New Challenges to Humanae vitae:: Conscience and Discernment

Abstract

This essay reviews the project of revisionists and argues that some moral theologians are interpreting Amoris Laetitia as promoting a view of conscience and discernment that undermines if not abandons the constant teaching of the Church that there are universal, absolute, immutable moral norms. This essay also shows that this interpretation of Amoris Laetitia conflicts with the teaching on the nature of conscience and its relationship to the moral law as set out in key magisterial documents. M ANY OF THE CHALLENGES against Humanae vitae fifty years ago were rooted in reforms that revisionists had been advocating for years against the approach to moral theology present in the “manuals.” Revisionists (as did many traditionalists such as Pinckaers), found the manuals to be fundamentally legalistic, not personalist enough and not Christocentric. In A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century: From Confessing Sins to Liberating Conscience, James Keenan claims Humanae vitae “stymied” the progress over the manualists that was being made by the * This article has appeared in Scripta Theologica (University of Navarre) and is published by permission of the author. ** Janet E. Smith holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She is the author of Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and of The Right to Privacy and the editor of Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader. She has been published in several many academic journals and has been a regular columnist for the National Catholic Register and blogs on CatholicVote.com. She serves as a consulter to the Pontifical Council on the Family and serves on the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian unity as a member of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, III and as representative to the Faith and Order Commission for the World. More than two million copies of her talk, “Contraception: Why Not” have been distributed. 1 Servais Pinckaers, OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: The Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1995).