As many of you have probably heard by now, last week, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) officially notified Mercy Sister and professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Yale Divinity School Margaret Farley that her work “cannot be used as a valid expression of Catholic teaching, either in counseling or formation, or in ecumenical or interreligious dialogue.”
This action is a pretty big deal. Professor Farley is one of the most well-known and highly regarded theologians of her generation. Her book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, is a contemporary classic. It is a book that every Catholic ethicist reads and takes seriously.
Farley wrote Just Love in order to make Catholic moral theology more just. Although the virtue of justice has been central to Catholic moral reflection on war, politics, economics, and civil order, it had been relatively peripheral to Catholic reflection on sexual ethics. If relationships of war and economic exchange ought to have justice, then shouldn’t justice also be present in sexual relationships? Put another way, if it is true that unjust wars are immoral wars, wouldn’t it also be the case that unjust sexual relationships are similarly immoral? In order to correct for this under-appreciation of the importance of justice as a sexual virtue, Farley offers a framework for crafting a sexual ethics based on “justice in loving and in the actions which flow from that love.” (207).
Farley is in trouble not so much for her “methodology of more justice,” but for the conclusions reached via this methodology. She is in trouble with the CDF because she thinks that masturbation is usually not immoral, that same-sex relationships can be good, that these relationships ought to be afforded legal recognition and protection, and that divorce is both possible and (sometimes) morally acceptable.
Rather than discussing the merits of Farley’s theology, I want to reflect on the CDF’s reasons for critiquing her.
According to the CDF, the root cause of Farley’s erroneous thinking is that “she does not present a correct understanding of the role of Church’s Magisterium as the teaching authority of the Bishops united with the Successor of Peter, which guides the Church’s ever deeper understanding of the Word of God as found in Holy Scripture and handed on faithfully in the Church’s living tradition.”
In other words, Farley is wrong because she doesn’t realize that the bishops and the pope are always right. The CDF also seems to be implying that anyone who disagrees with the bishops united with the pope will always commit moral error because the bishops united with the pope are always right.
But is this true? Have the bishops united with the pope always been right? Have they always been guides or have they also at times been followers, the recipients of enlightenment as well as its protectors?
The CDF is definitely right about one thing: the church has come to an “ever deeper understanding of the Word of God” on several occasions throughout history: it has changed its mind about the soteriological status of Israel, the status of religious freedom as a universal human right, the conditional acceptability of usury, the equality of women to men, and the unconditional evil of slavery, to name a few. But have these changes come about through the moral leadership of the bishops united with the pope as the CDF claims?
For most of the church’s history, the question was not whether slavery itself was wrong but when and under what circumstances it was right. Augustine thought that slavery was a just punishment for original sin and Aquinas thought that slavery was just, natural, and socially necessary. Many popes had slaves–Pope Alexander VI even gave all of Africa to Portugal and America to Spain with the explicit command to enslave all those who didn’t bow down to Iberian authority. Even the great advocate of Indian liberation, Bartolomé de las Casas, did not think slavery was always wrong: he railed against the enslavement of the Indians but did not always take issue with the enslavement of Turks or Africans.
Long before the bishops and pope became united in their opposition to slavery, humanists and Protestants like William Wilberforce recognized that slavery was always wrong. Even more impressively, Haitian revolutionaries, some of them Muslims, many of them adherents of African traditional religions, but none of them bishops or popes, recognized the unconditional immorality of slavery in the waning moments of the eighteenth century, a time when Catholic bishops and popes were still convinced that slavery could be just in certain circumstances. The bishops united with the pope would not categorically condemn slavery until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
Let’s take another, even more dramatic instance of radical change, the church’s changed stance on sexual equality, chronicled in greater detail in this earlier WIT post.
As recently as 1930, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Casti Connubii, railed against the burgeoning women’s rights movement, re-affirming “the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience” to her husband (27). Importantly, Pope Pius XI did not think this subjection to be something that was necessary only in certain times or places but instead was the “fundamental law” of the family that was “established and confirmed by God, [and] must always and everywhere be maintained intact” (28).
Now, of course, the church insists upon the equality of women to men (JPII) and rejects male headship, calling instead for mutual submission of the spouses (Benedict XVI).
In other words, John Paul II and Benedict XVI disagree with practically every pope that came before them.
Did the church, as implied by the CDF, acquire this enlightenment through the guidance of the bishops united with the pope?
As evidenced by the encyclical Casti Connubii, there was a period of time in which the Catholic magisterium (defined as the bishops united with the pope) was insisting, with increasing vehemence, that women were not equal to men, while other people, most of them women, and only some of them catholic, were insisting, with equally increasing boldness, that women were in fact equal to men.
When early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Sojourner Truth declared the sexual equality of women to men (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively) at a time when the Catholic church was insisting upon the divinely-ordained subordination of women to men, who was right? Either the bishops were wrong when Truth was right or women became equal to men only after John Paul II declared them so in the 1970s.
Clearly, we cannot conclude that women became equal to men only after John Paul declared them so—this would be a type of voluntarism. Except, instead of something being good because God decrees it such, we would have to conclude that something is good because the pope decrees it such, a proposition that is not just anti-thomistic, but idolatrous.
On the issues of slavery and women’s equality, it was not the bishops united with the pope who shed the light of moral truth on a half-blind humanity. Instead, it could be argued that, on these issues, these men were among the last ones to see the light.
So, in reading the CDF’s Notification of Margaret Farley, I wonder how history would have been different if Haitian revolutionaries and early feminists had waited on the moral guidance of the Catholic magisterium. If women like Sojourner Truth had not disobeyed and disagreed with the hierarchy, would the hierarchy still be insisting on the inequality of women to men? Would John Paul II have changed his mind if women like Mary Wollstonecraft had not dared to speak hers?
It is no coincidence that the church began thinking about slavery differently after the crusading work of abolitionists and former slaves. It is no coincidence that the church recognized women’s equality to men nearly 120 years after the start of the women’s rights movement. In changing the world, feminists and abolitionists (only some of them Catholic) also changed the church. John Paul II, the first pope to declare the definitive equality of women to men, was a recipient of the moral guidance of countless women and men who came before him.
Although disobedience provides no guarantee of righteousness, might it be the case that the ability of the bishops and pope to come to this ever-deepening understanding of the Word of God actually depends upon their being disobeyed by moral pioneers like Haitian slaves and nineteenth century feminists?
Where would the church be without those who defy it?
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