The ever-insightful Professor Roberto de Mattei, asking the question, “Is there still a sense of sin among the Synod Fathers?” eloquently critiques the progressivist position of the liberal agitants. It is historicism, sociology parading as theology, and a revival of the condemned “situation ethics” so popular in the psychedelic sixties and seventies.
After citing some very scandalous language from Synod progressivists, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn and Archbishop Bruno Forte, Professor de Mattei offers this critique:
As is evident from the interviews cited, the approach to the problems of the family is of a purely sociological nature, with no reference at all to principles that transcend history. Matrimony and the family for Cardinal Schönborn and Monsignor Forte are not natural institutions that have been part of the life of mankind since the beginning of civilization: institutions which have certainly come into being and dwell in history, but as they are rooted in the very nature of mankind, they are destined to survive, in every place and time, as the fundamental cell of human cohabitation. They retain that the family is subjected to the dialectic evolution of history, assuming new forms, according to the historical period and the “positive developments in society”.
The “positive language” which the Circulus germanicus cites, means that there must be no condemnation expressed by the Church, because we need to grasp the positivity in evil and sin. Properly speaking, for them, sin doesn’t exist, since every evil is an imperfect and incomplete good. These aberrations are based on deliberate confusion between the metaphysical and moral concepts of good and evil. It is clear in fact, that from the philosophical point of view, God Who is the Supreme Good, did not create anything that is evil and imperfect in the universe. Yet, in created things we also have human freedom, which renders possible in a rational being, moral estrangement from God. This aversio a Deo in the rational being is an evil that is properly defined as sin. Nevertheless the notion of sin is absent in the Cardinal’s view, just as it is in the special secretary’s.
By denying the existence of the intrinsece malum, Cardinal Schönborn is denying moral truths like those according to which “there exist acts which, per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object” (John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Reconciliatio et paenitentia, n. 17) and rejects in toto the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, promulgated precisely to reaffirm the existence of absolute morals, against the resurgence of “situation ethics”. In this perspective, not only is the notion of Divine and natural law as the root and foundation of moral order dissolved, but also the [very] notion of human freedom. Freedom is in fact the primary subjective root of morality, just as the natural and Divine law constitutes its objective form. Without the Divine and natural law, good and evil cease to exist, since the natural law is what allows the intelligence to know the truth and the will to love the good. Freedom and law are two inseparable entities in the moral order.
