“No law made by man can override the order established by God”
At the invitation of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Lateran University organized a congress on “The Moral Natural Law: Problems and Prospects” from February 12 to 14. During the congress, the “theological, philosophical and juridical bases,” and then the “epistemological and anthropological aspects” were developed. On February 12, Benedict XVI granted a private audience to the participants.
The Sovereign Pontiff told them: “No law made by man can override the norm written by the Creator without society becoming dramatically wounded in what constitutes its basic foundation. To forget this would mean to weaken the family, penalizing the children and rendering the future of society precarious.” And he added: “the good of the partner, of the children and of society no longer depend on human decision alone.” There “are, in fact, norms that precede any human law: as such they are not subject to modification by anyone”. “Natural law is, definitively, the only valid bulwark against the arbitrary power or the deception of ideological manipulation.” “The knowledge of this law,” continued Benedict XVI, “inscribed in our nature, is the true guarantee offered to everyone in order to be able to live in freedom and to be respected in their own dignity.”
“Lastly,” concluded Benedict XVI, “I feel the duty to affirm yet again that not all that is scientifically possible is also ethically licit. Technology, when it reduces the human being to an object of experimentation, results in abandoning the weak subject to the arbitration of the stronger. To blindly entrust oneself to technology as the only guarantee of progress, without offering at the same time an ethical code that penetrates its roots in that same reality under study and development, would mean doing violence to human nature with devastating consequences for all.”
At the conclusion of the congress, the theologian for the Pontifical Household, Fr. Wojtciech Giertych, deplored the contemporary resistance to the natural law. In his address on the application of the natural moral law, the Polish theologian regretted that “traditional moral concepts such as truth, conscience, moral law, reason, moral virtue, perseverance, fidelity, parents, spouses, virginity, chastity, authority, commandment, sin and nature are disappearing.” And with the birth of a new ethics “we read about cultural liberty, dialogue between civilizations, the quality of life, informed choice, gender equality, single-parenting, sexual orientation, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, the right to die, holism, tolerance, homophobia,” which reveal profound social and moral changes. Thus reproductive rights extend so far as to include abortion and contraception; the new concept of family includes homosexual couples. “It is a dangerous and confusing linguistic change,” he warned. And he continued: “There is a rapid decline of appreciation of basic moral truths and of the capacity of seeing what is obvious, in the name of that which is fleeting, ephemeral, and therefore not intrinsically binding.”
This led him to ask the question: “Will the social and political approval of gay marriages, of the adoption of children by gays and lesbians, of divorce, of contraception, abortion, euthanasia, the manipulation of embryos and laissez-faire theories of education finally arrive at the point of total absurdity, causing as a backlash a desperate return to rationality in ethics?”
“Without respect for the natural law, the Western world will change the structure of society,” he declared to the Italian Press Agency Ansa, “with devastating effects for mankind.” For the understanding of human dignity is derived from the concept of family, a monogamous and permanent family, founded on a man and a woman. “This is what gives man his dignity. Without all that, it is a catastrophe, an anthropological catastrophe,” he added.
