From the Editor’s Desk

Five months after the start of his pontificate, Pope Francis sat down with Antonio Spadaro, SJ for a series of interviews that were later translated and then published simultaneously in sixteen Jesuit journals around the world. The resulting text, along with his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (published three months later), anticipates the leitmotifs that would recur in Francis’s teachings. One of these is the importance of encounter: “We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.” ¹ Similarly, in Evangelii Gaudium, the pope “invite[s] all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them. . . . No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her.” ²

Animating Francis’s pastoral vision is an acute desire to cultivate ecclesial practices that foster this encounter. This is the context in which I interpret the recent permission given by the Vatican for “the possibility of blessings for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex.” ³ With his approval of the document, Francis responds creatively to the challenge raised by those who find themselves alienated from the church: How can the church help such persons encounter the person of Christ Jesus? The document states that it makes no changes to church teachings, but it also signals its intent to develop the church’s pastoral care for these individuals in light of our contemporary context.

Bracketing the thornier and more complex issue of whether the document effectively enacts, against its explicit claim, some sort of doctrinal change, it is hard to dispute that the church’s pastoral outreach in matters of sexuality has already undergone significant change, even before this most recent development. A glance at a widely influential moral manual of the pre-Vatican II era confirms this. Henry Davis, SJ (d. 1952), a well-regarded moral theologian teaching at Heythrop College, wrote a four-volume manual for seminarians titled Moral and Pastoral Theology. ⁴ He hoped that the volumes would not only provide seminarians with an overview of the church’s moral teachings but also help them understand the pastoral implications of those teachings. The collection, which was first published in 1935 and went through seven editions, formed generations of future priests throughout the anglophone world up until the time of Vatican II.

For an example of changes in the church’s pastoral practices, we can consider Davis’s guidance for the case where a Catholic desires to marry a non-Catholic Christian. Using language quite discordant for the contemporary ear but familiar to priests of that era, Davis states that “the Church universally and most seriously forbids marriage between two persons, one of whom is Catholic and the other a baptized member of an heretical or schismatic, or atheistic sect.” This is not just a church rule, Davis states, but a “union forbidden by divine law” because of the danger that such marriages present to the Catholic party and to their children. ⁵ Dispensations might be granted if a number of conditions were met, including grave reasons for the marriage (e.g., the couple lived in an area with few Catholics); the guarantee, made with “moral certainty,” that the children would be raised Catholic; and the duty that the Catholic party would “prudently endeavor to convert the non-Catholic party” (a duty understood as a matter of charity for the non-Catholic). ⁶ Contemporary norms, in contrast, reflect conciliar shifts in how Catholicism regards non-Catholic traditions and the church’s sensitivity to the pastoral realities of our contemporary pluralistic context. They do not require any guarantees, but only that the Catholic promises to do everything they can to raise their children in the Catholic faith.

Most of the volumes’ 1,500-plus pages are in English. However, the text tellingly switches to Latin for three discussions: sexual sins, ⁷ impotency as an impediment to marriage, ⁸ and sexual sins within marriage. ⁹ The anomalous use of Latin in an otherwise English text reflects not only the church’s belief that all sexual sins are grave but also its concern, prevalent at the time, that even a discussion of such sin risked mortal temptations. These sins (adultery, fornication, rape, masturbation, sodomy, and bestiality) were the Voldemorts of the Catholic world, the sins that must not be named, at least not in English.

Evidencing the era’s deficient understanding of homosexuality, the text (in the brief three paragraphs it devotes to the topic) distinguishes between “perfect sodomy” (i.e., homosexual acts) and “imperfect sodomy” (i.e., anal or oral sex between a male and female). ¹⁰ In defining homosexuality, the Latin text first focuses on the sexual act itself, but then switches to desires: “The essence of sodomy consists in affection for the same sex” (essentia sodomiae consistit in affect ad eundem sexum). The sentence that immediately follows this statement—in a quite unfortunate instruction for those seeking a pastoral understanding of homosexuality—goes on to assert, without making any clear distinction between desires and acts, that “this sin is the most serious one, as is clear from the fact that it is most against nature; from the most serious punishments inflicted for it by ancient law and by God himself; and from the words of St. Paul (Rom. I, 26–28)” (hoc peccatum est gravissimum, id quod patet ex eo quod est maxime contra naturam, et ex poenis gravissimis in jure antique et ab ipso deo ob illud inflictis, et ex verbis Sancta Pauli [Rom. I, 26–28]). ¹¹

If these Latin paragraphs were the sole guidance that priests had at the time for providing pastoral care to gay and lesbian persons, we can well imagine that such “care” was often experienced as unhelpful and even spiritually wounding. Even though many find contemporary church norms on homosexuality still pastorally (and doctrinally) inadequate, they are, nonetheless, a decided improvement on what the generations of the early twentieth century experienced. (Consider, for example, the Catechism’s exhortation—one that would have been condemned as absurd and scandalous if preached from church pulpits in the 1950s—that “men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies . . . be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” ¹² ) My point is not to argue for or against the adequacy of contemporary pastoral guidelines as laid out in the Catechism, but only to note that the church’s pastoral practices have already changed significantly—sometimes in ways that would have been rejected in an earlier era—and to suggest that Francis is right to recognize the need for such changes. The church’s pastoral casuistry should continually develop so that it can ever better serve contemporary Catholics, especially those who do not find the church a place where they can encounter Christ.

Pundits in the Catholic world have offered several spins on the significance of Fiducia Supplicans. Some have suggested that the warm reception among many LGBTQ+ advocates reflects their belief that formal church doctrine will also change—a view shared by both those who support such a development and those who believe it catastrophic. However, there may be a more basic reason for the hope elicited by the document in some quarters: in this very small pastoral step, the needs and hopes of one group of Catholic believers have been given some recognition. And with that affirmation, however minor and small, those believers have taken another step away from the that-which-cannot-be-named erasure that had long characterized civil and ecclesial attitudes toward them.

Though none of the articles in this issue explicitly addresses the issues raised by the document, some of themes discussed by them are relevant to it—the development of doctrine, a graced encounter with the triune God, an ecclesiology for believers whom the church body has treated unjustly, and Christian responses to and within a dominantly nonreligious horizon.

Catherine Clifford (“The ‘Hierarchy’ of Truths in a New Context”) examines Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio) and its reminder that not all church doctrines are equally central. Its teachings, she argues, offer a soteriological criterion that encourages a further rapprochement among Christian churches. Such new accords would be “characterized by more gracious measures of reciprocal interim sacramental sharing” that acknowledge how “other communions continue to be effective mediators of God’s saving grace.”

The nineteenth-century theologian Matthias Scheeben has been the subject of renewed attention recently. Against facile attempts to sharply contrast Scheeben’s theology with that of Karl Rahner, Vincent Strand, SJ (“Rahner and Scheeben on Grace”) defends the congruence between the two, at least in regard to important elements found in their respective approaches to grace. In particular, Strand shows how Scheeben’s account of the “conviction,” shared by both Rahner and Scheeben, “that grace consists in the gift of God’s uncreated self” avoids the problems that many associate with Rahner (e.g., his idea of the supernatural existential).

The sexual abuse crisis and other church scandals have led scholars to examine anew the tension between the ideal of the church as an instrument of Christ and the historical reality that the church (or its members) fail to embody that ideal. In “From Ecclesial Sin to Ecclesial Han,” Flora Tang explores another ecclesial element at stake in these sins of the church body: the fact that the victims of the church’s sins are sometimes themselves members of the church body. She builds on the Korean concept of han to construct an ecclesiology that recognizes how “members of the church need not just forgiveness by Christ through the church, but also other forms of grace such as the healing of broken relationships, the mending of social divisions between rich and poor, and the openness to justice that enables reconciliation.”

As Aden Cotterill rightly notes in his “Tomáš Halík: A Theology for the Post-Secular,” scholarly examination of our contemporary secular and post-secular environment is “well-trafficked.” Nonetheless, Cotterill succeeds in advancing that discussion by mining the writings of the Czech theologian and priest Tomáš Halík. He shows how several themes in Halík’s corpus can assist the Christian in responding to our religiously complicated landscape: “the blessedness of spiritual seeking, a receptivity to the critical insights of atheism, and the affirmation of doubt and uncertainty as an integral feature of Christian faith.”

In this year’s Notes on Theological Ethics, we have four essays that capture the emergent issues of our day. Gerald Beyer (“NATO Expansion after 1989”) looks back on whether NATO’s expansion in 1989 had moral legitimacy. Knowing that Pope Francis sees in that development a provocation of sorts against Russia, Beyer comprehensively examines and makes a case for the present state of NATO through the Catholic Social Tradition. Maureen O’Connell (“Aesthetics and Contemporary Ethics”) invites us to see how dependent theological ethics is and ought to be on aesthetics. She reviews a surprising number of theological works reflecting on aesthetics to see that art not only reframes the world in which we live and prompts us to innovate the way we view sources of moral insight but also invites us “to transgress socially constructed and often aesthetically reinforced boundaries that limit human flourishing, most notably features of human embodiment such as race, gender, and ability.” Paul Scherz (“AI as Person, Paradigm, and Structure”) helps us examine what ought to be our stance toward AI (artificial intelligence) if we want to assess what constitutes right ethical conduct from AI. After examining a host of proposals, he returns us to “a new, more sophisticated instrumentalist approach” as a way of overcoming the tendency to view such technology as a neutral tool on the one hand, or as a person on the other. Finally, James Keenan, SJ (“Recognizing Collectives as Moral Agents”) argues that the present hesitancy to recognize the moral agency of collectives must be overcome. Reviewing the writings of a wide array of ethicists (community organizers, feminists, anti-racists, virtue ethicists) moving within such collectives, he raises up standards for assessing the agency of such groups.

Christopher Steck, SJEditor in Chief