“Confessions” of a Priest

In the following article, a basic conflict over the idea of natural law is spelled out by one Catholic priest who is competing with others -- including the infrastructure surrounding several Popes. He has support from another priest here. The more important priest, the one who wanted to essentially dispose of the old ideas about Natural Law, is interviewed here in Italian (but translators are easy to find these days).

In an interview... Bishop Vincenzo Paglia claimed a decisive role in the dissolution of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and its replacement by a new academic entity, as well as in the radical transformation of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He also made clear that these interventions were intended to bring about a profound paradigm shift, which—for the first time—he explicitly acknowledged as affecting not only the pastoral sphere but the doctrinal one as well.

According to Paglia, this “very profound” reform entailed, above all, a rethinking of the very concept of natural law. Paglia accused the John Paul II Institute of advancing a conception of natural law understood as a set of immutable principles from which moral norms are deduced. He proposed, instead, that natural law must be grounded in an ongoing historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience. In this perspective, a “theology within history and within people’s lives” must replace what he characterized as the late Institute’s “armchair theology.”

The short quote should suffice to show that this is not a debate limited to the Catholic Church. It is the cultural debate of the last several generations in the West.