Transcultural Moral Truth in Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio: Resources for Discerning Revisionist Concerns

At the end of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II underscores that his purpose in writing the encyclical is to evaluate “certain trends in moral theology today” that reject transcultural Christian moral norms.1 In contrast with these trends, the pontiff reaffirms the continued validity of absolute moral norms— specifically, norms that proscribe Christian persons from performing the kinds of acts that are judged to involve intrinsic moral evil.2 The pontiff ’s concern is occasioned by contemporary ethical theories that interpret traditional moral commandments not in an absolute or immutable manner but rather as precepts that are “always relative and open to exceptions.”3 The doctrine proscribing intrinsic moral evils had been a matter of significant academic debate during the postconciliar milieu leading up to John Paul II’s promulgation of the encyclical. Moral theologian James Keenan explains that this controversy was between moral “revisionists and neomanualists.”4 He describes Veritatis Splendor itself as a preeminent expression of the latter approach to moral reflection.5