Natural Law and the Magisterium

Natural Law and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church Processes

Natural Law and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church

The Roman Catholic tradition of ethics, conceived in terms of a "natural law," is based on goods to be sought for all persons. It represents a commitment to an objective moral order, knowable by reasonable reflection on human experience, especially on the goods which constitute human flourishing, and the institutions necessary to secure, protect, and distribute them. Although the specific shape of moral practices and institutions varies culturally, all peoples recognize such goods as life, family, marriage, education, government and religion. Prudence is required to realize these values rightly in the complexity and occasionally conflict of a full human life and in a society of persons. Truth in morality emerges from concrete locations, demanding both the affections and the cognitive powers of discernment to guide us in the achievement of "true good" for ourselves and others. But the fact that both Aristotle and Aquinas assume it possible to speak of moral virtue and of reasonably discerned "practical rectitude" in morality, demonstrates that they applied standards of truth and falsity to practical action despite its inevitable contingency. That they were sometimes wrong in their conclusions, especially about women's natural inferiority, does not disprove their method. Rather, it validates the necessity of a constant reexamination and reformation of particular readings of "human experience," informed by critical interaction with other standpoints, past and present.

There is a vigorous debate underway in contemporary Roman Catholic ethics about the proper understanding of natural law as an ethical concept. In this dissertation, I refer to a classicist conception of the natural law. A classicist view purports to offer access to moral norms which are certain and unchanging. In the area of human sexuality, norms are frequently apprehended by reflecting on the physical structures of the reproductive organs and by contemplating intercourse as a biological activity. Careful consideration is given to the generative faculties that human beings share with other animals. This view of the natural law continues to be influential, particularly in documents concerning human sexuality issued by the Vatican.

The line of argument used to oppose interventions in the reproductive process is less obviously rooted in a concern about embodiment, but, once again, a careful reading of the text highlights the relevance of considerations of embodiment. This second line of reasoning is related to what the Vatican calls "the special nature of the transmission of human life in marriage." In the Vatican's view, since human procreation is the fruit of a "personal and conscious act," it is irreconcilably different from the transmission of life in other animals. It is intentional and purposive and therefore governed by laws. What laws? Laws, says the Vatican, given by God and "inscribed in the very being of man and woman."

As the language here suggests, the appeal is to a natural law conception of human nature, according to which we must understand the telos of human sexual life, marriage, and the family in order to discern the range of acceptable reproductive interventions. Moreover, the appeal is to a particular understanding of this telos, one in which intercourse, love, procreation, marriage, and the family belong together. In the Vatican's view, procreation is properly undertaken in the context of a loving monogamous marriage through an act of sexual intercourse. Here, then, is a second standard by which to assess interventions in the reproductive process. Any type of assisted reproduction that conforms to the procreative norm just articulated, i.e., any procreative attempt that includes sexual intercourse between partners in a loving monogamous marriage, helps facilitate the natural process of procreation and is therefore acceptable. Any intervention that fails to conform to the norm is a departure from the natural law with respect to human sexuality and is therefore morally problematic.

Two points are worth noting at this juncture. First, in rejecting reproductive technology as a violation of natural law, the Vatican is invoking the "inseparability thesis," set out in Humanae Vitae, and which supports Catholic opposition to contraception. Just as the Catholic Church condemns contraception because it separates what is never permitted to be separated by allowing for sex without procreation, so it condemns reproductive technology because it provides for the possibility of procreation without sex. This is important to note because many critics of the inseparability thesis have argued that, by insisting that each and every act of sexual intercourse must be open to procreation, the Vatican itself accepts a sort of "physicalist" understanding of sexuality that is incompatible with the holistic picture of the person as a "unified totality" of body and spirit that grounds the first line of argument against reproductive technology discussed above.

This observation suggests a second one. To say that reproductive technology separates procreation from sex is not equivalent to saying that reproductive technology disembodies procreation. So opposition to reproductive technology is not just opposition to those techniques, like IVF, that actually disembody conception, but opposition to how the body is used and viewed by reproductive technology generally. To be sure, the Vatican objection is not merely reducible to the consequentialist concern that all forms of reproductive technology move us toward the objectionable endpoint of extracorporeal gestation. Nevertheless, whether emphasis is placed upon the bodily and spiritual unity of a person, or upon the importance of keeping sex and procreation together, the Vatican is concerned that reproductive technology leads us to treat our bodies merely as a source of gametes, and that so treating our bodies is the first step to disembodying procreation altogether. We already have extracorporeal conception; can extracorporeal gestation be far behind? Ultimately, then, one important source of Vatican resistance to reproductive technology is that it encourages the disembodiment of procreation.

Roman Catholic Advocacy Of A Family Living Wage Natural Law

From Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum forward, papal teaching on modern industrial society has made the just treatment of wage workers a central moral concern. 3 In line with the natural law approach favored by Catholic moralists; and in contrast to influential individualist and collectivist alternatives; work is interpreted through an anthropology that posits the dignity of each person, realized within three primary social relationships deemed natural to humans: the political, the economic, and the familial.

The political realm contributes to the common good by coordinating and protecting through law the well-being of groups and individuals. The economic sphere serves human flourishing by providing fair access to the goods of creation intended for all. In modern industrialized economies, the majority of persons are dependent for such access on wages attained through their labor. Human dignity is upheld in this setting only if workers are assured that, through honest labor, they can obtain the material conditions necessary for survival and a reasonable degree of security and material well-being. For Leo XIII and his successors, this translates into the worker's right to a "living wage." Important as the political and economic dimensions of social life are, this modern natural law tradition particularly cherishes the family, "the first, essential cell of human society." 4

The family, as an intimate "community of love," "school for a deeper humanity," "nurse and mother" of a holistic attitude toward the nature and dignity of persons in society, and "school of work," is regarded as the primary milieu for personal, interpersonal, and intergenerational growth and sustenance. As a "domestic church," family is an essential locus for spiritual education and formation.

Family contributes to the common good by nurturing the bonds and values necessary if civic and economic life is to subsist and prosper, yet in a real sense the civic and the economic spheres are there for the sake of the family. Family, for instance, functions as a warrant for private ownership in the papal writings.

In Gaudium et spes, marriage and family are described as the foundation of political life, and the well-being of political society is presented as intimately linked to the well-being of the community founded by marriage. Family needs and is obligated to the polis, yet retains an integrity and freedom within its sphere that ought not to be violated by state or economic interference. A priority of family over economy is asserted analogous to the priority of individual over state and labor over capital. Economic justice is therefore understood as necessarily including measures that promote and protect family life. A right to a family living wage; that is, a wage sufficient to assure a basic level of material security for both the adult household head, normally male, and his dependents, normally, wife and children; is implied in Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum and is explicitly articulated in Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno.

The consistent concern in this literature with labor and with workers' rights reflects a traditional emphasis in Christian social thought upon the moral priority of the basic needs of those who are economically vulnerable, over against the protection of the superfluities of the economically advantaged. Set as it has been within a normative vision of society as a harmonious, hierarchically interdependent organism, the conflictual, even radical implications of this basis have frequently been muted. Yet official Catholic support for union organizing and for strikes, and for state planning to ensure a decent livelihood for all, has been augmented over the years by a heightened recognition of the need to combat underlying institutional imbalances of power. Though the overarching goal of a peaceful and harmoniously ordered community endures, Catholic sensitivity to the dynamics of power, the reality of sinful systems and structures, and the necessity of struggle for social justice has increased over the past century, becoming especially evident in the social encyclicals of the present pope and the later writings of his predecessor, Paul VI. Seen in light of these developing sensibilities, the living wage is a means of empowering the poor to fulfill their material needs, to cultivate their abilities and aspirations, and to participate in just, enlivening social relationships.

In developing his argument for a family living wage, John A. Ryan was self-consciously faithful to the Catholic natural law tradition and the papal social teachings of his day. Simultaneously, he employed an inductive analysis and evaluation of the specifics of the U.S. economy to fashion a moral and practical argument that was distinctly American. As ethicist and social reformer, Ryan contended with both the theoretical and practical aspects of the issue of economic justice, and as a sophisticated and influential American Catholic case for wage justice, his work remains unsurpassed. 6 Not surprisingly, his work displays the tension, characteristic of the tradition, between a theological affirmation of equal rights and dignity for all and a hierarchical, organic picture of social relations that legitimates differential access to institutional power, burdens, and benefits according to one's function in the social organism. The tension is most obvious in treatments of gender roles, but it also affects other areas, such as models of social transformation and of class relations. We shall see in Ryan's writings the difficulties that this uneasy marriage of egalitarian and hierarchical models wrought.

Truthfulness and Credibility of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church

The Church must be worthy of belief. Faith is certainly not an act of reason to be compelled by rational evidence, but neither is it an irrational act of violence on the part of the will. Christian faith, precisely because it is God's gift, is not a blind "intellectual sacrifice" in which man offers to God, or even to the Church, the sacrifice of his understanding. Christian faith is the intelligent commitment of the whole man, which does not exclude but presupposes rational thinking. Faith is corrupted when it becomes intellectually dishonest, when -- that is --it suppresses, forgets, and shuts out genuine rational difficulties as illegitimate doubts, instead of facing up to them with complete truthfulness. Anyway, the "solution" of these difficulties does not always depend on the believing subject; the "object" to be believed and its credibility are also involved. In the concrete: a Church which has become incredible renders difficult or -- in the individual case -- even impossible a truthful Credo ecclesiam, a faith in God in the Church.

To be sure, an individual believer may occasionally apply to the Church -- to this community of human beings, and sinful human beings -- standards which are too narrow and too strict, to which he himself could scarcely measure up. But this is far from saying that too much is always demanded. Must it, then, not have something to do with the Church, her concrete situation and her defects, that numbers of devout Christians -- by no means individualistic lone wolves in splendid isolation, but the kind who very readily think with a community, co-operate in a common task, indeed want to incorporate their thought into the thought of a community of believers -- feel repelled by the "institutional" Church as it is now and thus prefer to be truthfully Christian outside the Church? For the sake of truthfulness they set themselves apart from this Church by leaving under protest or by silently withdrawing into the inner emigration. Must we suppose all these people have acted in this way merely because of ignorance or vexation? Or has not the Church in the concrete provided at least the occasion for their action? Can a Christian not simply feel that his Credo ecclesiam demands too much of him in a wholly concrete situation involving the Church and himself?

In fact, this "Roman system" -- so far as it means the liturgical, theological and administrative centralism and juridicism which is receding today, so far as it means the authoritarianism, absolutism and imperialism of the Roman Curia, criticized on all sides today-was, particularly after the "Constantinian turning point," more and more clearly in the making, but it prevailed in the Latin Church only in the high Middle Ages after the Gregorian reform, and from then on was methodically expanded, although with frequent reverses, up to the time between the two Vatican Councils. We have examined elsewhere in both its exegetical-historical and systematic theological aspects, as well as the practical-pastoral, the very complex question of the Petrine office in the Church.

There is no doubt that the Church as a whole has gained greatly in credibility in the world through the new, conciliar orientation. At the same time, unfortunately, the fact must be accepted that some who kept loyally to the former regulations (in regard to fasting laws, Latin and liturgy, especially) now feel that they are disowned. If in regard to a particular question the Church has brought very much suffering on human beings, through a false or at least out-of date approach, then precisely those affected ought to understand that she must change her attitude in order not to create still more suffering (this holds analogously too for the law of celibacy). It would hardly be Christian to say: "We had to suffer, the others must suffer too."

Certainly bishops and teachers in the Church ought to grasp fully all possibilities, and better than hitherto, in order to explain and render intelligible why the Church then spoke in one way and today speaks differently. There are actually always very many factors involved in Church and society at a particular time, which make people behave then in one way and not in another. And it is always possible to give many reasons why today we have struggled through to a different outlook. But this justification must not be made a cheap excuse, a tacit dispensation, from accepting unhesitatingly full responsibility also for the human failure of the Church and her government. What will be decisive is to learn from all the failures and do things better in the future -- and this means now, at the present time. Just so ought the church constantly to seek afresh to win the trust of men. But is there not very much more at stake here? More than confidence in the Church? Have we not hitherto overlooked the decisive perspective, that confidence on which all confidence in the Church is based: confidence in the Holy Spirit? A difficult problem-complex emerges here, and it can be fully understood why -- for example -- particularly in the question of birth control, the conservative minority of the Roman commission which the Pope backed wanted this point treated with the utmost seriousness. It had in fact been clear for a long time before Pope Paul VI's encyclical that the real dispute is not about the pill, not about birth regulation at all, but about the truth of the Church's magisterium. It had become more and more established, even in the Catholic Church, that the teaching on birth control ought to be changed; but could it be admitted that the magisterium of the Catholic Church had made a mistake? We shall try to find our way towards answering this question, raised by so many. On this point, too, only complete truthfulness can get us out of the present crisis.

1.

The conservative theology of the minority on the commission is right in insisting that the problem must not be simplified by saying that the encyclical of Pius XI, Casti Connubii, of 1930, was not an "infallible" statement. It can in fact be shown with overwhelming documentation from statements of the popes, of the bishops' conferences, and of so many outstanding individual bishops and of the universal teaching of theologians, that, at least in our century, it is a question of a universal teaching, binding under grave sin, of the Church's magisterium (magisterium ordinarium).

A doctrine taught so intensively and universally is equivalent to an "infallible" doctrinal statement. Thus the conservative group rightly argues:

Our question is a question of the truth of this proposition: contraception is always seriously evil. The truth of this teaching stems from the fact that it has been proposed with such constancy, with such universality, with such obligatory force, always and everywhere, as something to be held and followed by the faithful. Technical and juridical investigation into the irreformability and infallibility of Casti Connubii (as if once this obstacle had been removed, the true doctrine could be found and taught) distracts from the central question and even prejudices the question.

2.

Conservative theology is again right in saying that a change in teaching cannot be explained simply by a different historical situation. For already in 1930 the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican bishops had presented precisely the solution and the reasons for birth control which are offered to support it today:

For, as a matter of fact, the teaching of Casti Connubii was solemnly proposed in opposition to the doctrine of the Lambeth Conference of 1930, by the Church "to whom God has entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals . . . In token of her divine ambassadorship . . . And through our mouth." . . Some who fight for a change say that the teaching of the Church was not false for those times. Now, however, it must be changed because of changed historical conditions. But this seems to be something that one cannot propose, for the Anglican Church was teaching precisely that and for the very reasons which the Catholic Church solemnly denied, but which it would now admit. Certainly such a manner of speaking would be unintelligible to the people and would seem to be a specious pretext.

This dissertation would become very thick if we were to try to give an account of all that could be noted on the negative side. We may recall the excommunication of the Patriarch Photius and of the Greek Church, which rendered formal the now nearly thousand year-old schism with the Eastern Church; the prohibition of interest, another extremely pressing moral question on which the Church's magisterium changed its views far too late; the condemnation of Galileo, which is essentially responsible for the alienation between the Church and the natural sciences; the condemnation of new forms of worship in the rites controversy, which is a main reason for the far-reaching breakdown of the Catholic missions of modern times in India, China and Japan; the maintenance of the Pope's medieval secular power even into modern times, with all the secular and spiritual means of excommunication, which rendered the papacy further incredible as a spiritual ministry; the numerous condemnations of modern historical-critical exegesis (in regard to the authorship of the books of the Bible, source-criticism, historicity and literary forms, the Johannine Comma, the Vulgate); or the condemnations in the dogmatic field, particularly in connection with "Modernism" (theory of evolution, conception of the development of dogma) and so on.

It was very much to the credit of Pope Paul VI, with his great solicitude for the relations of the Catholic Church to the Orthodox Churches and to modern science, that in any case he took these questions much more seriously and that he deliberately honored in public the name of Galileo, on which previous popes were silent, and has publicly withdrawn the excommunication against the Patriarch of Constantinople. And it is also very much to the credit of the theologians who made available the moral theological expert opinion for the progressive majority of the commission, that they spoke with unusual frankness about the errors of the Church's magisterium, not least in regard to marital morality:

Not a few theologians and faithful fear that a change in the official teaching could damage the confidence of Catholics in the teaching authority of the Church. For they ask how the assistance of the Holy Spirit could permit such an error for so many centuries, and one that has had so many consequences, especially in recent centuries. But the criteria for discerning what the Spirit could or could not permit in the Church can scarcely be determined a priori. In point of fact, we know that there have been errors in the teaching of the magisterium and of tradition. With regard to intercourse one should note that for so many centuries in the Church, with the active concurrence of the Popes, it was all but unanimously taught that marital intercourse was illicit unless accompanied by the intention to procreate -- or at least (because of the words of I Cor. 7) to offer an outlet for the other partner; and yet no theologians hold to this teaching today, nor is it the official position.

Certainly the conclusion could not have been avoided that a new, critical interpretation of the Church's "infallibility" could overcome the present difficulties.

No: the confidence of Christians and also of theologians in God's Spirit in the Church must be very much stronger. And this not only in fact, in the concrete endurance of the errors of the magisterium in the past and present, but also as a matter of theological principle.

Anyone whose trust in God and in his Spirit is not superficial or rationalist, but profoundly Christian, believes unshakably that the Spirit of God will maintain the Church in the truth of the gospel, in spite of all errors and through all errors. This is the great miracle of the Holy Spirit of God in the Church: not that no errors occur --where then would be the humanity of the Church of men? --but that the Church, in spite of all her defection from God, is never dropped by God, never abandoned by God; that, in spite of all sins and errors of popes, bishops, priests, theologians and laymen, she did not perish like the dynasties of the Pharaohs and the Roman Empire of the Caesars, but continues to be sustained by God in the Spirit throughout the centuries and -- even after long periods of decadence -- is led to ever new life and new truth. Particularly here it is strikingly evident that the truth and truthfulness of the Church is not her own achievement, but the incomprehensible event of God's merciful grace. And our faith rejoices in the thought that ultimately our own endurance in truth although we constantly fail, is indeed important, but not ultimately decisive. What is much more decisive is the great promise of his fidelity, which God will not revoke in all eternity, in spite of our failure all along the line.

So the storm then may still rage so fiercely and darkness fall; the ship of the Church may toss and roll, it may lose its course and drift hither and thither aimlessly with sails slackened: ". . . he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth" ( Jn. 14:16-17). She will not succumb to the power of darkness, of lying and fraud. She is certain: by God's gracious promise, infallibility is bestowed on her. In spite of all her erring and misunderstanding, she is maintained in truth by God.