Posted on 08/09/2024 8:30:26 AM PDT by ebb tide
Heterodox Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV) member Fr. Maurizio Chiodi has repeated his dissent on Catholic teaching, stating that “we have to rethink” traditional teaching on homosexuality and contraception.
Chiodi, known for his heterodoxy regarding the Church’s teaching on sexuality, was appointed by Pope Francis as a member of the PAV in 2017 and recently named a member of the Vatican study group on “Theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues.”
In an interview with the news outlet of the German bishops, katholisch.de, Chiodi reiterated his dissent on Catholic moral teaching.
“I believe that today we need to rethink the traditional – and for our time incomprehensible – ethical considerations on homosexuality,” the Italian theologian said.
“If in the past we spoke of homosexuality as ‘contra naturam,’ (against nature) today we must ask ourselves: what does ‘natura’ mean? This Latin word has many – very different – meanings, above all the meaning of universality, and we must recognize that universality is necessary for moral knowledge.”
While Chiodi appeared to acknowledge the universality of natural law, he qualified it by claiming that morality needs to be viewed in light of the experience and “lived life of an individual conscience with its specific culture.” This kind of argument is often used by moral relativists in an attempt to downplay objectively sinful actions like homosexual acts.
“I believe that sexual difference is constitutive of human existence because it is the origin of our life: we all know that as a child, we come from a mother and a father,” Chiodi admitted. “A homosexual person does not deny this. But they do not perceive this difference as attractive to themselves.”
“This sexual orientation does not depend on their decision. We must ask ourselves: What is the possible good for such a person? The question for a homosexual person is to live their sexuality by recognizing their vocation to relationships capable of closeness, care, communion, and fidelity to the other, and by seeking the good that is concretely possible for them.”
The Catholic Church has infallibly taught that homosexual acts are always gravely sinful. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
Chiodi indirectly admitted that those who dissent from Catholic teaching on sexuality are in a “hidden schism.”
“There was an Italian Catholic philosopher, Pietro Prini, who at the end of the last century spoke of a ‘hidden schism’ in the Catholic Church, especially with regard to sexual morality,” he told katholisch.de.
Fr. Chiodi also falsely insinuated that the Catholic teaching on contraception and sexual morality can be changed, as he has done before.
When asked about the Church potentially changing its stance on contraception and sexual morality, he said: “I do not believe that we need to discard our tradition, but we do need to rethink and reformulate it, starting from the Bible, in dialog with Christians, to hear about their experiences.”
“The aim of this difficult process, with its inevitable tensions, is to find the good of God for our humanity, today, in this time,” Chiodi continued. “Theology must endeavor to propose a new style – or a ‘change of model’ – to think ethically and theologically today, both in bioethics and in some questions of sexual morality.”
The Catholic Church infallibly teaches that contraception is always gravely sinful and against natural law. In Humanae Vitae, Pope St. Paul VI condemned “any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.” The pontiff expressed this same teaching positively when he taught that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.”
In an even more solemn manner than Paul VI, Pius XII taught in Casti Connubii that “no reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may become conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.”
READ: Professor rebukes new Academy for Life member’s ‘disastrous’ approval of contraception
Ping
There are already plenty of woke churches.
If someone wants to go to one they can.
If a church goes woke you can bet your bottom dollar it will split.
Wellll,what do we expect when the Vatican is run by pro-abortion gays?????
They would have to refute the pontificate’s own theological treatise, Humanae Vitae” that they, along with the Jesuits, have been unsuccessfully frying to do lo these many years since the 1960s
They’ll fail.
Start your own church, then.
Truth does not need to be “reconsidered”!!!
Science hasn’t shown that Homosexuality is genetic or inherent.
“Science” can’t show much as it is coopted.
Genetic is doubtful. A behavior that discourages mating is not going to efficiently pass those genes.
Were there no women back in the day? If not, seems like gay would be the way.
I there were women, sorry you can’t touch that, maybe.
Remember too,a lot of priests and nuns were forced to join....Families were poor or they needed to get rid of a few kids.....Not everyone who joined wanted to be there....makes it tough to live a life you hate......
No we don’t
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