Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  Cardinal John O’Connor of New York thought that World Youth Day ’93 had been a “watershed experience” in the American perception of John Paul II and in the Pope’s experience of the United States.17 John Paul seemed inclined to agree. In his annual Christmas address to the Roman Curia on December 21, 1993, he called Denver the “big surprise” of 1993, took a gentle jab at the American bishops for their lack of confidence before the event, and put the entire episode in an evangelical framework. It was “not the first time,” he reminded the prelates, “that the young people expressed so vigorously their desire to carry the Gospel into the new millennium. Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life…So how can one say that they like slogans such as ‘Christ—yes, the Church—no!’? Rather do not many of them ‘go counter’ to anti-Christian propagandać This has obviously amazed and even embarrassed some of the media prepared to witness a great contestation. This was even a surprise to the American Episcopate, which has realized that it is not alone in its evangelizing mission but is supported above all by young people, the builders of the future….”18

  For months to come, guests at John Paul II’s table were struck by the only photograph displayed in his dining room. Set on a sideboard, it showed the Pope, rosary in hand, looking out his helicopter window at the vast crowd waiting for World Youth Day’s closing Mass at Cherry Creek State Park.

  MORAL TRUTH AND THE DRAMA OF FREEDOM

  Less than two months after John Paul left Denver, he published his long-expected tenth encyclical on October 5, 1993. Veritatis Splendor [The Splendor of Truth], which addressed “fundamentals of the Church’s moral teaching,” immediately established itself as one of the major intellectual and cultural events of the pontificate.19

  A Crisis of Culture

  The Second Vatican Council had spent little time on moral theology.20 Yet despite the Council’s relative lack of attention to the subject, there was widespread agreement at the time that a renewal of Catholic moral theology was necessary. Few issues after the Council generated such passion and public controversy as the direction of that renewal.

  The manuals used to teach moral theology in Catholic seminaries and graduate theological faculties had seemed to more than a few theologians, priests, and bishops to be excessively legalistic (“casuistic” was the technical term). Moral theology’s connection to dogmatic theology and spirituality had also become attenuated, as thinking about the moral life had come unstuck from the Church’s thinking about the new life of grace it lived in Jesus Christ. Pre-conciliar moral theology’s primary reference point was the Ten Commandments, not the Sermon on the Mount—which was not to suggest that the Decalogue was wrong, but that its injunctions ought to be perceived in a distinctively Christian context. The Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments had to be put back together, it was thought. The moral life ought to be reconceived as a life of growth in the happiness of virtue, by which we become fitted for our destiny—eternal life within the light and love of God the Holy Trinity.

  Pre-conciliar Catholic moral theology also had intellectual difficulties with conceptualizing human freedom. Because of that, the moral life tended to be portrayed as a struggle between my will and God’s will, and the question in any situation became, “How far can I go before I butt into an obligation being imposed by that stronger will?” Grace, prayer, and the enlightenment of the soul by the Holy Spirit were all underplayed, even neglected, in what the preconciliar moral theology manuals tended to depict as a great wrestling match between my will and God’s commands.21

  The Council’s call for a development of Catholic moral theology was fully warranted. The controversy that erupted after Vatican II had to do with the nature of that development and its relationship to the sources of Catholic moral theology in the Bible, the early Fathers of the Church, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The combatants were usually portrayed in “liberal” and “conservative” categories. Deeper and far more interesting questions were being debated than could be captured by those labels.

  Should the morality of an action be judged primarily by the character of the act itself, or by a calculation that stressed a person’s intentions and the consequences of an action? What was the relationship between a Christian’s basic decision for Christ—the “fundamental option,” as some post-conciliar theologians called it—and the specific sins that all Christians commit in the course of their Christian lives? Was there a moral “law,” inscribed in human nature and in the dynamics of moral choosing, that could be known by reason? Were some acts, by their very nature, intrinsically evil, always and everywhere, without exception? Was freedom a morally neutral characteristic of the will, capable of attaching itself legitimately to any object? Or should freedom be understood as freedom for excellence, a means by which human beings grow into goodness by choosing good?

  In its struggle with the meaning of freedom, the Catholic debate on moral theology touched some of the most controverted questions of public life in the late twentieth century. Veritatis Splendor was formally addressed to the bishops of the Catholic Church and was intended to set a framework for the future development of an authentically Catholic moral theology. But Veritatis Splendor was not simply, or even primarily, John Paul’s forceful entry into the intramural wars of Catholic moral theologians. Rather, it is best read as a crucial moment in the Pope’s quest for a new humanism, a reminder to men and women of the grandeur of the truth to which they can conform their lives and fulfill their destinies.

  Making Moral Sense

  If Veritatis Splendor is not for Catholics only, neither is it a papal scolding of wayward, willful sinners. John Paul II is too experienced a pastor to think that the polymorphous perversities of the late twentieth century are very original. They aren’t, as a brisk reading of Genesis, concentrated on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, will readily attest. There is something new in the late twentieth century, though—the inability of educated people to make moral sense to one another.

  What passes for moral argument on the edge of the twenty-first century is too often vast confusion. Terms like “right” and “wrong,” “virtue” and “duty” are bandied about with no common understanding of what they mean. One group’s abomination is another’s basic human right. What some consider acts of mercy, others regard as homicides for the sake of convenience. When it comes to moral argument, the modern world too often plays the role of that classic cynic, Pontius Pilate, with his dismissive question, “‘Truth’? What is ‘truth’?” ( John 18.38). Pilate, and many self-consciously modern people, think that question is the end of the debate. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul suggests that it is really the beginning.

  The widespread notion that freedom can be lived without reference to binding moral truths is another unique characteristic of contemporary life. From Mount Sinai (where the Ten Commandments were understood to be the moral conditions for Israel living its freedom) to the U.S. Declaration of Independence (which staked the American claim to independent nationhood on certain “self-evident” moral truths), it had been widely understood that freedom and truth had a lot to do with each other. No more. And the uncoupling of freedom from truth, led in one, grim direction. Freedom, detached from truth, becomes license, and license becomes freedom’s undoing. Without any common understanding of moral truth, life is reduced to the assertion of everyone’s will-to-power. That, in turn, leads to chaos. And since human beings fear chaos above all, they will reach for the chains of tyranny to bring order back into life. Freedom untethered from truth is its own mortal enemy.

  The idea that every human being creates his or her own truth—what is true “for me”—is yet another crucial factor in contemporary moral confusions. The modern or “postmodern” variation on this perennial temptation is the claim that every moral system is a cultural construct “all the way down.” I may think that I value freedom and that “freedom” has some objective meaning. In thinking that, according to postmodern theorists, I am deluding myself, for my concept of “freedom” is as “culturally con
structed” as someone else’s claim that child sacrifice is a grand idea.

  Against such deconstructions of the moral drama of the human condition, John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor insists that we are truly free and that our freedom is the condition for any serious concept of “morality.” At the same time, the Pope argues that freedom has a built-in trajectory, a dynamism that produces in every human person an aspiration to goodness and excellence. Veritatis Splendor begins with a lengthy papal meditation on the Gospel story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?” (Matthew 19.16). For centuries, Catholic commentators had dealt with the rich young man as a kind of poster boy for vocations to the priesthood. To John Paul II, he is Everyman, asking the question that haunts, or inspires, every human life—what good must I do to fulfill my eternal destiny?

  Truths with Consequences

  To those who object that the essence of the modern human condition is its plurality, John Paul says, you are right—and that is precisely why we have to think more seriously about the possibility of moral truths and their relationship to living in freedom. Moreover, the Pope argues, a genuine public conversation about these issues is a real possibility. In an intellectual climate dominated by relativism, John Paul raises the stakes considerably in Veritatis Splendor by insisting that there is a universal moral law built into the human condition—a law that provides the “grammar” for serious moral conversation among people of different cultures and life experiences. This understanding of the rootedness of the moral life in a universal human nature is, the Pope further suggests, the foundation on which a new humanism capable of defending human dignity can be built.

  The encyclical’s insistence that there are intrinsically evil acts (because there are, in the technical terminology, “exceptionless moral norms”) also takes the reader beyond scholarly quarrels and into crucial public issues. To the argument that certain dubious acts can be justified by their consequences or because more good comes out of them than evil, John Paul insists that one can never do evil in order to do good. As for the claim that no act, in and of itself, is always-and-everywhere evil, the Pope counters that homicide, genocide, slavery, prostitution, trafficking in women and children, and abortion are always gravely wrong, because by their very nature they do grave damage to victims and perpetrators alike.

  John Paul also tackles the argument that pastoral sensitivity requires a less sharp-edged sense of the reality of evil and its effects in the complexities of individual human lives. Modern moral theologies of “consequentialism” and “proportionalism” may well have been motivated by genuine pastoral concerns. But their intense focus on intentions and outcomes has deflected attention from the moral nature of specific acts and how they shape the character of those who do them. One result, ironically, has been to make it more difficult to condemn radical evil in a century pockmarked by its lethal and brutalizing consequences.

  The Pope also argues that recognizing the moral reality of intrinsically evil acts has important public implications for the free society.

  Human beings are demonstrably unequal in their physical, intellectual, and aesthetic capabilities, but the equality of all persons before the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. How are we to square self-evident inequality with our commitment to legal and political equality? The answer, John Paul suggests, lies in a concept of equal moral responsibilities. Recognizing that everyone is equally responsible before the moral norms prohibiting intrinsic evil is the sturdiest foundation for defending the principle of equality before the law.22 The same can be said for maintaining the civil society essential to democratic political life. The bonds of civil friendship are more securely formed by a sense of mutual moral obligation arising from commonly accepted moral standards than from merely contractual obligations.23 Postconciliar Catholic moral theologies that downplayed or virtually denied the significance of intrinsically evil acts inadvertently reinforced the relativist tendencies of the culture of “I did it my way.” Dubious accounts of the moral life in their own right, these moral theologies were also unhelpful in reconstructing the moral foundations of the free and virtuous society.

  There was yet another irony in the post-conciliar history of Catholic moral theology, and Veritatis Splendor faces it squarely.

  Many Catholic moral theologians who had vigorously criticized the preconciliar “manuals” for their rigidity and legalism never made a radical break with the cause of that rigidity and legalism—the identification of freedom with willfulness, and the opposition between law and freedom that results from thinking of the moral life as a struggle between God’s will and mine. The basic, wrongheaded question remained in place—“How far can I go?” Some of the new moral theologies, by shifting the center of moral analysis from the moral act to the actor’s intentions and the act’s consequences, lowered the bar of Catholic morality by saying, in effect, “You can go farther.” But that drained the moral life of its inherent drama and rewards, and failed to resolve the intellectual problem of freedom and its relationship to truth and goodness.24

  A lax version of the old manuals’ legalism could not be considered a major improvement in Catholic thinking about the moral life. Genuine renewal in moral theology will come, the encyclical suggests, from retrieving and developing the idea that freedom, informed by reason, is ordered to the truth and finds its fulfillment in the goodness—the beatitude—of human flourishing, not in winning a few more skirmishes in the battle between God’s allegedly arbitrary will and mine.

  The truth about the drama of the moral life and about freedom is revealed, John Paul concludes, by the example of those prepared to die rather than do what they know is wrong. The witness of martyrs is a powerful counter to the claim that the dignity of freedom lies in doing things my way. The martyr teaches us that freedom is truly personal and truly liberating when it seeks the good and rejects evil, even to the point of death. Not everyone is called to be a martyr. Everyone is called to be a witness to moral truth, and “witness” is the original meaning of the term “martyr.”25

  The threshold of hope, the threshold of human dignity, is not crossed by lowering the bar of the moral life but by reaching higher—and then, if one has failed, by reaching higher again.

  Controversies Continued

  John Paul first announced his intention to address “more fully and more deeply the issues regarding the very foundations of moral theology” in a 1987 apostolic letter, Spiritus Domini [The Spirit of the Lord], issued to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the influential eighteenth-century moral theologian. Thus Veritatis Splendor was at least six years in the making.

  Its completion had to await the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church—which, as John Paul notes in his encyclical, “contains a complete and systematic exposition of Christian moral teaching.”26 Given the magnitude of the two projects, it seemed appropriate to make a full, positive presentation of the Catholic understanding of the moral life first, in the Catechism. That, it was thought, would help set the context for a more sharply focused reflection on the foundations of moral reasoning, for a critique of the difficulties in contemporary moral theology, and for an analysis of the relationship between the fundamentals of Catholic morality and the crisis of modern culture.

  Several papal commissions were involved in preparing Veritatis Splendor. During the drafting process, John Paul consulted with bishops and theologians around the world. Their influence on the final text of the document is not difficult to detect. The encyclical’s critique of the idea of freedom-as-willfulness and its emphasis on freedom-for-excellence parallels the work of Servais Pinckaers, a Belgian Dominican and professor of moral theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The extensive references to St. Augustine and the themes from St. Bonaventure reflect longstanding interests of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The nature of moral action and the philosophical and theological exploration of “intrinsically evil�
�� acts had engaged the attention of Tadeusz Styczeń, SDS, and Andrzej Szostek, MIC, John Paul’s colleagues at the Catholic University of Lublin. As in any papal document, the theologian of the papal household, in this instance the Swiss Dominican Georges Cottier, was certainly consulted.

  Yet Veritatis Splendor is very much John Paul II’s encyclical, conceptually as well as formally. Its first part, on Everyman’s quest for the goodness that will lead to eternal life, reflects themes from the dramatic anthropology Karol Wojtyła had been unfolding since his days in the Rhapsodic Theater. His Lublin experience had helped him understand key issues in the crisis of contemporary moral philosophy. His struggle against communism had deepened his conviction that tyranny was best resisted by free persons acting according to consciences informed by moral truths. He had been developing the theme that the truth-and-freedom nexus was crucial for the future of democracies old and new since the late 1980s. Thus the suggestion that Veritatis Splendor is to be read not as a genuinely papal document, but as the hybrid product of various “Vatican theologians” (as some critics put it) is not persuasive. John Paul II was the intellectual driving force behind the production of Veritatis Splendor, from the outset and throughout the process. The further suggestion that the Pope wanted to invoke his charism of infallibility in the encyclical and had to be talked out of it by Cardinal Ratzinger is also false, according to Ratzinger himself.27

  Press coverage of the encyclical predictably stressed the Pope’s reaffirmation of classic Catholic sexual morality, although in fact these issues were barely referenced in Veritatis Splendor; it was not clear why reporters thought it newsworthy that the Pope continued to think that fornication was wrong.28 In the months just prior to the encyclical’s publication, speculation was rife about a papal “declaration of war” on theological liberals, as a German theologian, Professor Norbert Greinacher of Tübingen, put it. Greinacher was reacting to Italian press reports based on the leak of an alleged draft of Veritatis Splendor. The British Catholic press further confused matters by reporting that “underlying the document…is the principle of papal authority”—which was either a banality, or a serious misreading of John Paul’s understanding of the issues at stake.29 Another British Catholic weekly had it that the Pope had been forced to revise the entire encyclical because of adverse reactions to the leaked “draft.”30 That the Pope was tackling questions of crucial importance for free societies was rarely remarked in the prepublication attempts to determine just what theologians the Pope allegedly had in his sights.