The Devil and ‘Emerging Issues’

It’s often been said, though perhaps not often enough lately, that the Devil can cite Scripture for his purposes. Whether the Evil One is operative in many of the current approaches to Scripture – in university departments and some Church circles – is a question best left to true authorities and even exorcists. But there’s no question that the people who wrote Final Report of Study Group Number 9: Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues, which appeared just last week, were engaged in serial Scriptural abuse. 

Admittedly, they’re not alone. A good deal of current Scripture scholarship seems like the work of a lawyer looking for legal loopholes – on behalf of the usual “emerging” subjects: LGBTs, women’s ordinations, suicidal concessions to postmodern “paradigms.” 

A long line of doctors, martyrs, confessors, saints, spiritual adepts, holy men and women, ordinary Catholics, and popes – to  say nothing of the Apostles and Early Church Fathers – would not even have conceded that such subjects are “controversial” – the original area that the study group was supposed to be considering. Let alone “emerging.” 

Homosexuality, priestesses, and heterodox “paradigms” were quite common in the pagan world during the early Christian centuries. None of that “emerged” into the Church’s life at the time. They were all non-starters for followers of “the Way.”

Which makes the outlandish way that the recent report handles Scripture and tradition so obviously nonsensical, out of a clumsily “contextualized” desire to produce a predetermined outcome, whether it accords with Christian revelation or even verifiable reality.  

The report purports to believe that there is precedent in Scripture for changing previously held beliefs in the way that the Apostles decided that Gentile converts were exempted from some precepts of Jewish law:

Starting from the account of the experiences lived by the Apostles – in particular Peter and Paul with Barnabas, in their ministry of proclamation to the Gentiles – re-read and illuminated in the light of the Word of God, the process of dialogue leads to a progressive and detailed communal discernment of the issue. The decision taken synodally (“it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28) expresses the Church’s growing awareness of a more mature relationship with its Jewish roots: for in this relationship it learns to discern, by interpreting under the guidance of the Spirit, the experience it is living, what is of permanent significance and finds its fulfilment in Jesus, and what, on the other hand, has only a provisional value.

Ah yes, more mature. As are we. This sounds plausible unless you look more closely at the claim and how it is being manipulated – the mot juste – to a very different end. 

The gentile converts were told, “You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.”(15:29)  So, from potential idolatry and πορνεια – which any Greek Lexicon will tell you means not only prostitution but fornication and unchastity.

Whatever else it may be said to mean, the passage doesn’t allow what both Jewish tradition and the practice of the early Church understood God had forbidden, the kind of same-sex relationships the study group wants to “emerge” now.  You would think that, in 2000 years of Christian existence, it would have “emerged’ long ago. But it didn’t. And, in any honest assessment, can’t now either. 

Behind all this lies another bit of legerdemain, namely an appeal to “lived experience” as a guide to dealing with present debates. In a sense, of course, lived experience is an important component of any individual life. But so is the accumulated “lived experience” of our tradition, or we’re all just making it up – to suit ourselves – as we go along. 

Early Christianity notably learned much from Greco-Roman philosophies in addition to its Jewish heritage. But as I documented years ago in a lengthy essay, even the great philosophers of classical Athens frowned on homosexual acts.  

So why is it that now, 2000+ years into Christian “lived experience” (plus another 1400 years of the Mosaic Law), LGBT “witnesses” are so important as to overthrow a millennia-long, unbroken moral tradition?

Perhaps it’s simplistic to see this as merely a surrender to the decadent sexual inclinations of the present. But what’s simple is, often enough, true. As here. 

Decadence is always with us in a fallen world. But acceptance, even celebration of decadence, is a rarity. Those decadent Renaissance popes that people, Catholic and not, are happy to deplore had at least one virtue: they didn’t try to claim that their sexual sins were justified by their lived experience, let alone a joyful and more mature understanding of what the Holy Spirit desires us to see and do now.

A Church that continues to encourage todos, todos, todos to believe that what it is impossible to accept is already halfway to being accepted is doing them a disservice. Both in confirming people in error and in confusing the rest of us. 

It’s worth noticing that it was months after Pope Francis issued his 2023 declaration Fiducia supplicans on blessing homosexual and other couples in “irregular unions” that the German bishops announced their intention to do so formally. We learned just last week that, as a result, in 2024 a letter was sent to the Germans, “warning that such blessings could be interpreted as the legitimization of unions incompatible with Church doctrine.”

So, we have this chain of events: a document allowing gay blessings, then a letter from the prefect of the Dicastery for Divine Worship, Cardinal Fernandez,  (who had earlier issued the document) to the German bishops saying they can’t be formalized without contradicting Church doctrine, and now a report by a Synodal study group that a “paradigm shift” is needed because of [LGBT] “lived experience.”

Even non-Catholics once used to say that “at least Catholics know what they believe.” Do we anymore? 

Only Pope Leo is in a position to sort out this devilish confusion, which he cannot ignore.