(LifeSiteNews) — In his first extended interview, Leo XIV fell short of affirming the immutability of the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, and strongly implied that changes could be possible in the future.
Although more muted, he also implied that he could “change the Church’s teaching” on women’s ordination.
When discussing his approach to “LGBTQ+” issues with Elise Ann Allen of Crux Now, Leo XIV struck an uncertain note, suggesting that Church teaching could shift if attitudes changed first:
People want the Church doctrine to change, want attitudes to change. I think we have to change attitudes before we ever change doctrine.
The idea that “attitudes” must be changed before doctrine can sheds new light on the recent events in the Vatican, including the audiences with Fr. James Martin, SJ and Sr. Lucia Caram, and the LGBT pilgrimage.
He continues, and rather than stating such changes were impossible, Leo says:
I find it highly unlikely, certainly in the immediate future, that the Church’s doctrine in terms of what the Church teaches about sexuality, what the Church teaches about marriage [will change].
Later, instead of stating that the Church’s teaching could not change, he merely said that he thought that it would remain the same:
I think that the Church’s teaching will continue as it is, and that’s what I have to say about that for right now.
This language is deeply inadequate. The central points of Catholic teaching on sexual morality – including the sinfulness of homosexual acts, as well as fornication, adultery and others – are not contingent, or matters of probabilities and personal conjecture. They are definitive, grounded in both the natural law and divine revelation, and incapable of alteration.
We can know with certainty from reason alone that sexual activity outside of marriage – and thus all sexual activity between persons of the same sex – is contrary to the natural law.
This is also a dogma of the faith, as divinely revealed in Holy Scripture and proposed by the universal ordinary magisterium of the Church. Vatican I taught that such truths are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith.
READ: Pope Leo vows to ‘continue’ Francis’s ‘prophetic vision’ for the Church
Female ordination
Leo also discussed the possibility of the ordination of women to the diaconate in similar terms:
What the synod had spoken about specifically was the ordination, perhaps, of women deacons, which has been a question that’s been studied for many years now. There’ve been different commissions appointed by different popes to say, what can we do about this? I think that will continue to be an issue.
In the early Church, there was indeed an office of “deaconess” – however, it is certain that these women were not ordained to any sacramental holy order of the diaconate. However, Leo calls this into question by equating the female diaconate with that of the permanent diaconate established after the Second Vatican Council:
Just one small example. Earlier this year, when there was the Jubilee for Permanent Deacons, so obviously all men, but their wives were present. I had the catechesis one day with a fairly large group of English-speaking permanent deacons. The English language is one of the groups where they are better represented because there are parts of the world that never really promoted the permanent deaconate, and that itself became a question: Why would we talk about ordaining women to the diaconate if the diaconate itself is not yet properly understood and properly developed and promoted within the church?
He also expressed his willingness for study and debate on the matter to continue:
I am certainly willing to continue to listen to people. There are these study groups; the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has responsibility for some of those questions, they continue to examine the theological background, history, of some of those questions, and we’ll walk with that and see what comes.
However, Leo claimed to have no current intention of “changing the teaching of the Church”:
I at the moment don’t have an intention of changing the teaching of the Church on the topic. I think there are some previous questions that have to be asked.
Needless to say, this necessarily implies the possibility of “changing the teaching of the Church.”
The immutability of dogma
Vatican I denied that the Pope could change the Church’s teaching or introduce new dogmas:
For the holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles.
The Church has also excluded the possibility of changing the meaning of such dogmas on the grounds of a “development of doctrine.”
Pope Pius IX condemned the following proposition in the Syllabus of Errors:
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Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason. — (Qui pluribus, Nov. 9, 1846).
Vatican I declared:
That meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained… there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.
The same council anathematized anyone who says dogma can be assigned “a sense… different from that which the Church has understood and understands.”
Pope St. Pius X cited these teachings in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis against Modernism.
In the Oath against Modernism, he also required clergy to profess that dogma is handed down “in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport.” This oath also states that the idea “that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously” is a “heretical misrepresentation.”
READ: Pope Leo says Latin Mass question ‘very complicated’
Grave implications
Leo’s comments – particularly those about the need to for attitudes to change before doctrine can – shed a new light on the recent events in the Vatican, including the audiences with Fr. James Martin, SJ and Sr. Lucia Caram, and the LGBT pilgrimage.
But the truth is clear: homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, marriage is between one man and one woman, and these teachings cannot change.
As stated above, both the Church’s teaching on sexual morality and the immutability of dogma are the sorts of truths that Vatican I says must be believed with divine and Catholic faith; the censure attached to the obstinate denial or doubt of such truths is heresy. (Can. 751 of 1983 CIC, Can. 1325 of 1917 CIC)
We are thus left with the problematic situation of Leo XIV not only raising hopes for an impossible change of doctrine in the future, and not only claiming a power to execute such changes, but also publicly doubting (or even denying) these two sets of truths in a video interview.
