Cognitive Dissonance

Disrupts the Symphony of Truth

In July 1968 Pope Paul VI published an encyclical letter entitled Humanae Vitae (On the Transmission of Human Life) which restated once again the Church’s ancient teaching that every act of sexual intimacy between spouses should be open to new life and that sexual intimacy outside of marriage is contrary to the law and love of God. That letter was published in response to questions raised by the invention of the first oral contraceptive pill in the 1950’s, an innovation driven by Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

Some Catholics had begun to argue that the newly available pill provided a morally licit means for married couples to enjoy sexual intimacy without the possibility of conceiving a child and that the Church should acknowledge that use of the new technology was in keeping with the law and love of God. Pope Paul convened a commission to study these questions and make recommendations to him on what the Church’s response should be, and after hearing the commission’s conclusions, the pope published his letter which rejected the claim that new pill could be used by husbands and wives without sin.

Before the text of Humanae Vitae was even available to read, opposition to its teaching was being organized by Catholics throughout the Western world, and the leaders of the opposition were primarily priests and theologians. The effects of this dissent from the magisterium of the Church are still with us more than half a century later, not least because those who led the dissent have continued to hold offices in the Church and are now among the most senior clergy in the developed world. In fact, the disagreements among priests and bishops over the truth of the teaching of Humanae Vitae are so profound that a case can be made that an invisible and undeclared schism has existed within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church since the summer of ’68, and Francis Cardinal Stafford wrote a vivid description of how that schism began in one American diocese. Click here to read Stafford’s essay.

The Catholic Church is the last global institution on earth which rejects many of the claims and aims of the sexual revolution, and she continues to reject those claims and aims because they are contrary to what God has revealed for our salvation. But just as in 1968, not a few Catholics believe the Church’s teaching is false and want to see that teaching changed to accommodate the usual litany of demands for the redefinition of sexuality. This is the background for understanding the most recent eruption of dissent, and it would not normally be newsworthy except that this time the claim was made by a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ, the Archbishop of Luxembourg, who stated plainly that Catholic teaching on the moral character of same sex friendships and marriage is false and should be changed.

When a man is ordained to the diaconate, the presbyterate, or the episcopate, he must first make a profession of faith and oath of fidelity which are meant to insure that the man in question will teach only what the Catholic Church teaches and that he will teach it because he first believes it. After the Nicene Creed, the oath says that “With firm faith I also believe everything contained in God’s Word, written or handed down in Tradition and proposed by the Church, whether in solemn judgment or in ordinary and universal Magisterium, as divinely revealed and calling for faith. I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals. Moreover, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman Pontiff or the College of Bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic Magisterium, even if they proclaim those teachings by an act that is not definitive.”

Jean-Claude Hollerich, SJ has taken that oath at least four times in his life: once at each of his three ordinations and again when he became a cardinal. Either he swore a false oath at one or more of those occasions, or he has changed his mind about a matter central to the life of the Church since he became a cardinal in 2019. In either case, now that he has declared that he believes the Church is teaching falsehood about a matter it claims to be revealed by God, Cardinal Hollerich should resign all of his offices and retire to a private life of prayer and study. But of course he will not do that, just as numberless bishops and priests have not done so in the past half century even though they shared Hollerich’s conviction that the Church is teaching falsehood all the while calling it divine revelation.

The Great Apostasy which afflicts the Church in our time is caused by many things, but one of the most pernicious causes is the scandal of men and women who hold offices in the Church while rejecting the Catholic Faith in whole or in part and who refuse to acknowledge that their communion with the Church is damaged or even destroyed by their unbelief. Moreover, when lawless men have control of the administration of law in the Church, they hollow out the meaning of words and make shipwreck of the faith of others by their corruption and incoherence.

Such dissidents doubtless tell themselves that they are courageous reformers who must make a bold stand in order to lead the Church to greater clarity and purity, just as did Hermann of Wied, the Catholic Archbishop of Cologne who became a Lutheran but stayed on the job for several years despite changing sides in the titanic struggles of the 16th century. But such a claim to prophetic witness is self-serving flattery, and those who do not believe what the Catholic Church teaches to be revealed by God should admit to themselves and to everyone else that they are no longer Catholics and then move on to something else in their lives. Such candor would be far more conducive to the struggle for authentic reformation in the Church than the living lie and cognitive dissonance of rejecting what the Church believes and teaches while remaining a teacher in the Church.