As the autumn session of an increasingly contested Synod opened a few days ago in the Vatican, an extract from an unpublished text by Benedict XVI has just been released. It points the finger at a moral progressivism which has become the norm in Western society, and which in certain respects seems to have penetrated even into the ecclesiastical sphere.
The latest developments in the Church have revived a stylistic device that made Chateaubriand such a success in his day: prosopopoeia, a device that consists in making the absent or the dead speak, in order to summon them as witnesses—often incriminating—to the present.
Thus, on the French political scene, it is the figure of Charles de Gaulle that is often exhumed by political actors to defend faltering institutions. Similarly, in the ecclesiastical arena, the figure of Pope Benedict XVI is sometimes evoked to challenge certain positions emerging under the current pontificate.
It is no coincidence that an unpublished text by the German Pope has been released just as the second session of the XVI General Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops is taking place at the Vatican: a publication that comes, moreover, a few days after a series of appointments to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith that seem to be moving in the direction of both moral and doctrinal progressivism.
The text published by Sandro Magister, Vaticanist at Settimo Cielo, is one of the handwritten writings that Francis' predecessor did not wish to publish during his lifetime, and which he entrusted to Monsignor Livio Melina: the former head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, who recently cowrote La verità dell'amore, a work that should soon be available in Italian bookstores.
The late Pope's contribution dates back to 2019, when the Institute was undergoing a reshuffle—a purge in Msgr. Melina's eyes—aimed at removing its most conservative elements. Benedict XVI, according to Melina, “considered that measure unjust and unacceptable, and sought by various means to get those responsible to reconsider.”
In this text (The Christian Image of Man), the former Pontiff returns in passing to his—highly debatable—thesis that the Second Vatican Council had been diverted from its original intention, to be considered “as a demolition of walls, as a ‘tearing down of bastions,’ such that in some circles the very end of Catholicism was feared, or awaited with joy.”
Deploring the fact that individual freedom, a notion that became central with Luther and the Renaissance, has been paroxysmally exalted over the centuries, the author makes the following observation: “it is now denied that man, as a free being, is in some way bound to a nature that determines the space of his freedom. Man now no longer has a nature, but ‘makes’ himself.
“No more does there exist a nature of man: it is he himself who decides what he is, male or female. It is man himself who produces man, and so determines the destiny of a being that no longer comes from the hands of a creator God, but from the laboratory of human inventions. The abolition of the Creator as an abolition of man thus becomes the authentic threat to faith.
“This is the great task facing theology today, which will be able to see it through only if the example of the lives of Christians is stronger than the power of the denials that surround us and that promise a false freedom.”
These sentences stand in stark contrast to the document currently serving as the basis for the work of Synod participants, who are asked, to cite just one example, to consider “assuming socio-cultural diversity within the framework of a multifaceted Church, and favouring the appreciation of liturgical, disciplinary, theological, and spiritual expressions appropriate to different socio-cultural contexts” (Instrumentum laboris, no. 97).
Philosopher Augusto Del Noce, in his anthology Analyse de la déraison [Analysis of Unreasonableness], warned as early as the 1960s of a “lack of reaction from the Church” to moral progressivism, which could one day herald the advent of a “Catholicism without religion,” as he put it.
(Sources : Instrumentum laboris/Settimo Cielo/Diakonos.be – FSSPX.Actualités)