Veritatis Splendor vs. Amoris Laetitia, by Richard A. Spinello

By Richard A. Spinello, Crisis Magazine, Aug. 7, 2023

Richard A. Spinello is Professor of Management Practice at Boston College and a member of the adjunct faculty at St. John’s Seminary in Boston. He’s the author of The Encyclicals of John Paul II: An Introduction and Commentary and The Splendor of Marriage: St. John Paul II’s Vision of Love, Marriage, Family, and the Culture of Life.

Pope John Paul II’s inspiring encyclical on moral theology celebrates its 30th anniversary, but today many at the highest levels of the Church ignore or even reject its teachings.

Pope John Paul II’s inspiring encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, was promulgated thirty years ago, on August 6, 1993. The encyclical has certainly lost none of its intellectual force or deep wisdom, and it remains as pertinent today as ever. When this papal teaching first appeared, however, it was greeted with a torrent of hostility by many of the Church’s moral theologians.

Bernhard Häring (Pope Francis’ favorite moral theologian) described himself as “greatly discouraged” after reading John Paul II’s work. This is not a surprise since the pope was correcting the errors that Häring and other revisionist theologians had propagated in the Church since the end of Vatican II. As John Paul II pointed out, it was not a matter of isolated or limited dissent but a “systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine” (4). …

Continue reading >>>>