Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, was asked what his office's newest document means for homosexual persons and the divorced and remarried. He answered with slavery.
"It took us 19 centuries to show that slavery is repugnant to human dignity," Fernández told José Manuel Vidal of Religión Digital in an exclusive interview published Oct. 26.
The question quoted Venite ad Me, the dicastery's Oct. 22 document on passing on the faith. The text says, "No human or religious law or authority can ever declare anyone unworthy of his love or of the love of other human beings" (No. 18). Vidal asked: "What pastoral consequences should that statement have for homosexual persons, the divorced and remarried, and those who have drifted away because they felt rejected by the Church?"
Fernández's answer did not mention marriage or sexual morality by name. He went on: "It is pointless to talk around the issue to fool ourselves and maintain that the official Church was always against slavery; you have to perform a lot of mental contortions to deny reality."
He said that "a few years before Leo XIII's condemnation of slavery, a document of the Holy Office stated that slavery 'is in no way repugnant to human dignity.'" He closed: "Perceiving the concrete consequences of recognizing the infinite dignity of every person is another challenge that, with the help of the Spirit, I hope we can meet better and better."
Set down as the answer to that question, the slavery line invites a reading the Church has already closed off: that her teaching on marriage and sexual acts could one day go the way the old tolerance of slavery went.
Venite ad Me itself makes no such claim. It calls itself "a set of Considerations, not a Doctrinal Note" (No. 8).
The Church's teaching on homosexual acts is no custom awaiting correction. "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that 'homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,'" the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. "They are contrary to the natural law." And: "Under no circumstances can they be approved" (CCC 2357).
St. Paul wrote of those whose "women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men" (Rom 1:26-27).
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same office Fernández now leads, answered the argument from history 40 years ago. Its 1986 Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons rejected a new exegesis claiming that Scripture's moral injunctions "are so culture-bound that they are no longer applicable to contemporary life." "These views are gravely erroneous," the congregation wrote. It added: "the Church's teaching today is in organic continuity with the Scriptural perspective and with her own constant Tradition." And: "her clear position cannot be revised by pressure from civil legislation or the trend of the moment."
In 2021 the same congregation ruled out blessings of same-sex unions. God, it said, "does not and cannot bless sin."
The teaching on marriage is just as fixed. Christ said, "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mt 19:6). The Catechism teaches that a marriage concluded and consummated between baptized persons "can never be dissolved" and that "the Church does not have the power to contravene this disposition of divine wisdom" (CCC 1640). "If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God's law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists" (CCC 1650).
Pope St. John Paul II wrote that "the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried" (Familiaris Consortio 84).
The slavery comparison cuts the other way. The Church's moral teaching names slavery outright. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II taught that some acts "radically contradict the good of the person made in his image" and "have been termed 'intrinsically evil.'" Among his examples, drawn from the Second Vatican Council, are "slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children." The encyclical adds that "the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception."
Human dignity is the reason the Church condemns slavery. It is also the reason she forbids homosexual acts. "The Church, in rejecting erroneous opinions regarding homosexuality, does not limit but rather defends personal freedom and dignity realistically and authentically understood," the 1986 letter says.
Doctrine grows in understanding; it does not reverse. The First Vatican Council taught that "that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding." Quoting St. Vincent of Lérins, the council said understanding may increase "but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding" (Dei Filius, ch. 4).
The Second Vatican Council bound the Church's teachers to the same rule. "This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on," Dei Verbum says (No. 10).
Fernández has said as much himself. "The doctrine does not change; the Gospel will always be the same. Revelation is already settled," he told the National Catholic Register's Edward Pentin in September 2023. In the same interview he said "it is clear that the Church only understands marriage as an indissoluble union between a man and a woman."
The Church needed no 19 centuries to learn what Christ taught about marriage. He taught it from the start, pointing back to the beginning: "he who made them from the beginning made them male and female" (Mt 19:4). That teaching stands, because "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8).
