Vatican City, Sep 23, 2024 / 11:45 am (CNA).
Pope Francis has named 28 new consultors to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, including moral theologian Father Maurizio Chiodi, who has expressed opinions contrary to Church teaching.
Chiodi, a moral theologian, has come under media scrutiny in recent years for suggesting contraception use in marriage could be morally permissible in some circumstances.
In a 2017 lecture in Rome, the priest also said that homosexual relationships “under certain conditions” could be “the most fruitful way” for those with same-sex attraction “to enjoy good relations.”
Chiodi was made a theology professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences in 2019 following its refounding by Pope Francis. He has also been a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2017.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for issues of doctrinal orthodoxy in the Catholic Church and the investigation and prosecution of sex abuse by priests, has been under the leadership of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández since September 2023.
In the past year, the DDF has faced internal and ecumenical fallout from Fiducia Supplicans, the dicastery’s declaration permitting nonliturgical blessings for same-sex couples. It has also published a document on human dignity, Dignitas Infinita, that addresses growing concerns over gender theory, sex changes, surrogacy, and euthanasia in addition to abortion, poverty, human trafficking, and war.
In May, the dicastery also issued new norms on judging alleged Marian apparitions, subsequently approving Marian devotion at a number of spiritual sites, including most recently at Medjugorje.
The nearly three dozen new external consultants — experts in theology, canon law, and Scripture — will meet with existing DDF consultors to advise the dicastery’s leadership and members at regular intervals.
The 28 new appointments are mostly Italian priest-theologians but also include six women — two religious sisters and four lay theologians — and two lay male theologians.
The full list of new consultors is below:
Bishop Antonio Staglianò, president of the Pontifical Academy of Theology
Father Giovanni Ancona, theology professor
Father Giacomo Canobbio, scientific director of the Catholic Academy of Brescia
Father Carlo Dell’Osso, secretary of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archeology in Rome
Father Basilio Petrà, theologian
Father Bruno Fabio Pighin, canonist
Father Mario Stefano Antonelli, rector of the Pontifical Lombardo Seminary of Sts. Ambrogio and Carlo in Rome
Father Pasquale Bua, theologian
Father Maurizio Chiodi, theologian
Father Massimo Del Pozzo, canonist
Father Aristide Fumagalli, theologian
Father Federico Giuntoli, biblicist
Father Pier Davide Guenzi, moral theologian
Father Franco Manzi, theologian
Father Massimo Regini, theologian
Father Raffaele Talmelli, superior general of the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete and exorcist
Father Denis Chardonnens, OCD, theologian
Father Armando Genovese, MSC, theologian
Father Juan Manuel Granados Rojas, SJ, biblicist
Father Dominic Sundararaj Irudayaraj, SJ, biblicist
Mario Bracci, theologian
Sister Giuseppina Daniela Del Gaudio, SFI, director of the Observatory for Apparitions and Mystical Phenomena regarding the Virgin Mary in the World
Sister Benedetta Rossi, Missionaries of Mary, biblicist
Donatella Abignente, theologian
Claudia Leal Luna, theologian
Sandra Mazzolini, theologian
Ignazia Siviglia, theologian
Emanuele Spedicato, canonist
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Does wishing the Church were one, holy, catholic and apostolic again make me a backwardist?
Depends. But aren’t you proud to be one? I am. I think Deacon Ed Peltier is one too; for many months he added the word to his name.
meiron: I’m as backwardist as ever. In fact, my motto is: “Backwardist and proud.” I belong to the Backwardist Branch of the Catholic Church. (Please don’t confuse this as saying that I am an adherent to Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form as I am not. But I’m also against suppressing it.)
I’m fully intending to proselytize. In fact, the Backwardist Catholic Church believes that Jesus Christ is the only path to God; salvation is through Jesus Christ. He is the Way, the Truth and Life. I make no apologies to anyone that I am a follower of Christ. My aim is not to make other people feel better but to speak the truth at all times.
I hate the phrase me too, but me too. Since truth is eternal, an idea abhorrent to the synodal/syncretistic/pseudo-Catholic religion of this pontificate, we have to look backward to recognize ourselves.
There are only two philosophies. Everything else is derivative. Either God is a fool or we are. Were it the first, truth would be meaningless. Since it is the latter, it is for this reason that we fail to see that God did not and could not abandon us to a capricious understanding of how we ought to order our lives together. Moral truth never changes.
Those who primarily worship themselves rather than God lose or discover they never had faith in the idea that all truth originates exclusively within the mind of God, so they pursue revolutionary fantasies that promise to eliminate evil in the human condition once and for all.
Brilliantly said!
No, Brineyman. It makes you Catholic.
About the theologian Chiodi and his special-circumstances squint, the hole in the Titanic was only one-quarter of an inch wide…but also below the waterline and 300 feet long. (At least the little Dutch Boy on the leaking dike knew where to put his thumb.)
For helpful perspective, from an earlier Anglican (say what!) gathering we have the following from dissenters to the incremental approval of mutual masturbation (pontificated at the 1930 Lambeth Conference). Said the minority at a later such gathering in 1948:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical,” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
And, how dare Chiodi refer to some homosexual relations as “fruitful” !? Indeed, a backwardist, fixistic, bigoted, and homophobic double-entendre of hurtful slang.
What more needs to be said about this papacy? We await…
I strive often to maintain a charitable perception of Pope Francis. However, when I read the following paragraph, “Chiodi was made a theology professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences in 2019 following its refounding by Pope Francis. He has also been a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2017.”
Saint John Paul II was not simply a spiritual giant to me and whose writings led to my conversion to the Church, but he was a towering academic relative to Bergoglio. When Bergoglio “refounds” Pope John Paul II’s Theological Institute for Marriage and the Family Sciences, staffing it with those similar to Chiodi, the jig is up and I cannot attempt to provide further charity. It is a pathway leading to heresey and acceptance of evil. I give up. I cannot continue to make excuses for Bergoglio.
Serious question here:
Has the Catholic Church ever before had a pope who was actively seeking to undermine the Church and subvert her teachings?
I know we’ve had corrupt, self-serving popes, but I don’t know whether any have been actively engaged in sabotage.
Before now, I mean.
The Renaissance popes kept their excesses between the sheets.
Peter: That’s not only true but humorous as well (although we should never conclude that sin is ever something that is funny.)
But even our good popes preceding Francis kept the excesses of dissenting theologians in place, without meaningful consequences to their careers, implicitly validating their corruption of young minds in universities while Baggio selected faithless men to be rubber-stamped into the episcopate. A fool ending up in the Chair of Peter is the logical result of a long process of indifference to real consequences.
brineyman: Please be ever-reminded that the election of one Jorge Bergoglio to the Chair of St. Peter was orchestrated by one Theodore Cardinal McCarrick (now known in the Church as MR. Theodore McCarrick a known homosexual predator).
I predict in 10 years or so, the Church will change her teachings on contraception–even is “okay” to use though not optional given certain marital conditions (rather like the Anglicans did so many years ago).
Folks who are loyal Catholics will say this is nothing to worry about since the teaching on contraception is part of natural law teaching and was never taught infallibly, etc.
Something like that.
I had thought that Humanae vitae’s teaching against willful contraception WAS infallible teaching. Maybe I was wrong. Paul VI was clear in what he said and wrote not like the current occupier of Peter’s Chair.
I think this is in doubt, “cuz reasons.”
I remember listening to a series of talks given at an NFP conference, and one of the speakers, a priest who was on the board of an NFP group, was asked the question about HV being “infallible.” And I clearly remember him saying that No, it was not, contraception being part of the natural law teachings–like you can’t go around putting water in the gas tank of your car and expect it to run properly (he didn’t say that last, but that is what I understood.)
.
Before I wrote the above, I looked up the part about contraception being infallible, and it would appear that points of view vary, unlike the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception–which I believe everyone understands to be infallibly taught.
.
The overwhelming majority of Catholics–clergy and laity alike–do not support the “ban” on contraception and view it as nothing more than a nice traditional discipline or whatever, completely optional. So I think it will be somewhat “formally” loosened (like Fudicia Supplicans did for gay marriage) in 10 years, and then maybe officially overturned another 10 years after.
That is pretty much guaranteed.
The good news will be that people will flee the sinking ship, and join the SSPX and other Catholic societies. The bad new will be, that the Church will promote the damnation of God knows many by her false & deadly teaching.
People are capable of justifying any falsehood whatsoever. Justifying the belief that Jesus was only a great prophet, would be a much tougher proposition, but I don’t doubt the Church would try it, if need be. The Papacy has shown itself to be worthless as a guardian of and guide to religious truth.
The world has long gone the way of the Pied Piper of Gomorrah. The Vatican in relative slow motion. We know who the Piper is. Does the Vatican?
The Vatican stands as a pariah in the midst of the Apostolic faithful [to differentiate from the progressive], the remaining few in the pews and at the altar. Fr Maurizio Chiodi chosen as representative of a less unsophisticated, blunt perspective for a more finesse, intellectually appealing approach. He speaks of “homosexual relationships under certain conditions to enjoy good relations”, the exception in pleasant contrast to the rampant orgy that emblazons the morally dissolute.
Now we’ve dealt with Francis’ exceptions to the rule in Amoris Laetitia and know where that narrow exception has taken us. Obviously it’s not the exception that’s at issue, because an exception that undermines the rule is a new rule. It’s not a slippery slope analogy. That’s due to the destruction of the principles that make for the rule. In this case as explicated by Chiodi an unlawful act is instead by nature a moral good.
If the Lord will be propitious to us, what other assistance do we need -St. Basil.
The Church will not change her teachings and positions and what we see presently pushed at the forefront of everything will not survive. The latter is predicated on the 4 “outlooks” in Evangelii Gaudium which are heralded as “against proselytism” that at the same time teach being brought to God and the Commandments through sterilizing relationships and exchange that is “reality”. These 4 altogether and individually –
1. don’t totally reconcile with any one parable or the Beatitudes but also are internally self-contradicting
2. admit conventual and individualist processes not of the Gospel to transfix them as of some universal or destined virtue or moment or wonder
3. serve and advance the methods and causes of the enemies of salvation in their obliquity ratiocination and
4. misread the signs of the times.
See the sower and seed, or the prodigal son, or the widow’s mite, etc.
It substitutes the medicine of God for being medicinal and inclusionary. So as if to not offend the 1st Commandment as if by not offending the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 8th Commandments because it is a collectivity all at once.
(The St. Basil quote is from MAGNIFICAT of September 6 2007.)
If Fr Chiodi says God made same sex attraction, perceived as a divine good, then it becomes intrinsic with natural law. As Pope Francis told the gay seminarian God made you that way. As if to say if you’re born with no arms, with Downs Syndrome God intentionally made you that way. That mistakes of nature and all the ills of Mankind are not really the result of original sin.
Christ says differently as recorded in the Gospels, that he freed those born with or who acquired physical, mental defects – from ‘the grip of the devil’. In effect the result of evil coming into the world. Evil, moral as well as physical features of the kingdom of Satan.
Actually it was Fr Radcliffe OP who made the assertion that same sex attraction “is God given”.
“God given?” Do the math…
The percentage of anti-binary LGBTQ in recent age groups vastly outstrips (so to speak) the percentage in earlier age groups and times past. Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?
Maybe we can tease a clue from Andre Gide, prominent and conflicted bisexual novelist? About whom, a biographer wrote thusly:
“[Gide] emphatically protests that he has not a word to say against marriage and reproduction (but then) suggests that it would be of benefit to an adolescent, before his desires are fixed, to have a love affair with an older man, instead of with a woman. . . the general principle admitted by Gide, elsewhere in his treatise, that sexual practice tends to stabilize [!] in the direction where it has first found satisfaction; to inoculate a youth with homosexual tastes seems an odd way to prepare him for matrimony” (Harold March, “Gide and the Hound of Heaven,” 1952).
Is it God or, instead, is it sociological?
Sociological as in exploitation, sexual abuse, early-age experimentation and getting locked in (stabilized), and stuff like that? This is God? Ironically, Cardinal Hollerich might be onto something when he pontificates, “I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching [basic sexual morality] is no longer correct.” https://www.newwaysministry.org/2022/02/04/leading-cardinal-in-synod-seeks-change-in-church-teachings-on-homosexuality/ What this luminary meant to say, surely, was that social research doesn’t so much upend sexual morality–as it might uncover the actual causes of the multiplying behavioral pandemic. Then there’s the role of locking-in brain chemistry associated with all kinds of addictions, even video games, and pornography which is found to be more addictive than cocaine.
Even Church hirelings are in the act of indirectly grooming (the double-speak of the DDF’s Fiducia Supplicans?). And, thereby outfitting themselves with fashionable millstone neckties to go with their red and purple hats.
“Since such sexual fluidity doesn’t spread biologically (!), then the what pray tell, might be the reason?”. This is such a telling indicator about the origins of LGBT, which points to psychology [or sociology as you suggest] and a growing mindset rather than a biological disorder from the normative.
EDWARD: Brilliantly said!
Thank You! Always like your comments too.