Alison (pictured) commented in a recent virtual conversation on the website ‘Outreach' in its monthly series of virtual talks ‘Outspoken.'

In the conversation with Fr James Martin, SJ, Alison discussed natural law and conscience, important topics for all Catholics, but especially for LGBTQ Catholics who often face arguments against them using these concepts.

"The notion of natural law is something that is absolutely essential to Christianity," Alison said.

But, he says, we must remember that part of what the Holy Spirit does is make us "participants, on a very small scale, in understanding what creation, which is much more than us, is actually about."

But Alison noted that natural law has, unfortunately, been used in some cases primarily to restrict people, especially LGBTQ people.

However, homosexuality is now seen as what Alison calls a "non-pathological minority variant in the human condition."

And from the moment it becomes clear that some people are bearers of this minority variant, "which is neither good nor bad," their way of being is "going properly to flourish starting with that, instead of in spite of that."

Becoming children of God

Alison also discussed conscience, emphasising that we are becoming children of God rather than mere servants. "I no longer call you servants…but friends," as Jesus says in the Gospel (Jn 15:15).

Alison sees this as a fundamental insight.

We are, all of us, in the process of becoming children of God.

This doesn't mean that we are perfect, but that we can learn to do things wrong and then do things better—much as a child might do under the care of a loving parent.

Alison said love plays a significant role in this process. "Love turns you into who you really are going to be," he says.

In God's eyes, "the ‘you who I'm calling you to be' has to do with how you learn to give yourself away."

Alison also spoke about what it means for LGBTQ people to encounter "discord" with some aspects of church documents and offered pastoral advice about how natural law and conscience can be understood in this context.

Sources

• Outreach

This makes it somewhat ironic that, during his pontificate, Benedict XVI found himself delivering a series of tightly argued addresses, all of which emphasized the West's need to return to right reason in the fullest sense of that word.

These speeches and their implications for law and democracy are explored in a collection of essays entitled Pope Benedict XVI's Legal Thought: A Dialogue on the Foundation of Law, edited by Marta Cartabia and Andrea Simoncini.

The flight from right reason, so apparent in Western culture and Christian life since the 1960s, has long worried many Jewish and Christian scholars.

The 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, for instance, can only be fully understood against the background of efforts by some moral theologians—many of whom, such as the late Josef Fuchs SJ, were not coincidentally from the German-speaking world—to maintain the language of natural law while infusing it with consequentialist and proportionalist argumentation to legitimize positions clearly contrary to longstanding Christian teaching concerning exceptionless moral absolutes.

Perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of Pope Benedict's efforts to restore reason to its proper place in the West and religious intellectual life more generally was his willingness to go, as another pope often says, to "the peripheries" to make his case. Put another way, to the extent that what some people call "the Benedict Option" involves Christians disengaging from a thoroughly secularized public square and declining to present arguments based on public reason, the sixteenth Pope Benedict was not inclined to embrace this approach. Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute, from an article by Samuel Gregg, Research Director at the Acton Institute.
• Image: Ignatius Insight

Basically, it's a system of principles that guides human life in accordance with our nature and our good, insofar as those can be known by natural reason.

It thereby promotes life the way it evidently ought to be, based on what we are and how the world is, from the standpoint of an intelligent, thoughtful, and well-intentioned person.

It's much the same, at least in basic concept, as what classical Western thinkers called life in accordance with nature and reason, and the classical Chinese called the Tao (that is, the "Way").

We might think of it as a system that aims at moral and social health and well-being—which, like physical health, can at least in principle be largely understood apart from revelation.

For that reason, natural law has seemed to many Catholic thinkers the obvious basis for a society that would be pluralistic but nonetheless just, humane, and open to the specific contributions of Christianity.

There's something to that view. Grace completes rather than replaces nature, so natural law includes basic principles of Christian morality.

Also, political life depends on discussion and willing cooperation based on common beliefs. It would be best if those beliefs reflected the whole truth about man and the world—and politics were therefore Catholic—but people who run things today don't accept that and don't seem likely to do so any time soon.

Even so, it might be possible for a governing consensus to form around the principles or at least concept of natural law.

The idea of government in accordance with man's nature and natural good could then give discussion a reference point and some degree of coherence even though disagreements over important issues would remain. Continue reading

Sources:

• The Catholic World Report, from an article by James Kalb, a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
• Image: The Evening, Caspar David Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons.

Fr Thomas Reese said "for anyone familiar with the 1980 synod on the family, reading the new [document] fosters a feeling of déjà vu".

The same issues are discussed, the same factors are blamed for problems and the same solutions are proposed, he argued on the National Catholic Reporter website.

"Granted the return of all these old topics in the new 'instrumentum laboris', one could conclude that the 1980 synod on the family was a failure, but it is not clear how this new synod will do any better," Fr Reese wrote.

He did concede that "unlike the 1980 instrumentum laboris, this new working document does not blame dissident theologians for the failure of the laity to accept Church teaching on sexual ethics".

"Rather, it admits that the sexual abuse crisis and lavish living by clerics have hurt the Church's moral credibility."

Fr Reese singled out one problematic area in which the document admits the Church is struggling to defend its teaching in the court of public opinion.

The Church for centuries has used the concept of "natural law" to defend its teaching, but the working paper confesses that "the concept of natural law today turns out to be, in different cultural contexts, highly problematic, if not completely incomprehensible".

As a result, "the natural law is perceived as an outdated legacy", the document laments.

It reports that "in not only the West, but increasingly every part of the world, scientific research poses a serious challenge to the concept of nature".

"Evolution, biology and neuroscience, when confronted with the traditional idea of the natural law, conclude that it is not 'scientific'."

Fr Reese observed that the working document admits this has serious consequences for Church teaching.

"The demise of the concept of the natural law tends to eliminate the interconnection of love, sexuality and fertility, which is understood to be the essence of marriage," the working paper says.

In the October synod, bishops will discuss feedback from the Vatican questionnaire sent out last year.

Another larger synod next year will formulate proposals on Church action to be forwarded to the Pope.

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Catholic Herald
• Image: PBS