Last December Pope Francis made the news when he officially sanctioned church blessings of homosexual couples. He maintained that while homosexual “marriage” isn’t marriage and while the Church cannot bless the actual union, she can bless the couple. Of course, what this looks like to anyone and everyone is the Church blessing homosexual marriage. That’s what all the headlines ran with, and understandably so. Normal people, when they see a priest blessing two men holding hands and claiming to be married to one another, don’t say, “Oh, he’s not blessing the marriage, just them. He’s not blessing their homosexual life together, just them as individuals.” That’s silly. The optics are the message and the optics clearly present a priest blessing two men claiming to be married to one another.
This isn’t the first time Pope Francis has made the news for promoting liberal ideas and seemingly changing the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. In 2013 he said even atheists can go to heaven, so long as they live a good life. In the same year, when asked if homosexuality was wrong, he answered, “Who am I to judge?” In 2015, Francis warned of the evils of manmade global warming and called for international pacts of environmental justice.1
Roman Catholic conservatives are wondering what is happening in their church. Isn’t the Roman Catholic Church a conservative church? Doesn’t it take conservative stands on abortion, on divorce, on sexual immorality in general, even on birth control? Do they just have to wait out the current pope’s tenure and all will go back to the way it was before?
That’s just the problem. Pope Francis looks more liberal than previous popes, but he is completely in line with the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Far from being the “conservative” church, Roman Catholicism is fundamentally liberal and always has been.
Take Pope Francis’ seeming approval of homosexuality. He seems to be more liberal than his predecessors when he says that homosexual orientation is not a sin. But he isn’t. He’s repeating well-established Roman Catholic teaching. He’s not denying that homosexual acts are sinful. He’s only asserting that the inclination toward those acts isn’t sinful. And this is exactly the Roman Catholic doctrine of sin. From the beginning, in their debate with the Lutherans, the Roman Catholics insisted that the inclination to sin is not sin. The Lutherans insisted (with Jesus) that a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit (Mt. 7:17). It’s because our inclinations are sinful in the first place that they produce sinful acts. “Out of the heart come sinful thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality,” etc. (Mt. 15:19).
Or take the Pope’s position on atheists going to heaven. This fits perfectly with Lumen Gentium, the 1964 decree of the Second Vatican Council, which states that anyone who leads a basically moral life can come to know and love God and win heaven without ever having heard of Christ or His Gospel. This aligns also with the Roman Catholic Church’s liberal view of man, which assumes—despite the doctrine of original sin—that man is basically good and can gain God’s grace by his own powers.
As to the Pope’s liberal positions on global warming, illegal immigration, the death penalty, and the welfare state, these are in lockstep with the Roman Catholic adoption of other popular “scientific” and social doctrines in the past centuries, including its adoption of evolution and its attempts to influence global initiatives through the League of Nations and later the United Nations, each of which the Vatican made overtures to join.
Francis looks more liberal because of how and when he says things, but he is very clearly a product of the Roman Catholic Church.
It is one thing to point out the obvious, present fact that many of the Roman Catholic Church’s positions are liberal. It is another thing to see why, systemically, this is the case. The first reason has already been mentioned: the Roman Catholic doctrine of man minimizes sin’s effects and so overestimates man’s powers for good. It holds this in common with liberalism and so takes many stands that conservatives see as socially liberal. Take the welfare state. A more skeptical view of man’s goodness would question whether a man will work hard if you give him money for not working. St. Paul held that view and so says, “If a man does not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thess. 3:10).
The second systemic reason for Roman Catholic liberalism is its teaching on the Bible. Lutherans teach that the Bible is the only source for teaching in the Church. This is a conservative principle. It means doctrine cannot change. It’s fixed. Just as you can’t add or subtract to the Bible, you can’t add or subtract to the Church’s teaching. You may articulate things differently depending on the time in which you live and so address changing circumstances with unchanging teaching. But you never change the teaching. That is the essence of conservatism.
The Roman Catholic Church, from their modern origin in the Council of Trent (1545-1563), has always held that the Bible is not the only source of doctrine. They add to the Bible also the Pope himself and Church tradition. The Pope and Church Councils can, in effect, change Christian doctrine. The approval of evolution by Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), with the caveat that God creates human souls directly, simply changed the doctrine of creation “in conformity with the present state of human sciences” (Humani Generis, 36). In 1995, Pope John Paul II condemned the death penalty in his decree Evangelium Vitae. This despite the Bible’s clear teaching that the state has the right to put criminals to death (Rom. 13:1-4), as well as the ironic fact that the Vatican itself has employed an executioner in past centuries and has put literally thousands of people to death! The universalist stance of Lumen Gentium, which states that people of all different religions can obtain heaven without membership in the Roman Catholic (or Christian) Church likewise directly contradicts numerous previous decrees of both Pope and Council, not to mention the Bible (Jn. 14:6; Rom. 3:20).
These three examples (and there are many more) show a Roman Catholic Church that changes according to the times. More than that, it shows a Roman Catholic Church that is designed to change with the times. Yet despite this inherent liberalism within the Roman Catholic Church, they keep a façade of conservatism in outward form: the sacrifice of the mass remains a constant, the celibacy of priests remains intact, the Pope remains the head of the Church, with all the clothes and hats and colors. Things look the same.
But the Roman Catholic Church also asserts a conservatism of doctrine. The claim here is that nothing has changed, despite the obvious changes. Once the Roman Catholic Church asserts something new, she insists it’s always been taught (or at least never taught against). It is the same trick Orwell satirized in 1984: “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” We call this retroactive continuity. You change something and then you simply assert you have always taught it. Take for instance the change to the Roman Catholic teaching on the death penalty. The doctrine, Pope John Paul II said, has not changed, but now that in modern society we can keep people safe from criminals without the death penalty, it is no longer morally acceptable to put murderers to death. And yet we have had the ability to keep prisoners in prisons securely for hundreds of years. And this didn’t stop Giovanni Battista Bugatti (1779–1869), the Pope’s executioner, from cutting off 514 heads in his tenure as papal executioner. The fact is the doctrine did change. And it changed because the Roman Catholic Church moves with the times. It is a liberal church.
Ironically, the very element that seems so ancient and conservative in the Roman Catholic Church is the seed of liberalism within it. The papacy seems an ancient institution. But it overturns what is more ancient: the Bible. The tradition of the Roman Church, it is claimed, goes back to the apostles themselves. But that tradition, insofar as it has strayed from the apostles’ teaching in the New Testament, is liberal. The conservative principle is the principle articulated in the Lutheran Reformation: Ad fontes, back to the sources! Back to the Bible, which is pure and clear and does not change. Only the Bible (sola Scriptura) can serve as the basis for teaching in the Christian Church. Otherwise we rely on men who change with the times.
What is the answer for conservative Roman Catholics? The truly conservative Church. The Church that can actually claim a tradition that has not changed for two thousand years, since the time our Lord Jesus sent His apostles to convert the nations (Mt. 28:18-20). The Church that was renewed and reformed by Martin Luther, but founded by the Lord Jesus. The Lutheran Church did not suddenly appear in the sixteenth century. The name “Lutheran” did. But the Lutheran Church is simply a continuation of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. The Reformation was itself a conservative movement. It dispensed with only those things that corrupted the Church, and it kept all traditions that came down from the apostolic age, basing all things on what is most ancient: the Bible.
This is why Roman Catholic conservatives should come home to the Lutheran Church. It’s not only that the Lutheran Church has conserved the liturgy and lectionary and vestments and reverence that have always belonged to the conservative Church. It’s not only that the conservative Lutheran Church still looks like church and has not chased after the fads of rock bands and entertainment worship. It is that the conservative Lutheran Church confesses and gives what all Christians long for, even if they can’t quite articulate it. And that is the unchanging truth. We preach Christ crucified for sinners. We preach the Lord Jesus, whose life, death, and resurrection are our righteousness before God. We preach the beautiful truth that God declares us righteous and counts us as His children through faith in His Son. The love of Christ compels us, because we have judged thus, that One died for all (2 Cor. 5:14). In this is Love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 Jn. 4:10). This pure Gospel is what everything conservative in the Church must serve and the reason the true Church will by God’s grace remain committed to the unchanging truth of the Bible until her Lord returns.
1 See “8 of Pope Francis’ Most Liberal Statements” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/07/what-has-pope-francis-actually-accomplished-heres-a-look-at-7-of-his-most-notable-actions/
