Pope Francis and the Perils of Double Truth

Abstract

While Pope Francis’ popularity grows with the media, disenfranchised Roman Catholics, and groups usually unfriendly toward Catholicism, he arouses concern among Christian traditionalists. Much unease comes from mixed messages utilizing a kind of duplicity different from heretical double-truth teachings of the Latin Middle Ages. This use of alternate truths for different audiences reverses the medieval employment, offering the public not the literal, traditional sense (which the Latin Averroists saw as suited for mass consumption) but symbolic or figurative versions once reserved for the sophisticated and erudite, while insisting that more robustly faithful elites still embrace the stricter teachings of the Church. Moreover, this “reversed” double truth can itself be doubled yet again, if the higher elites privately believe the same, weaker, less robust truths disseminated to the masses, although holding them in a more rationalized, sophisticated form. Modernized double truth is not new, but previously the papacy enforced a singularity for Church teaching. With Pope Francis, however, the doubling of truth appears at the peak of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. This has profound consequences for bioethics, (1) constituting a third version of Catholic moral teaching, following both the Tridentine manualist version, and the rationalist, Vatican II modernist rendition, to form a post-modern approach to moral truth, (2) subverting traditional Catholic bioethicists, while calling into question the Roman Catholic Church as a reliable ally against militant secularism in current bioethics. Ancient Christianity as exemplified in the Orthodox Church offers a better model for bioethics, due to its basis in asceticism, worship, and a noetic approach to truth that is not dependent on the vicissitudes of discursive rationality or a chief primate to arbitrate them.