It hasn't received a lot of attention yet, but Pope Benedict XVI lately has been honing an approach to issues of personal morality notably different in certain respects from his predecessor's. The jury understandably is out on whether he will be more successful than John Paul II was in persuading secular society of the truth of Christian morality.
Note that the difference between the two popes is essentially tactical. The content of the message is fundamentally the same, but the way it's presented clearly is not.
From the start of his pontificate, Pope John Paul confronted hot-button issues of personal morality head-on. In a famous series of 130 talks delivered at his Wednesday general audiences between 1979 and 1984, he laid out a "theology of the body" that many people regard as arguably his most noteworthy doctrinal innovation — a new and illuminating way of thinking about sexuality and the Church's doctrine on that controverted topic.
There's no doubt that Pope Benedict agrees with John Paul's bottom line on these matters. But with the exception of same-sex marriage — something that Benedict XVI loses no opportunity to deplore and oppose in the strongest possible terms — he generally steers clear of the head-on approach while adopting an approach of his own that might be called oblique.
Last November he went a long way to explaining his reason for that in a talk to a group of Swiss bishops. Visiting his native Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, he recalled, he invariably got questions from journalists about women's ordination, birth control, abortion, and "other such constantly recurring problems."
There's a danger in getting bogged down this way, he added. "The Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions…. Not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears."
Elaborating on this theme, Benedict noted the existence of two clusters of moral questions sometimes set in opposition to each other. On the one hand, there are global issues like peace, poverty, and the environment. Young people resonate to these in a special way. On the other hand, there are the issues of personal morality touching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and family.
The aim of persons with teaching responsibility in the Church must not be to discard one set of issues in favor of the other. Instead,
[w]e must commit ourselves to reconnecting these two parts of morality and to making it clear that they must be inseparably united. Only if human life from conception until death is respected is the ethic of peace possible and credible; only then may non-violence be expressed in every direction, only then can we truly accept creation, and only then can we achieve true justice.
The task of "reconnecting these two parts of morality" presents a large challenge indeed, but Pope Benedict is right — it's something that urgently needs doing. Not, however, through some kind of half-baked moral equivalency that sees saving the polar bears threatened by global warming as a goal on a par with saving the unborn (or, quite possibly, more important — after all, the sacred principle of "choice" trumps everything else). This reconnecting calls for hard work and, especially, hard thinking.
January 22 is the 34th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the country. On this occasion calling for prayer and reflection, we could hardly have better guides than those two exponents of the Christian moral message, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, each with his own distinctive way of communicating perennial truths.
