The Mind of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Pope Benedict XVI

Morality in our time: Neuralgic issues: Sexuality & Women in Ministry

Monsignor Michael J. Cantley

            In today’s cultural climate the theologian is forced to walk a thin line between the expectations of the modern world and fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church.  To the first he hopes to speak in ways that will be heard (but he/she is also acculturated to the mind-set of the times and has to be self-critical enough to factor out those things which, though predictably popular and desired by his/her time, are at variance with the truth of Christ, the only valid criterion by which any theologian does his/her work); to the second the theologian owes either the obedience of faith or religious acceptance as does any other Catholic believer.  The theologian has the task of articulating the Revelation of God to the world whose zeitgeist is secular, pragmatic, relativistic, divorced from ontological moorings and unused to thinking in terms of ultimate goals and eternal values.  At the same time, the theologian must work within a faith community.  For the Catholic theologian that means guidance by the magistrium: “which presupposes that Christianity, especially in its Catholic variety, has a determinate content and thus confronts our thinking with a prior given, which cannot be manipulated at will and which alone gives the theologian’s words their distinctive significance above and beyond all purely political or philosophical discourse.”[1]  Given that the Magisterium is somewhat out of favor these days, especially in moral issues and even with a number of Catholic theologians, and that the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (henceforth CDF) has been labeled with undignified epithets, it is important to note from Cardinal Ratzinger’s words that the Magisterium’s corroboration with the theologians conclusions gives them the added strength of ecclesial approval.  From our lecture on the Church it should be recalled that Cardinal Ratzinger has a deep conviction that the theologian is not working with his/her own creation but with what essentially belongs to God.  Theology tries to understand His Revelation and articulate it to the world using its languages, cultures and addressing its current questions and concerns in the light of God’s revealed purpose. 

            In his autobiographical work Milestones,[2] cardinal Ratzinger reveals his preference for St. Augustine’s personalism over against the “crystal clear logic” of St. Thomas Aquinas that seemed “closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made.”[3]  He found the current neo-Thomism “too far afield from my own questions.”[4]  He favored a return to the sources of Christianity in order to measure the current culture against them and thus discover true and authentic Christian teaching.  This is not the pattern of thought that had captured the mentality of many great theologians like Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan and Edward Schillebeeckx who, in line with Aquinas, “proposed and attempted a positive engagement with modern intellectual and cultural movements.”[5]  Their reason for their choice of theologizing was the radically changed mind-set of the post-Vatican II Church.  At one time in the Church’s now past history, theology could draw on a common theological heritage and a philosophical tradition that had its focus on an objective reality commonly acknowledged.  Now: “Theology can no longer presuppose that common cultural and intellectual heritage.  Through various stages, philosophy abandoned the ontological and metaphysical attitude that once marked it.  It became fascinated with phenomena and from emerging natural science borrowed positivistic interest in facts as they appear; it grounded itself now, not in the reality of things, but in reflections on human consciousness…‘Truth’ now refers not to reality given, nor to what has been done, but to what remains to be done…The tragedy of post-Vatican II theology is that…it has turned…to various forms of modern philosophy…lost its critical distance and …has become a handmaiden of various forms of positivism…”[6] This is a serious tragedy for the Church since it signals that it has lost its identity and sense of mission, becoming indistinguishable from the culture it has been called to enlighten, enliven and save. 

            The major “crisis of faith” today is certainly to be found in the field of moral teaching and the implementation of, or failure to accept the Church’s direction in this field.  Cardinal Ratzinger believes: “It is nourished by the moral crisis of mankind, and at the same time intensifies this crisis.”[7]  When looking for an explanation, he refers to a modern trend within Christianity to attend primarily to orthopraxy (authentic action) rather than to orthodoxy (authentic teaching), a mistake that separates action from fundamental belief/conviction and opens the door to pragmatism – attending to what works, what the market of current culture and opinion will accept –- thus clouding the more fundamental concern about right and wrong.  Ratzinger offers an interesting example to support his contention that when actions are divorced from principle Christians have often acted in ways that fail to put their moral doctrine first and act according to its dictates.  His example is the resolution of the problem of racial injustice and the establishing of ‘racial equality’ through law when it should never have been an issue had Christians taken their faith to heart.  “Here”, he says, “we see the practical question becoming the touchstone for the truth of doctrine, a test case for the Christian position; where ‘orthopraxy’ is scandalously lacking, ‘orthodoxy’ becomes questionable.”[8]  Another factor, he avers is that: “the trend toward ‘praxis’ lies in various strains of ‘political theology’ which are in turn variously motivated.”[9]  This way of thinking leads to positivism where “truth is felt to be unattainable, and the insistence on truth is regarded as a ploy of interest groups seeking to confirm their position.”[10]  The challenge laid to Christianity by today’s culture is, again, orthopraxy, a mandate to formulate a code of ethics that would leave theory, principle, eternal law and natural law out of the picture.  Obviously such an ethic would have no room for a teaching authority that sees action and decision as based on a given, sees morality from within and antecedent to implementation through choice and decision.  The fundamental flaw in this challenge is that moral error is discovered only through hind-sight; only the post factum judgment sheds light on whether the decision made should be continued or rejected as harmful.  Ratzinger expresses this: “a teaching authority that would formulate an already-given truth concerning man’s authentic praxis and that would measure man’s performance against this truth would be banished to the negative side of reality as a hindrance to creative and forward-looking praxis.”[11]  Yet, even here, the need for some authority becomes a practical necessity, a position he notes arose from issues raised by Marxist philosophy itself.  He points out that in the practical order “praxis needs reflection; so the linking of Marxist praxis to the Party’s ‘teaching authority’ is completely logical.”[12]  To draw this out further, experience suggests that orthopraxy without reflective principles to guide concrete action are too haphazard and chancy to be fruitful.       

            To fill out the picture of moral confusion as it is expressed today, Cardinal Ratzinger addresses a movement at the opposite extreme of the position that identifies Christianity in terms of orthopraxy.  This position denies that there is such a thing “as a specifically Christian morality and that Christianity must take its norms of conduct from the anthropological insights of its time.  Faith does not supply any independent source of moral norms, but points insistently to the future.  Nothing that is not ratified by the future can be maintained by faith.”[13]  Those who offer this point of view assert that faith does not develop its own morality but adopts it from the existing culture.[14]  Such a position would obviously obviate the possibility of identifying any morality as specifically Christian since its only source is human reason and its only context the changing moral forms adopted from changing historical circumstances.  The teleological, or end-directed thrust of Christian moral teaching is eliminated.

            Certainly there are analogies between the moral precepts of ancient Judaism and the even more ancient cultures surrounding her, and there are philosophical teachings from the pagan world that influenced and aided the expression of moral doctrine in the St. Paul’s writings and in early Christianity – Stoicism would be one example.  But Judaic and/or Christian originality is to be found not in individual details or similarities of particular moral judgments but in the total vision that forges, explicates and applies the moral teaching guided and inspired by the God of Abraham who is also the God of Christian believers.  The Ten Commandments formulate God’s will for His people of both Testaments: “for Israel the Ten Commandments are part of the concept of God.  They are not supplementary to faith, to the Covenant; they show who this God is, with whom Israel stands in covenantal relationship.”[15]  They reflect and attest to God’s ‘holiness,’ a concept that speaks of God’s transcendent ‘Otherness’: “the specific atmosphere of divinity, yielding particular rules for encountering it.”[16]  The Commandments are the Creator’s directives for use, how His product will be able to attain its fullness of being.  In Christianity, the notion is deepened.  “Christians do not merely adopt a theory about Jesus, but enter into his way of living and dying and make it their own.”[17] Paul’s expression is apposite: “in him (God) we live and move and have our being.”[18]  Morality, then, is not an appendix with flexible and variable content, but the expression of faith inseparable from the very core and heart of that faith.  If one reads Paul, the only conclusion one can come to is that he does not theorize but teaches what faith demands.  There is and must be an absolute “normative tradition [an apostolic exhortation which] is expounded as it applies to the particular situation.”[19]  Cardinal Ratzinger concludes: “orthodoxy without orthopraxy fails to reach the core of Christian faith…Faith’s praxis depends on faith’s truth, in which man’s truth is made visible and lifted up to a new level by God’s truth.”[20]  It is here, precisely, that our fallible human reason needs sure guidance and finds it is the Spirit guided Magisterium (this, too, is a faith statement in itself).

            Cardinal Ratzinger worried about the “cultural imperialism”[21] of Europe and the United States.  This term acknowledges the cultural power of and ability for these advanced peoples to export culture and ideas/ideals to less developed countries and cultures.  The power and comfort of these superior cultures tempt other nations to emulate them, and their wealth gives them the means to influence the rest of the world to a degree not previously attainable.  Hence he says: “In a world like the West, where money and wealth are the measure of all things, and where the model of the free market imposes its implacable laws on every aspect of life, authentic Catholic ethics now appears to many like and alien body…Economic liberalism creates its exact counterpart, permissivism, on the moral plane.”[22]  The challenge is “to present Catholic morality as reasonable,”[23] a difficult task when the audience is “conditioned by the dominant culture with which not a few ‘Catholic’ moralists have aligned themselves as influential supporters.”  He continues with the theme: “These moral theologians of the Western Hemisphere, in their effort to still remain ‘credible’ in our society, find themselves facing difficult alternatives: it seems to them that they must choose between opposing modern society and opposing the Magisterium…consequently they set out on a search for theories and systems that allow compromises.”[24]  This has led to new approaches in moral thinking: a “so called ‘morality of ends’ – or as it is preferred in the United States where it is particularly developed and diffused – of ‘consequences’, consequentialism: Nothing in itself  is good or bad, the goodness of an act depends entirely upon its end and upon it foreseeable and calculated consequences.  After becoming aware of the problematic character of such a system, some moralists have attempted to tone down ‘consequentialism’ to proportionalism: moral conduct depends upon the evaluation and weighing of the proportion of goods that are involved.”[25]  The problem with these systems is that their only means of verification is “individual evaluation”.  Traditional morality has, of course, always factored in the proportion of good to be attained vis-à-vis the evil consequences that may also be present – e.g., the principle of the double effect where the good outcome must not come for the evil of the action, the requirement that good outweighs the evil consequence, that the evil is not directly willed but only allowed as unavoidable and that the act performed is itself morally good or at least indifferent.  The conditions for a ‘just war’ may also exemplify proportionality.  The point that Cardinal Ratzinger is making is that the compromises of consequentialism and/or proportionalism have built their whole moral system on what is only a part, a factor in traditional moral judgment.

Specific Moral issues:

            We have already noted Cardinal Ratzinger’s preference for Augustinian and Bonaventurian thought because of its emphasis on the person.  Personalism respects the individual human being in his/her existence from the moment of conception till natural death, and beyond to eternal life.  Hence, since our future with God is the goal of our existence and is mortgaged by all and each of our free will decisions, moral teaching is given great importance in divine Revelation.  God has given us “‘instruction for use’ inscribed by him objectively and indelibly in his creation”.[26]  This we call Natural Moral Law.  It is important to emphasize the word moral in speaking about natural law because the media consistently reports scientific findings from the field of animal life and translates them directly into human experience and action.  Medically, much can be learned from experimentation in the animal kingdom and made useful in treating physical ailments in human beings.  But in the field of moral action the radically central factor of free will is always in play.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “This law is called ‘natural,’ not in reference to the nature of irrational beings, but because reason which decrees it properly belongs to human nature.”[27]  Even the pagan philosopher Cicero attests to the uniqueness of natural moral law: “For there is a true law: right reason.  It is in conformity with nature, is diffused among all men, and is immutable and eternal; its orders summon to duty; its prohibitions turn away from offense…To replace it with a contrary law is a sacrilege; failure to apply even one of its provisions is forbidden; no one can abrogate it entirely.”[28]

            It is necessary to attend to the unique application of the expression ‘natural law’ when applied to moral action to counter the impression that is often given in media reportage of some scientific discoveries.  Recently, there was reportage of an experiment in altering a gene in a fruit fly causing the female to act male in courting, and an altered male to act in female fashion.  The report went on to suggest an immediate transfer to the human scene as a possible explanation for homosexuality, forgetting that the gene system of the human is far more complicated than that of the fruit fly.  There may, of course be a genetic cause for homosexual orientation, but even that does not change the moral character of homosexual activity any more than heterosexuality allows sexual exchange outside of marriage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which reflects Cardinal Ratzinger’s thought, acknowledges: “the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible.  This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial.”[29]  The teaching demands that homosexual people be accorded respect, compassion and sensitivity and rejects every act of unjust discrimination.  Yet, “homosexual persons are called to chastity”[30] as is everyone else.  “Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered …They are contrary to the natural law…Under no circumstance can they be approved.”[31]  Obviously, and on this teaching, same-sex marriage can never be approved.  In his address on June 9, 2005, to the Congress on the Family for the Diocese of Rome, entitled the “Anthropological Foundation of the Family,” Pope Benedict XVI was exceeding clear on this point: “Marriage and the family are not a casual sociological construct, fruit of a particular historical and economic situation.  On the contrary, the question of the right relationship between man and woman sinks its roots in the most profound essence of the human being, and can only find its answer in the latter…The different present forms of the dissolution of marriage, as well as free unions and ‘trial marriages,’ including the pseudo-marriage between persons of the same sex (emphasis added), are on the contrary expressions of anarchic freedom that appears erroneously as man’s liberation.  A pseudo-freedom like this is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably includes the trivialization of man.”[32]  The Holy Father also addresses this and other issues regarding sexuality in his former position as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).  He indicates that the “rupture between sexuality and marriage has separated it from procreation ending up with the situation  that now obtains with startling frequency where procreation is effected without sexuality through the medical technology now available.  This ‘biological manipulation’ is striving to uncouple man from nature…to transform man, to manipulate him as one does a ‘thing’: he is nothing but the product planned according to one’s pleasure.”[33]  Sex has become a recreational sport (with a spectator component through pornography).  Moreover “all forms of sexual gratification are transformed into the ‘rights’ of the individual…an especially current example, homosexuality becomes an inalienable right.”[34]  In this same way, same-sex marriage is being argued as a ‘right’ for the homosexual couple.

            The sacredness of marriage and the family, the indissolubility of a valid sacramental marriage, the openness of marital intercourse to the procreation of children, the sinfulness of pre-marital and extra-marital sex, the grievous evil of abortion are all issues that are so firmly a part of Catholic moral teaching that no one can reasonably expect a change.  And, while celibacy is a law of the Church, a sentence in Pope Benedict’s recent address to his diocesan Congress on the family precludes any expectation that a change here is likely: “The option for virginity for love of God and of brothers, which is required for the priesthood and consecrated life, is accompanied by the appreciation of Christian marriage: one and the other, with two different and complementary forms, make visible in a certain sense the mystery of the covenant between God and his people.”[35]  Again, as Prefect of CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger had a hand in the formation and issuing of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which reiterates the requirement of celibacy[36] and notes that in the Eastern Catholic Churches married men may be ordained, but bishops are selected from the celibate clergy and a widowed priest may not remarry.[37]

Women in the Church

            The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches unflinchingly: “In creating men ‘male and female’, God gives man and woman an equal personal dignity.  Man is a person, man and woman equally so, since both were created in the image and likeness of the personal God.”[38]  In another place, the Catechism continues: “Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.”[39]  These teachings, which Cardinal Ratzinger allowed into this Catechism and which were approved by Pope John Paul II set the stage for a review of Cardinal Ratzinger’s own mind-set with regard to women and place his words in their proper context: “It is primarily woman who most harshly suffers the consequences of the confusion, of the superficiality of a culture that is the fruit of masculine attitudes of mind, masculine ideologies, which deceive woman, uproot her in the depths of her being, while claiming that in reality they want to liberate her.”[40]  He is talking about an attitude he labels “radical feminism” which on the surface presents itself as noble and logical in seeking to erase all differences and admit women to all of life’s possibilities (including, in regard to the Catholic Church, ordination).  But this radical feminism forgets the price the woman would pay, the suppression of her femininity and therefore forego a fundamental mark of her personhood.  It trivializes sexuality.  Equality of woman with man has already been stated, and now Ratzinger avers: “it is necessary to go to the bottom of the demand that radical feminism draws from the widespread modern culture, namely, the ‘trivialization’ of sexual specificity that makes every role interchangeable between man and woman.”[41]  It ws noted above that when sex is detached from its God-given purpose of expressing the complimentarity of man and woman and effecting the procreation of the human family  through committed life-long love, it deteriorates into a recreational and spectator sport, or it becomes an instrument for domination.  Now the Cardinal points out: “the whole being and the whole activity of the human person are reduced to pure functionality, to the pure role…to something that does not directly regard the respective sex.  It is not by chance that among he battles of ‘liberation’ of our time there has also been that of escaping from the ‘slavery of nature’, demanding the right to be male or female at one’s will or pleasure, for example, through surgery…If everything is only a culturally and historically conditioned ‘role,’ and not a natural specificity inscribed in the depth of being, even motherhood is a mere accidental function.”[42]  Surely the evidence that supports these words of the Cardinal, now Pope, are all around us in surrogate motherhood, sex-change operations, cloning, stem-cell experimentation through cloning, artificial insemination, and who know what the future will bring?

            One of the issues Cardinal Ratzinger was forced to address was the agitation for the ordination of women to the Catholic priesthood.  The issue had already elicited a response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith when Cardinal Franjo Seper,[43] Ratzinger’s predecessor, was Prefect.  In 1976 the Congregation issued its document Inter Insigniores (Declaration on the Question of Admitting Women to the Sacred Ministry).  It answered that question about the ordination of women negatively.  Ratzinger was a consultant at the time and must have had a hand in the Declaration’s formulation.  He stated about the document that “it marked by a certain dryness: it goes to conclusions without being able to justify all of the individual steps leading to them with the requisite fullness of detail.”[44]  The CDF document of 1976 concluded: “one cannot see how it is possible to propose the admission of women to the priesthood in virtue of the equality of rights of the human person, an equality which holds good also for Christians.”[45]  The document notes that supporters of women’s ordination have a penchant for quoting Galatians 3:38 to the effect that in Christ “there is neither male nor female…all are one.”  The document comments that this is a misappropriation of the text that does not speak to ministries but “only affirms the universal calling to divine filiation, which is the same for all…The priesthood is not conferred for the honor or advantage of the recipient, but for the service of God and the Church.  [It continues] a vocation cannot be reduced to a mere attraction, which can be purely subjective.  [It] is a particular ministry of …the Church [whose] authentication…is indispensable and a constitutive part of the vocation.”[46]  Pope John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Ordination sacerdotalis of 1994 refers to this CDF document and Pope Paul VI’s approval of its teaching and concludes: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all of the Church’s faithful.”[47]  In comment, Cardinal Ratzinger expresses conviction “that the Catholic Church and the Eastern Churches will defend their faith and their concept of the priesthood, thereby defending in reality both men and women in their totality as well as in their irreversible differentiation into male and female, hence in their irreducibility to simple function or role.”[48] 

            No one should expect this Papacy of Benedict XVI to reverse the teachings regarding priesthood as they have to do with the ordination of women or of celibacy as a requirement for men seeking to become priests.  There are already married men who have been ordained to priesthood in the Latin Church. They are former Protestant clergy who have come into full membership in the Catholic Church and have asked and been approved for ordination.  Will this expand?  We will have to wait and see.  One can at the moment, however, quote nothing that would suggest such an expansion for reasons beyond what has already been stated.  With regard to the denial of ordination for women one may hope for more convincing reasons to be forthcoming.[49]  Finally, it would be wrong and fruitless to expect any change in the way of mitigation of Church teaching on matters de sexto issues about the sacredness of human life and its preservation.