said he was in love with her but he’d run into a little financial trouble & needed $15,000.
She agreed to that & next thing she knew a man was knocking at her door. He explained that Elon wasn’t feeling well that day so he sent him over to pick up the money instead. Of course he was never seen again.Nor the 15k.
I’m pretty sure however at variance Elon Musk’s personal life may be from Church teaching he doesn’t propose to old ladies & take their cash.
🙂
Tell me that’s an AI story?
,
Wow. That poor woman. And she fell for it? That hurts.
.
Ol’ Elon’s done a few things, but no, that probably isn’t one of them.
No, unfortunately it’s real story.
I knew a well educated lady who fell for something not so obviously ridiculous but similar after her husband was put into a dementia care home. She made the mistake of sharing that info with someone she was playing an online Scrabble type game with & one thing led to another.
It cost her $124,000.
Study Group 9 as Weigel suggests has replaced settled doctrine with lived experience. Since as our previous pontiff mused, time is greater than historical space. Morality reduced to what everyone is doing at a given time.
There’s a catch in this thinking, that the word morals stems from social mores. The habits and practices of cultures. That the former, given time disqualifies the permanence of commonly revealed truth such as binary relations.
It’s simply a return to Paganism. The grand issue, sexual behavior and the transmission of life is determined by variable personal pleasures rather than the gift of life and lives other than our own.
In addition to the fallacy of replacing “settled doctrine with lived experience,” you have also offered the more precise insight that friends of the homosexual lifestyle are attempting to more subtly install a “categorical” exemption from the moral law.
Why this? Four points:
FIRST, psychological or other personal factors can “mitigate” (not eliminate) personal culpability, as noted in the Catechism. But what, then, does Study Grope #9 have to say about Veritatis Splendor which still and explicitly incorporates (!) the moral law and moral absolutes directly (!) into the Magisterium of the Church?
SECOND, the embedded Cardinal Fernandez has been quoted as saying he has read Veritatis Splendor, but that he didn’t “think it went far enough.” Meaning, we guess, that in some “categories” he thinks the discredited Fundamental Option is valid…
THIRD, and what does Study Grope #9 have to say to the Lord about the spreading scandal that their subtlety inflicts on vulnerable persons in the younger generation who are gravitating toward and getting locked-into (!) the LGBTQ category—clearly not genetically but by cultural exposure and likely early experimental “experience”? (The noted and conflicted bisexual Andre Gide still advocated such slippery slope experience).
FOURTH, about the synodal “progress” of substituting novel verbiage for Veritatis Splendor, we are reminded that real “progress is ‘conservative’ because it is cumulative instead of substitutional.” Study Grope #9 discards Veritatis Splendor, now part of the Church’s Magisterium.
SUMMARY: What does the clericalist Study Grope #9 have to say to the Lord about converting (!) their collars into millstones?
What does the Study Group have to say about Veritatis Splendor? My guess is that the laypeople in the group haven’t read it and the men in Roman collars, if they’ve read it, simply don’t care.
What does the Study Group have to say about spreading scandal? I’ve little doubt that their consciences are so seared that, far from thinking they’re spreading scandal, they think they’re doing the work of the “god of surprises” and that those who disapprove of their findings, suggestions, demands (whatever) are rigid backwardists who need to be enlightened. (As for the millstones — you find the millstones, I’ll find the sea.)
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
If the synodal superlodge is “simply a return to Paganism” it is not Catholic.
https://sophiainstitute.com/promo/discovering-the-latin-mass/
This article is very good and gets right to the heart of the matter. Will the pontificate of Leo follow the erroneous route of Francis and the senate that he is responsible for. Will he lead the way to a true understanding of human nature which must follow the path of Plato, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, Augustine and Aquinas philosophy and theology or will the direction continue to be led by errant modern philosophy and theology modern theology off the True path by using the errors of modern philosophy to seek understanding.
Synod in above comment, not senate. The auto edit changed the word.
In Christ,
John
Spot on, Father Peter! 🙏✝️
“Why is this vastly expensive and time-consuming synodal process to be continued?”
The answer is very simple! Synod Study Group #9’s outrageous report is further evidence (as if we needed any more) that the whole synodal process is being used as a subterfuge to try and normalize sinful homosexual acts which cry out to heaven for vengeance.
It is the end game of the whole synodal process that is orchestrated by the homo heretics controlling the hierarchy right up to the very top!
“homo heretics controlling the hierarchy right up to the very top!”
“Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church but in reality they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray.”
St Athanasius
…Pope Leo…Synodality…Integral Something Whatever…💤💤💤💤💤
What a strange dream. I woke up wondering what happened to Rupnik and when sodomy ceased being sinful, etc.
Anyhoo, after a good carbonara and Chianti, it’s time for my nap here in Rome. 💤💤💤💤💤
It is no Time to be sleeping in Gethsemane!
“It is not that the voices that seem to have largely shaped the content of Synod Study Group report #9 were previously unheard. Those voices had been heard for decades.”
For example, “If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party ( what about The Holy Ghost), nor is society affected( what about Christ’s Teaching reflected in the teaching of The Magisterium of His Church regarding sin and sexual immorality being an offense against God and the Sanctity and Dignity of The Human Person).
And due to the failure of those “whose competence it is”, to declare these voices anathema, these voices that represent a counterfeit magisterium that is attempting to subsist within The One Body Of Christ, while denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost and thus The Divinity Of The Most Holy Blessed Trinity, are actually declaring The True Magisterium of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church to be in a state of schism from them, while they themselves exist in a state of apostasy, illuminating The True Magisterium from the schismatic apostates.
You cannot be affirming The Unity Of The Holy Ghost and thus the fact that it is not possible to have Sacramental Communion without Ecclesiastical Communion, while denying The Deposit Of Faith that Christ Has Entrusted to His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, for The Salvation of Souls, and be, in essence, a schismatic.
A schismatic papacy is an oxymoron for a True Vicar Of Christ would never defend and promote sexual immorality, and call that an affirmation of The Perfect Divine Eternal Infinite Salvational Love Of The Blessed Trinity, as Jorge Bergoglio, did, prior to his invalid election to the papacy by a majority who could not have had the competence to even participate in the election if they believed a man who denied Christ’s teaching regarding lust and the sin of adultery could possibly be a True Vicar Of Christ.
“Penance, Penance, Penance.” 🙏✝️
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/archbishop-vigano-publishes-letter-to-leo-xiv-i-declare-that-i-am-not-a-schismatic/