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The renowned professor of natural law spoke last week at a Rome conference, convened in response to a recent Pontifical Academy for Life publication that challenged this teaching.
VATICAN CITY — One of the world’s leading professors of the natural law has given a robust defense of the infallibility of the Church’s teaching on contraception, saying it should always be regarded by all Catholics as “certainly true,” even though “the episcopal unity that guaranteed that judgment as irreversible has subsequently shattered.”
John Finnis, professor emeritus of law and legal philosophy in the University of Oxford, explained to a conference of international Catholic theologians and jurists in Rome last month that the Church’s doctrine on contraception fulfills the four conditions required for a teaching to be infallible even if it has not been formally defined. But a “new paradigm,” driven by an alleged “consensus of the majority of moral theologians,” emerged after 1968, to justify dissenting from that teaching.
This led to a loss of unity in judgment among bishops on the infallible nature of the teaching — a fact that Finnis said “is a problem for them and for the sees they govern” but “not for the truth of a teaching” which their predecessors had been united in teaching as infallible.
Finnis, a Catholic scholar who once taught Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, was speaking at a Dec. 8-10 Rome conference entitled “A Response to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Publication: Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, Practical Challenges” co-hosted by Ave Maria University and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
VATICAN CITY — One of the world’s leading professors of the natural law has given a robust defense of the infallibility of the Church’s teaching on contraception, saying it should always be regarded by all Catholics as “certainly true,” even though “the episcopal unity that guaranteed that judgment as irreversible has subsequently shattered.”
John Finnis, professor emeritus of law and legal philosophy in the University of Oxford, explained to a conference of international Catholic theologians and jurists in Rome last month that the Church’s doctrine on contraception fulfills the four conditions required for a teaching to be infallible even if it has not been formally defined. But a “new paradigm,” driven by an alleged “consensus of the majority of moral theologians,” emerged after 1968, to justify dissenting from that teaching.
This led to a loss of unity in judgment among bishops on the infallible nature of the teaching — a fact that Finnis said “is a problem for them and for the sees they govern” but “not for the truth of a teaching” which their predecessors had been united in teaching as infallible.
Finnis, a Catholic scholar who once taught Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, was speaking at a Dec. 8-10 Rome conference entitled “A Response to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s Publication: Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, Practical Challenges” co-hosted by Ave Maria University and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Continued below.
John Finnis to Pontifical Academy for Life: Church’s Infallible Teaching Against Contraception Is ‘Certainly True’
The renowned professor of natural law spoke last week at a Rome conference, convened in response to a recent Pontifical Academy for Life publication that challenged this teaching.
