The human person first? No, not before God! This must be stated clearly. The statement “the human person first” gives me to understand that the human person trumps God and His moral code and law. This little essay is addressed to those who feel free to play havoc with God’s law and moral code and consequentially to play havoc with the Catholic Church’s moral credibility. They carry a grave responsibility.

God’s Law and Moral Code are all about love: God’s perfect love for human persons. God gave them to us in order to instruct us on how to love Him. God is perfect justice with infinite mercy because He is the epitome of absolute and perfect love. His law and moral code bring order which in turn bring harmony and serenity.

 “You cannot fool God” was the warning given me as a seven-year-old in 1958, in Wales by a no-nonsense but loving nun. I thank God for her. God sees right through us. He sees our true intention.

The modern fashion is to precede a contentious stand on morality by words that give a nod to the traditional moral code. This serves to raise suspicion among the faithful that a legalistic, often devious, game is about to be played with them. The game is that of “what is meant, or not meant, or meant with some caveat; draw whatever conclusion that makes you happy”. I, for one among many, have had a nauseating decade of this.

The cancerous growth in the Church is the heresy of Modernism with addenda. This has revolutionised the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith. Yes, a revolution it is! The protagonists even boast of it. Many a good soul has been hoodwinked by assurances of continuity with the traditional moral theology or of a development. The DDF has performed a back-flip by overturning its 2021 declaration: “The Church cannot bless sin.” Just two years later we are unashamedly told that Fiducia Supplicans overturns it.

To say that the credibility of the DDF is low with many is an understatement. It has made a mockery of itself, of its ancestry and of its raison d’être.

The vast majority of Catholic priests are good priests

The crisis in the Church has been caused by the assimilation of a philosophy and a theology that are deleterious. Catholic Tradition in Faith and Morals draws a straight line from God Incarnate through the Apostles and St Paul, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas... to St John Paul II.

The marked deviation from that line is the theology that there is no such thing as an intrinsically evil act. There is! This concerns the abuse of God’s love and the Good He has given us. Revolutionaries claim that St Thomas Aquinas lends support to their assertion that there can be no such thing as a specifically negative moral norm. He does not!

Revolutionaries, appealing to St Thomas’s Questiones Quodlibetalis 9q 7a2, claim that, in certain circumstances, the moral disvalue attached to some kinds of actions is nevertheless justified by outweighing circumstances. Tradition responds by pointing out that, in the same passage, St Thomas expressly says that there are some kinds of human acts that have deformity inseparably annexed to them (fornication, adultery, et al.), which can in no way be morally good for they are intrinsically evil.

Revolutionaries claim that moral norms are of a generic nature that refers to an ideal and are not of a specific nature that refers to the practical. But how can this claim be compatible with the Catholic faith? Jesus is the Prototype Man: fully human yet fully divine. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. It was He who promulgated the code and norms for the direction of human sinners in practical terms.

To say that the Catholic Church has made some people feel unwelcome is slanderous in my book. These may be the subjective feeling of some caused by the inadequacies of some priests. Christ’s Church welcomes all to holy mass. But only those Catholics who are not in a state of mortal sin may receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ. Acknowledgement and repentance of mortal sin and its absolution in the sacrament of reconciliation will restore God’s grace to that soul.

The vast majority of Catholic priests are good priests. They will communicate God’s infinite love to every person and gladly bless each individual. But they will refrain from blessing couples in irregular relationships, where a blessing could be interpreted as God’s blessing on sinful acts.

The Catholic Church is both mother and teacher. She is not daughter and pupil. She must be firm in her moral teaching, even though certain theologians consider the term ‘intransigent moralist’ a slur.

St John Paul II had something to say about this: “… this intransigence is said to be in contrast with the Church’s motherhood. The Church, one hears, is said to be lacking in understanding and compassion. But the Church’s motherhood can never, in fact, be separated from her teaching mission, which she must carry out as the faithful bride of Christ, who is truth in person” (Veritatis Splendor 95).

 

Peter Micallef-Eynaud is a medical doctor and theologian.