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This abandonment of theological sanity and pastoral responsibility coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, in which German bishops played significant roles.
When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor(The Splendor of Truth), dealt a severe blow to the pride of many German theologians, who had long thought themselves the cutting edge of Catholic intellectual life.
Indeed, within a year of the encyclical’s publication, a book composed entirely of essays critical of John Paul’s deeply humanistic explication of Catholic teaching on the path to happiness and beatitude was published in Germany — because, its editor explained, Germany had a special obligation to police the Church’s theological precincts. Who had appointed German theologians to this supervisory role was left unstated. So was the idea that seemed to undergird much of the German Catholic intellectual resistance to John Paul II: German theologians must be smarter than a Pole.
German resistance to the papal magisterium antedated John Paul II, of course; it would be hard to find a prominent German theologian (or bishop, for that matter) who defended Pope Paul VI after he issued the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility. But much has changed since then, and the locus of progressive Catholic revisionism in moral theology has shifted from contraception to homosexuality.
And now the German resistance to the truths taught by Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor has metastasized into what seems to be an embrace of the claims of gender ideology and the “trans” movement by most of the country’s bishops.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor(The Splendor of Truth), dealt a severe blow to the pride of many German theologians, who had long thought themselves the cutting edge of Catholic intellectual life.
Indeed, within a year of the encyclical’s publication, a book composed entirely of essays critical of John Paul’s deeply humanistic explication of Catholic teaching on the path to happiness and beatitude was published in Germany — because, its editor explained, Germany had a special obligation to police the Church’s theological precincts. Who had appointed German theologians to this supervisory role was left unstated. So was the idea that seemed to undergird much of the German Catholic intellectual resistance to John Paul II: German theologians must be smarter than a Pole.
German resistance to the papal magisterium antedated John Paul II, of course; it would be hard to find a prominent German theologian (or bishop, for that matter) who defended Pope Paul VI after he issued the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility. But much has changed since then, and the locus of progressive Catholic revisionism in moral theology has shifted from contraception to homosexuality.
And now the German resistance to the truths taught by Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor has metastasized into what seems to be an embrace of the claims of gender ideology and the “trans” movement by most of the country’s bishops.
Continued below.
German Bishops’ Conference, Over the Cliff
COMMENTARY: This abandonment of theological sanity and pastoral responsibility coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, in which German bishops played significant roles.
