Leo XIV’s “one flesh” meditation looks pious on the surface. Underneath, it hands the contraception and LGBT revolution the very tools it needs.
Una Caro presents itself as a meditation on conjugal charity. On the surface it sounds familiar enough: biblical language about “one flesh,” reverent nods to John Paul II, a few obligatory bows toward Humanae Vitae and the “openness to life” of Christian spouses.
Underneath the pious glaze, the document does something very specific. It quietly relocates the center of marriage from the divinely instituted link between sex and procreation to an essentially psychological vision of “conjugal charity,” lived in a fluid, therapeutic anthropology borrowed from the Pontifical Academy for Life’s latest experiments.
Once you watch the way the text quotes Karol Wojtyła and recasts “openness to life,” it becomes clear what is going on. Una Caro is not a frontal attack on Catholic teaching. It is the Trojan horse parked just inside the gates: still wrapped in Wojtyła’s vocabulary, but packed with the logic that the Academy’s moral engineers will need to justify artificial contraception and, eventually, sterile sexual “unions” of every kind.
And it arrives in the same season that Leo has crowned Renzo Pegoraro as president of the Pontifical Academy for Life: the very man who helped turn that body from a bulwark for the unborn into a post-Christian bioethics think tank. You do not need much imagination to see where this is meant to go. Instead of a wall protecting marriage, this letter is a cleverly designed door.
Conjugal Charity Without the Cross
The older magisterium treated marriage in supernatural terms. Trent spoke of the sacrament instituted by Christ as a remedy for concupiscence and as an office ordered to the procreation and education of children. Leo XIII, in Arcanum and other documents, stressed the indissoluble bond and the family as a “society small in number, but no less a true society than the State itself.” Pius XI’s Casti Connubii spoke plainly: God attached to the marital act a primary end, the procreation and education of offspring, and a secondary end, mutual help and remedy for concupiscence.
In that tradition, love is not a free-floating feeling that creates its own meaning. Love is ordered by nature and grace. Conjugal charity embraces children because it is rooted in the Creator’s design.
Una Caro inherits the vocabulary but not the backbone. It speaks warmly about conjugal charity and “responsible fruitfulness,” but it consistently treats procreation as one aspect among many, a symbol folded into a broader narrative of self-realization, emotional support, and “accompaniment.”
The decisive shift shows itself in paragraph 145 – the section Leo’s ghostwriters hang on Karol Wojtyła in order to push the boundaries without seeming to.
The Wojtyła Quote That Will Be Used to Blow Up Humanae Vitae
Here is the heart of the matter. The letter states:
An integral vision of conjugal charity does not deny its fruitfulness, the possibility of generating a new life, because “this totality, required by conjugal love, also corresponds to the needs of a responsible fertility” Sexual union, as a mode of expression of conjugal charity, must of course remain open to the communication of life, although this does not mean that this must be an explicit purpose of every sexual act. In fact, three legitimate situations can occur:
It then lists, first, the case of a couple who cannot have children, and second:
‘That a couple does not consciously seek a certain sexual act as a means of procreation. Wojtyła also says so, arguing that a conjugal act, which “being in itself an act of love that unites two people, may not necessarily be considered by them as a conscious and deliberate means of procreation“
This is exactly where the sleight of hand happens.
Defenders will point to the “must remain open to the communication of life” clause and say: look, that is Humanae Vitae. Then they will treat the Wojtyła quote as a harmless reminder that you do not have to drum up a baby-intention before every embrace.
But that is not what the paragraph actually does.
First, it ties the “must remain open” clause immediately to “three legitimate situations,” one of which is not an objective state like infertility but a subjective description of intention: “does not consciously seek… a means of procreation.” “Openness” is no longer anchored in the structure of the act. It is relocated into a psychological horizon: the couple’s general story of being “open to life” over time.
Second, it elevates that interior stance to the level of a “legitimate situation.” In classic moral theology, there is only one genuinely “legitimate situation” where a marital act is per se non-procreative but morally good: involuntary infertility or natural infertility of the act (pregnancy, post-menopause, naturally infertile days) with no attempt to thwart its procreative structure. Una Caro quietly adds a new category alongside that: acts in which the couple “does not consciously seek” procreation, which in this framework can include acts they have deliberately closed by contraception, withdrawal, or other means.
Read quickly, the paragraph can sound orthodox, because the Church has always recognized infertile marriages as true marriages and has never demanded that spouses crank up an explicit baby-intention before every embrace. But Una Caro is not simply reminding us of that obvious point. The line “sexual union… must naturally remain open to the communication of life, although this does not mean that this must be an explicit purpose of every sexual act” already shifts the center of gravity. It says in effect: the general story of the couple’s “openness to life” suffices, even if particular acts are not lived, here and now, in that procreative horizon.
The problem is not merely the framework around that sentence. The sentence itself is being used to introduce a new standard. Instead of asking whether this concrete act respects the procreative structure willed by God, Una Caro invites us to ask whether the couple’s relationship, taken as a whole, can still be described as “open to life,” even when this particular act is intentionally closed to life by contraception, withdrawal, or other means. Then it canonizes this shift by listing it as one of three “legitimate situations.”
Even the clause about not “consciously seeking” procreation at every act becomes toxic in this setting. In Wojtyła’s original context it can be read innocently: spouses are not obliged to manufacture an explicit procreative intention before every embrace, so long as the act itself remains objectively ordered to generation. In Una Caro, that phrase is torn from its framework and repurposed. It is slotted in as a “legitimate situation” precisely to suggest that the procreative meaning of the act may recede into the background, so long as the couple’s interior narrative of “conjugal charity” remains intact.
Notice the pattern.
First: “Sexual union, as a way of expressing conjugal charity, must naturally remain open to the communication of life…”
The act is defined primarily as an expression of charity, not as a kind of act with a fixed, God-given structure ordered toward generation. “Openness to life” is lowered one level down and treated as a general background condition of the relationship.
Then: “…although this does not mean that this must be an explicit purpose of every sexual act. In fact, three legitimate situations can occur…”
The category of “legitimate situations” is now built around a psychological description of intention, not around the objective moral species of acts. By the time the text quotes Wojtyła – “a conjugal act… may not necessarily be considered by them as a conscious and deliberate means of procreation” – the stage is set.
Here is the move in plain language.
The old question was whether this act, in itself, respects the procreative structure of the marital act, or whether the spouses are deliberately sterilizing it.
The new question becomes whether the act is an expression of conjugal love within a marriage that is, in some broad way, “open to life,” even when this particular act is intentionally closed to life by contraceptive means.
Once you transfer the center of gravity from the act’s God-given nature to the couple’s interior narrative, Humanae Vitae becomes a dead letter. The condemnation of contraception in that encyclical depends on the fact that the marital act has a given structure that man may not deliberately frustrate. Leo’s text keeps the old vocabulary of “openness” while preparing to hollow out its content.
That is exactly what the dissident moralists around the Pontifical Academy for Life have been calling for. And now the Wojtyła passage is waiting in Una Caro, ready to be cited as the “magisterial” bridge that lets them cross.
Lefebvre Saw This Coming
If this all feels eerily familiar, it is because the basic maneuver was warned against at Vatican II itself.
Archbishop Lefebvre recalled how the Council tried to redefine marriage by placing procreation and conjugal love on the same level:
The question is raised in the same way regarding marriage. Marriage has always been defined by its first aim which is procreation and its secondary aim which is married love. Now, at the Council they sought to alter this definition and say there was no longer a primary aim, but that the two aims of which I speak were equivalent. It was Cardinal Suenens who proposed this change and I still remem- ber Cardinal Brown, the Master General of the Dominicans, getting up to say, “Caveatis! Caveatis!--Beware! Beware! If we accept this definition we go against all the tradition of the Church and we pervert the meaning of marriage. We do not have the right to modify the Church’s traditional definitions.”
He quoted texts in support of his warning and there was great agitation in the nave of St. Peter’s. Cardinal Suenens was pressed by the Holy Father to moderate the terms he had used and even to change them. The Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, contains nevertheless an ambiguous passage, where emphasis is laid on procreation “without nevertheless minimizing the other aims of marriage.” The Latin verb, post habere, permits the translation “without putting in second place the other aims of marriage,” which would mean “to place them all on the same level.” This is what is wanted nowadays; all that is said about marriage comes back to the false idea expressed by Cardinal Suenens, that conjugal love--which was soon termed quite simply and much more crudely “sexuality”--comes at the head of the purposes of marriage. Consequently, under the heading of sexuality, everything is permitted--contraception, family planning and finally, abortion.
Una Caro is the polished, post-conciliar version of exactly that shift. It formally acknowledges fruitfulness, then spends its energy describing marriage as a “union and community of two persons,” with “conjugal charity” and “sexual union” primarily understood as interpersonal self-expression. The Wojtyła paragraph becomes the decent-looking stone you stand on while you step over Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae.
Lefebvre’s line about consequences could be written as the caption under Leo’s document: once conjugal love is recast as “sexuality” at the top of the hierarchy, “everything is permitted.”
From Francis’s Academy to Leo’s Pegoraro: The Network Behind the Text
None of this would matter if the men shaping the Church’s official bioethics were still the kind of people John Paul II appointed. They are not.
In 2016, Francis rewrote the statutes of the Pontifical Academy for Life, dissolved its membership, and rebuilt it on a new foundation. The old requirement of a pro-life oath vanished. In its place came a mix of ecumenical, interreligious, and openly heterodox figures, joined by Catholic theologians who had already spent decades undermining the very teachings the Academy had once defended.
Over this project presides Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia. Under his watch, the Academy praised experimental COVID injections built on aborted fetal lines as a kind of “communal salvation,” issued eerily tepid statements on the overturning of Roe, and began speaking of itself not as a bastion of doctrine but as a “laboratory” for moral innovation.
Now Leo has promoted Renzo Pegoraro – long-time chancellor and Paglia’s right hand – to president. Pegoraro has overseen the Academy’s shift from defending life to blurring Catholic morality into public-health rhetoric, hosting pro-abortion and pro-contraception voices, and steering its flagship 2022 volume Etica teologica della vita (Theological Ethics of Life), which openly calls for a “paradigm shift” in moral theology.
Among the key players in that project is Fr Maurizio Chiodi, a moralist appointed to the Academy and given pride of place in its conferences and publications. Chiodi treats Humanae Vitae and even parts of Casti Connubii as “reformable doctrine,” and argues that the classic category of “intrinsically evil acts” must be re-thought in light of concrete situations, intentions, and the couple’s “path.”
In other words: the Academy is no longer staffed by men who think contraception is always and everywhere gravely sinful. It is staffed by men who regard that teaching as provisional, revisable, and ripe for “development.”
When that kind of Academy reads Una Caro, they do not see a reaffirmation of tradition. They see raw material. They see paragraph 145 as the bridge text they need: Wojtyła’s name, Leo’s signature, and an interpretive framework that relocates “openness to life” from concrete acts to a vague life-story.
Fernández and the Pastoralization of Intrinsic Evil
Layered on top of the Academy’s work is Leo’s choice of doctrinal enforcer.
The man he retained at the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is Victor Manuel Fernández – famous for his earlier attempts at a kind of eroticized spirituality, and for his role in crafting Amoris Laetitia’s “internal forum” solution to the question of Communion for the divorced and “remarried.”
Fernández has already signaled that he wants a softer approach to the notion of intrinsic evil, one that gives more space to the concrete subject, their intentions, their feelings, their discernment. His instincts are entirely in line with Paglia and Chiodi.
Give a mind like that a document like Una Caro and it does not stay put.
Step one: treat Humanae Vitae’s condemnation of contraception as a high-level ideal rather than a binding negative precept.
Step two: emphasize, as Una Caro does, that the conjugal act is first of all an expressive act of love between persons, and that the couple’s “openness to life” is measured at the level of their vocation, not each particular act.
Step three: proclaim, in the style of Theological Ethics of Life, that there can be situations in which “with a wise choice” a couple may resort to contraceptives.
Step four: insist that doctrine has not changed; we simply have “deepened” our understanding and made room for pastoral discernment.
This is how the Trojan horse operates. You never get an outright encyclical saying “contraception is now good.” Instead you receive a net of cross-referenced documents where the theory remains on paper while every concrete case is quietly exempted in the name of love, discernment, and “conjugal charity.”
The Point Is Not Theoretical: Chiodi’s Contraception ‘Paradigm’.
In a public PAV lecture, Fr Maurizio Chiodi argued that in some situations the use of artificial contraception “could be recognized as an act of responsibility.” That is the key phrase. A contraceptive act, in his scheme, is not by its nature always gravely immoral. Under the right “discerned” circumstances, it can be the very thing God wants.
In the same vein, Chiodi insists that Humanae Vitae is not infallible but reformable doctrine, and that Veritatis Splendor’s list of “intrinsically evil acts” must be revisited in light of concrete situations, intentions, and the couple’s overall path.
The Pontifical Academy for Life then publishes Theological Ethics of Life, a 500-page tome produced under Paglia, with contributors like Chiodi and Casalone, which openly flirts with the idea that, in certain “conditions and practical circumstances,” spouses may, “with a wise choice,” resort to contraceptives.(...)