ROME, July 9, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Vatican Radio, styling itself “the Voice of the Pope and the Universal Church,” has reported uncritically the recently published views of an Italian priest and moral theologian calling on the Church to rise from “the long and oppressive shadow of her sex-negative tradition.” Adding to the controversy, the Vatican story ran under a large and provocative picture of two beautiful, young, slender women kissing.
Father Martin Lintner, a professor at Brixen Theology College and president of the Internation Network of Societies for Catholic Theology (INSECT for short) and the European Society for Catholic Theology, made his pro-homosexuality comments in Die Furche (the Furrow), a German-language theology journal, under the suggestive title, “Good? Evil?—Beyond?” on July 1.
Vatican Radio’s German edition put up its précis the very next day, under the headline “Moral theology: the Church’s sexual teaching is in flux.”
Within days, the picture was removed from the article, then it was back, and then again by July 8 it was gone. The editor of the German edition of Vatican Radio, Father Bernd Hagenkord, however, made it clear he disagreed with the criticism the article and picture had attracted. Perhaps the picture was ill-chosen, he admitted in a blog post, but publishing Lintner’s opinion “was not really a scandal.”
Lintner presented his piece as very much in the spirit both of Pope Francis’ early comments to the effect of “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” and of the midpoint report from last year’s Synod on the Family. The latter report was actually the work of a liberal minority, and drew much opposition from the Synod fathers. It spoke of the “gifts” that homosexuality can bring to the Church.
Lintner goes far further. He calls for a theological understanding of homosexual acts based on the relationship between the two people involved, not on the natural law thinking that has always formed the basis of the Catholic condemnation of homosexuality—that it is closed to procreation, and therefore contrary to God’s manifest intention.
But Lintner says the Church needs to call on all to practice “a self-determined, responsible use of their sexuality.” For each person “the personal judgment of conscience remains the final authority.” As for the blanket condemnation from the Church, it does not promote individual judgment but obedience. “Moral actions can never be reduced to an ethics of obedience,” wrote Lintner.
The Vatican report paraphrases Lintner as saying that the old natural law morality now co-exists in tension with the new, “personal judgment” approach. “The argument of the biological procreation function continues to stand apart from the personal judgment criteria. A mediation between the natural law and the personal reasoning is difficult.”
Nowhere does the Vatican report question or contradict Lintner, nor counter his views with those of an orthodox thinker. The message is that change is coming: homosexuals will be recognized as full members of the Church, and this will be a good thing.
Hagenkord removed the picture, but blasted critics for their lack of charity towards homosexuals. Some people, he said in his July 6 blog post, “cannot bear it that some people are different. And then we are astonished…that homosexuals feel discriminated? Still today.”
Hagenkord was a moderator of a May 25 conference of liberal churchmen in Rome discussing how to advance the progressive agenda at the Synod on issues like homosexuality and communion for the divorced.