‘Perilous seas’: Archbishop who led JPII Institute on Marriage and Family Life aimed to reform idea of natural law

The former head of the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life recently sparked controversy after he said in an interview that changes he made during his tenure aimed to start a “profound reform” of the idea of natural law — universal principles of God’s creation that moral teaching on marriage, life, and other issues must respect.

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, who was grand chancellor of the institute from 2016-2025, made his remarks in a May 21 interview with Settimana News. Along with serving as grand chancellor at the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life, Archbishop Paglia served as the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life from 2016-2025. 

According to an automatic English translation of Archbishop Paglia’s interview, he said Pope Francis asked him to spearhead a reorganization of both the Pontifical Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family Life. He indicated that his approach to reforms stemmed from wanting to shift what he viewed as the institutes’ rather algorithmic, abstract moral theological approach to more of a pastoral tone that accounted for cultural developments and individuals’ unique circumstances and experiences. 

“One of the key points of the entire process was the rethinking of the concept of ‘nature,’ which underpinned a static and immutable vision of natural law, and with it the questioning of the essentialist and ahistorical paradigm that had supported all sexual and family moral theology developed to date,” Archbishop Paglia explained, according to the translation.

In a June 22 X post, Bishop Robert Barron wrote that Archbishop Paglia’s remarks “confirmed the worst suspicions that many of us had.”

Bishop Barron explained that Archbishop Paglia’s approach to changing the idea of natural law leaned on recognizing people’s subjective experiences, undermining the objective truth the natural law is rooted in. 

“What any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms,” Bishop Barron wrote. “Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible.”

He expressed concern that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were proposing a moral framework grounded in “historical discernment of subjective and cultural experiences,” rather than absolute moral norms rooted “in a keen understanding of the basic goods.” 

The problem with the subjective grounding is that “some values [are] so fundamental that acts repugnant to them are by their very nature wicked,” Bishop Barron argued. He pointed to slavery as an example of a practice that is intrinsically wrong, even if public opinion polls or majority opinion were to disagree. 

Any decent person would say slavery is intrinsically wrong even if a majority disagrees, Bishop Barron wrote, noting that such a yes “is predicated upon precisely what the tradition calls the natural law and basic goods.”

Bishop Barron argued that if one says “that this is just ‘armchair theologizing’ and that morality is a function of ever-shifting cultural and experiential data, then why couldn’t slavery be justified? Who is to say whether the consensus might shift back again? Who is to say that 'lived experience' might come to justify it?”

Archbishop Paglia’s remarks also were reviewed in a thorough June 19 analysis on Catholic World Report by Monsignor Livio Melina, a moral theologian and co-founder of the Veritas Amoris Project. Monsignor Melina was a professor of moral theology from 1996 to 2019 at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome and was its president from 2006 to 2016. 

Monsignor Melina expressed doubt that Archbishop Paglia’s efforts were motivated by theological groundings, arguing instead that the motivation was “an ideological critique of the Institute.” 

Neither the books and articles the Institute has produced nor its courses, doctoral research, or its overall approach indicate a rigid and algorithmic tone “incapable of interpreting people’s lived experiences,” he argued; rather, it had reflected a tone that is genuinely pastoral. 

“What has emerged has been precisely a theology of love, seeking to shed light through reason on this experience of love, fundamental to people’s lives, and to support them on their journey,” he wrote. “Paglia’s criticism therefore appears ideological and superficial, since it does not address the substance of the scientific work carried out at the Institute and goes so far as to equate it with the neoscholastic approach for the sole purpose of challenging the Church’s moral teaching.”

The “unspoken motive” behind the ideological critique, Monsignor Melina posited, may have been “the difficulty of accepting the message on marriage and the family that the Church has proposed thus far, which Paglia considered unreasonable and impractical.”

“From this perspective, his intervention has in fact prevented the further development of a proposal capable of remaining faithful to the Church’s traditional teaching,” he added, “while at the same time presenting it in terms understandable to contemporary man — a proposal endowed with pastoral fruitfulness that would truly enable people to live it out.”

Monsignor Melina emphasized that the Church today “finds itself at a crucial crossroads.” One route is to proclaim the truth of what marriage, family, and the human person are, encouraging people to follow God’s intended plan and look to Christ. 

Or, he wrote, “it can renounce this perspective of the narrow path, closing its eyes to the greatness of this call and reducing it to the actual possibilities of wounded humanity living in today’s context.”

The monsignor concluded by asking what moral vision the Church desires to pursue: one that regards human weakness and shortcoming as if they could not be overcome with divine grace, or one that shows a way for those desiring both ecclesial support and the grace to live out their Christian vocation.

“In reality, as we have seen, Paglia’s paradigm is by no means new; rather, it is an outdated paradigm — not only because it revives the post-Tridentine casuistic dialectic between law and conscience,” Monsignor Melina wrote, “but also because, at its core, it denies the enduring newness of Christ, who did not come to abolish the law but to give us the ability to fulfill it and thus bring to fruition God’s great plan of love. 

“To be merciful, the Church does not need to water down the fullness of life she proposes and adapt to the world’s standards, but rather to proclaim the good news of grace — which enables us to live up to our divine vocation despite our frailties and weaknesses.”

Bishop Barron encouraged reading Monsignor Melina’s analysis, linking to it at the end of his X post. He concluded by remarking that Archbishop Paglia’s interview reminded him of conversations he had with several German bishops during the 2024 Synod on Synodality. 

“Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality,” Bishop Barron wrote. “If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas.”