As the first reports from the Synod on Synodality begin to trickle in, one in particular should give us pause — and remind us of the pressing need to find new and better ways of communicating what the Church teaches about the truth and meaning of human sexuality. Because those we seek to reach don’t seem to be listening.

In a recent article in the Register, Senior Editor Jonathan Liedl reports on the work of the study group tasked with developing “a synodal way of discerning Catholic Church teaching” on controversial issues. This study group is proposing a “new paradigm” that would allow for the discernment of “doctrine, ethics and pastoral approaches” by consulting with the faithful and learning from their “lived experience.” Liedl provides a revealing quote from the study group’s status report to the synod:

“Ethically speaking, it is not a matter of applying pre-packaged objective truth to the different subjective situations, as if they were mere particular cases of an immutable and universal law. The criteria of discernment arise from listening to the [living] self-gift of Revelation in Jesus in the today of the Spirit.”

This statement alone is cause for concern. For the “immutable and universal law” referred to here can only be the natural law, that is, our participation in the Divine Law — that which anchors the Church’s teaching in the natural order. And it is not “applied.” It is discovered in the personal circumstances of life — quite often when one tries to ignore it. 

One frequently hears the claim, most often expressed by some members of the laity but now increasingly from the clergy, that Catholic teaching on human sexuality is just too difficult for most people to follow. This is supported, or so the argument goes, by the lived experience of any number of Catholics who find themselves unable to govern their sexual appetites according to the moral norms communicated by the Church. 

This same argument is a constant refrain echoing throughout all manner of public discourse. Subjective personal experience, it is said, demonstrates that it is time for the Church to relent; Catholic sexual morality is old-fashioned and a burden for the average person in the pew.

Completely overlooked by those who wish to make this argument is the experience of countless Catholics who have come to exactly the opposite conclusion. Indeed, the “experience” that generally grounds the contention that Catholic teaching is too hard, too rigid, too strict for human persons is primarily that of women and men who dissent a priori from the Church’s teaching on the meaning and end of human sexuality, Humanae Vitae in particular. Overlooked in this calculus is the lived experience of those who are faithful to it. 

Let the record show that there are many whose own experience has led them to a deeply personal recognition that only the Catholic understanding of the human person and the meaning of human sexuality can lead to authentic human happiness. A clear demonstration of this mostly unacknowledged truth is now on offer in our recent publication, Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality. The volume is a collection of essays that provide both the foundations for understanding the place of “lived experience” in a full account of the human person, as well as extensive evidence that, when properly integrated into the whole of oneself, such experience leads to the certainty that Catholic teaching provides the only sure route to human flourishing.

This particular text is one of three separate publications, each of which is a distinct response to the document published by the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL) in July 2022: “A Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, Practical Challenges.” The authors of the PAL document hoped to transcend the persistent divide between “conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and revisionists” in the “delicate field of bioethics.” 

The first of these three texts, “Humanae Vitae and Catholic Sexual Morality,” is a collection of papers by internationally known scholars from various disciplines, all recognized experts in their field. It provides an impressive and unassailable set of admirably rational arguments in defense of the Church’s teaching on the human person and human sexuality. And this is all to the good. 

But a second line of defense is necessary. Because the problem we really must face is that those we seek to persuade, whether in the culture at large or within the Church herself, are not listening. Indeed, they have been either deaf or resistant to these same arguments for decades. Unaccountably, they ignore the mountain of evidence compiled in the last 60 years, evidence that documents with undeniable clarity the toxic impact of the sexual revolution on actual, living men and women, on families, and on the society as a whole. We need to confront the fact that the language of subjective personal experience has displaced rational argument in both private and public discourse. 

Claims about the existence of universal truth or an objective moral order often cannot find a foothold when confronted with the argument that such realities do not resonate with a particular individual’s personal “experience.” Rather than a starting place in self-evident first principles, the arbiter of what constitutes right thinking and moral human behavior has become a matter of personal preference. This is a reality confronted daily by persons in all circumstances, no matter what their philosophical persuasion or worldview. It is a position advanced by our culture and encountered in the media, in education, in academia, in our political discourse — and now, it appears — it has seeped into the Church.

What distinguishes Lived Experience and the Search for Truth from other attempts is, above all, its method. Rather than beginning with the metaphysical framework, which, though indisputably essential to our understanding of this teaching, seems unpersuasive in the contemporary milieu, our hope in this collection is to arrive at the truths embedded in the Church’s moral teaching, especially those on human sexuality, not by deducing them from an abstract account of human nature, but through a process of induction, with the evidence of lived experience as our starting place. It is an initial attempt to arrive inductively at the truths embedded in the moral teaching of the Church through the lived experience of faithful men and women.

Those who seek to give priority to experience over truths arrived at through reason are proceeding without an adequate theory or understanding of the place that “lived experience” holds in a coherent account of the person. It is not enough to merely assert its place; one needs to account for the fact that the human person is distinguished from all of creation by his power of reason and that experience and reason share a common root in the mind of man. The text is an intentional effort to reclaim the language of experience and to contest the spread of a false dichotomy that, unaccountably, alienates one from the other.

Perhaps this confusion could be resolved by acknowledging Pope St. John Paul II’s own proposition that the category of lived experience is an essential element in a full account of the moral life and the search for the whole truth about oneself. Perhaps if our contemporaries could be alerted to it, we would find a way to address the pastoral needs of the faithful without appearing to subordinate doctrine to lived experience. Perhaps the clergy and the Church’s pastoral ministers would find it helpful in their fervent wish to assist those who suffer to arrive at the wholeness all persons seek. Perhaps this could be the basis of the “paradigm shift” the synod suggests is needed.