JOHN PAUL IIS VERITATIS SPLENDOR: TEACHER, WHAT GOOD MUST I DO TO

ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (MT 19:16)

Of all the voluminous writings of John Paul IIs pontificate, few will have such an
enduring impact on the Church as his encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor.
In fact, in the long history of encyclicals it holds a unique place. There have been
many encyclicals that have addressed various particular moral issues, such as Rerum
Novarum (Leo XIII) and Humanae Vitae (Paul VI). Veritatis Splendor, however, is a
first in the sense that it was penned to address fundamental errors that have crept
into Catholic moral theology as such (4). John Paul II says that now it seems
necessary to reflect on the whole of the Churchs moral teaching, with the precise
goal of recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the
present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied (4). Veritatis Splendor is an
incisive counter-attack against what the Pontiff takes to be a revision of moral
theology undertaken by some since the Second Vatican Council it is a response to
what he calls a genuine crisis (5).
In order to garner a sense of the encyclical, it will be sufficient to focus on three key
themes. These are: disputes over how to evaluate the morality of an action, the true
notion of freedom, and the authority of the Church in matters of morality.
DISPUTES OVER HOW TO EVALUATE THE MORALITY OF AN ACTION
John Paul II reminds us that the goodness of a moral action cannot rest solely on the
basis of whether or not the ultimate intention is good. A good intention is a good
start, but it is not enough. The Pontiff focuses our attention on what is traditionally
called the sources of morality (74). This is the idea that for an action to be good,
it has to be good in all its aspects, of which there are three: the object, the end, and
the circumstances.
The object is the proximate goal of the action, chosen by the one acting. The end is
the more remote goal that is achieved via the object. A circumstance is another
morally relevant aspect of the action that is neither the object nor the end. An
example should help. Without permission, Joe takes ten euros from his mothers
purse in order to buy a birthday present for his friend. In this scenario, the object
(the proximate goal) is stealing. The further goal, or the end, is to buy a birthday
present for his friend. These line up with the questions what and why because
we could ask: what did Joe do? (he stole) and why did he do that (to buy a
present). A circumstance in this case is the amount of money Joe took: ten euros.
The point about the sources of morality is that all three (object, end, and
circumstance) have to be good in order for the whole action to be good: just as with
health, all the different systems in a body (nervous, endocrine, pulmonary) must be
healthy for the person to be well. In the scenario just given, while the end is good

(buying presents for friends is good) the object is bad (stealing). This makes the
action, taken as a whole, bad.
Let us take another scenario: Joe gives five euros to a needy beggar in order to
impress his girlfriend. Here the object (giving money to the poor) is good, but the
whole act is vitiated by the bad intention: vain-glory.
Sometimes even a circumstance can corrupt the action when the object and end are
themselves good. Consider this: a married couple engage in intercourse in order to
have a baby, but they do it in public. In this case, the object (marital intercourse) is
good and so is the end (procreation) but how or where they do the act which is a
circumstance ruins the whole thing. In fact, it changes the very description of the
action from one of legitimate marital intercourse into indecent exposure!
Now, the point of getting into all this detail is not just to explain that John Paul II
reaffirms the classical teaching of the sources of morality but to set the scene for
one of the most important aspects of the encyclical, namely his critique of the theory
of proportionalism (71-83).
Proportionalism is a way of morally analyzing situations that is different from the
traditional approach just outlined. It is a flavour of what is called consequentialism
in the sense that, when making an evaluation, it puts the stress on the consequences
of an action: it claims to draw the criteria of the rightness of a given way of acting
solely from a calculation of foreseeable consequences (75). Perhaps the most
crude form of consequentialism is hedonism which judges the best course of action
on the basis of which brings about the most personal pleasure. Proponents of
proportionalism do not go quite that far. Rather they say that in deciding upon a
course of action one must weigh the proportion between the goods to be achieved
(or forfeited) by going down the different possible avenues. The starting point is to
consider the proximate goal of action (the object) to be pre-moral. This means
that it does not yet have a moral status: it is neither good nor bad, morally speaking.
The object only receives a moral category after the weighing process has been
completed. Some proportionalists will even use the term pre-moral evil for the
object, by which they wish to show that the action being considered is normally
speaking morally wrong but that this does not make it necessarily wrong in every
case.
Yet again, let us consider an example to flesh this out. Consider John le Carrs
novel, The Constant Gardner. It relates the exploits of a drug company that uses
Africans with HIV to test a drug against tuberculosis. The drug works well for the
most part but has deadly side-effects that kill a small minority of the patients. A
tuberculosis pandemic is imminent and there is little time to send the drug back to
the laboratory: human experimentation is a more efficient route to perfecting the
drug. The proportionalist analysis might go something like this: performing risky
experiments on human beings is a pre-moral evil. Everything being equal we would
not do it (even if the human guinea-pigs would probably soon die anyway), but it has
no moral status in itself. The proportion between their death and perfecting the
drug (and thereby forestalling the death of millions in a pandemic) is, in the moral
2

scales, heavily weighted in favour of stopping the pandemic in terms of the goods
being sought. Hence, the human experimentation, in this case, is licit and can even
be reclassified as necessary clinical trials.
We might also take another example from real life: that of the French Nazi
collaborator Paul Trouvier. He was put on trial in 1994 for crimes against humanity
for his part in the execution of seven Jews in 1943 as retaliation for the assassination
of a Vichy Minister of State by the French Resistance. He claims that his superior,
Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyon), had ordered the execution of thirty Jews and
that he, Trouvier, tried to bargain him down to seven. At his trial, he is reported to
have claimed that: Right to the end, I tried to find another solution. We tried to
reduce the number of victims from 30. I said we would do seven at a time. We
could not avoid the catastrophe. But I did, even so, save 23 human lives.1
The point is that this is an essentially proportionalist way of viewing the admittedly
difficult situation. Casting it formally into a proportionalist analysis we would say:
the death of seven innocent human beings is a pre-moral evil. This means that, like
any death (such as those by natural causes) it is a negative event. However, in and of
itself it is not a moral evil. Then, we weigh up the possible outcomes of different
scenarios, in this scenario either killing seven or killing thirty. We conclude that the
death of thirty is worse and so we categorize the action of killing the seven as saving
23 human lives, and morally approve it.
One criticism that is sometimes levelled at this way of analyzing things (briefly
mentioned in Veritatis Splendor) is the difficulty of knowing the consequences of a
given action. It is not that we can never tell the likely effects of our actions but
experience shows us that even the simplest of actions can have long term unforeseen
consequences. In The Magicians Nephew a single act of impetuosity on the part of
Digory awakens Jadis (the White Witch) from her enchanted slumbers, with farreaching ramifications for the whole of Narnia. There is profound truth in this tale:
big things often hang on small events. Moreover, even when consequences can be
known, how can we consistently make an objective comparison of the goods at stake
(77)? If a couple were to use proportionalist reasoning to justify deception in order
to gain a bigger tax rebate so as to fund the education of their son: on the basis of
what common denominator can we weigh the good of veracity against the good of
education?
However, problems with calculation of consequences are not the main objection to
proportionalism. The more substantive objection is that all this boils down to little
more than asserting that evil might be directly chosen as a stepping-stone to some
further legitimate goal. Richard McCormick, one of the main advocates of
proportionalism, says it how it is in the title of his influential book on the theory:
Doing Evil to Achieve Good.2

Collaborator Testifies on Killings of 7 Jews, Los Angeles Times, 30 March 1994.

Richard McCormick, Doing Evil to Achieve Good: Moral Choices in Conflict Situations (Chicago: Loyola
University Press, 1978).
2

Proportionalism places an exaggerated emphasis on the end of the action and gives
insufficient attention to the object. In short, it is just not true to call the object of an
action pre-moral (78). The object is a behaviour that is willed by the acting
person. From this it derives a morality independent from the end and does not need
to wait for an assessment of possible outcomes (the weighing process) for it to be
retrospectively morally categorized. Paul Trouver chose to kill seven innocent
people. This is not pre-moral: it is moral and, more specifically, immoral.
Proportionalism has been rightly criticized as a third-party morality in the sense that
it reduces the whole consideration to an observation of events and outcomes and
ignores the rather important fact of what the acting person is actually choosing.3
John Paul II notes that in order to be able to grasp the object of an act which
specifies that act morally, it is . . . necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the
acting person (78). His point is that morality is first of all about the choices we make
and not about physical events and outcomes.
A necessary corollary of proportionalism is the denial of moral absolutes, since this
approach unavoidably leads to the position that it is never possible to formulate an
absolute prohibition of particular kinds of behaviour which would be in conflict, in
every circumstance and in every culture, with those values (75). Another way of
putting this is that since proportionalism demotes the significance of the object of
action, one can no longer say that certain types of action, such as killing innocent
people, intercourse with anothers spouse, blasphemy and even rape, are wrong
always and in every conceivable case.4 John Paul II notes that the martyrs offer a
powerful testimony in favour of moral absolutes since they gave up the highest of
goods, their own lives, rather than choose that which is in and of itself evil the
denial of the faith (90-94). From the point of view of proportionalism and
outcomes the martyrs perhaps made a bad choice.
Before moving on, we should so as to avoid a not uncommon but unfortunate
misunderstanding distinguish the idea of proportionalism from the idea of acting
for a proportionate reason in the application of the principle of double effect (80).5
The difference is this. For a serious or proportionate reason we can sometimes
tolerate an evil. But this cannot be equated with seeking a good goal via an evil means.
Hence, if there are thirty persons held as hostages by terrorist highjackers (and who
are almost certainly soon to be executed), security forces could storm the plane in an
attempt to rescue them. It may be that, in the attempt, seven are killed in cross-fire
and explosions. But in this case their unavoidable death is not a means to rescue the
twenty-three. For a proportionately good reason, their death is tolerated, but not
chosen.
3

Cf. Martin Rhonheimer, Intentional Actions and the Meaning of Object: A Reply to Richard
McCormick, in Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology, edited by J.A. DiNoia and Romanus
Cessario (Princeton: Sceptor Publishers, 1999), 241-268.
4 Proportionalists might agree that one must never have intercourse with the wrong person but
cannot and will not argue that every act of intercourse with another persons spouse is always wrong.
Their moral absolutes, if they exist at all, are tautological. See William May, An Introduction to Moral
Theology (Huntington IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2003), 141-183.
5 Christopher Kaczor, Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition (Washington D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2002), 23-44.

DISPUTES OVER THE MEANING OF FREEDOM

The second major theme in Veritatis Splendor is the notion of freedom. John Paul II
says that the root cause of the crisis in Catholic moral theology is the influence of
currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and
constitutive relationship to truth (4, 34). Pointing our attention to the story of
Adam and Eve in the garden, the Pontiff states that [mankinds] freedom is not
unlimited: it must halt before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (35). By
this he means that mankind has not been given the power to decide what is good and
what is evil (40). We are free to choose whether we do this or do that, since we are
not moved by compulsion like inanimate things, nor are we moved by necessity of
instinct like animals are. Nonetheless, the freedom we enjoy as rational creatures
does not extend to determining what is true and what is false in matters of morality
any more than in other matters. We cannot choose that a circle have four sides and
we cannot choose that adultery be good.
John Paul II denies that this makes the moral law a kind of heteronomy a law that
is both foreign and oppressive (41). He denies this because the moral law is not
arbitrary but given by God so as to bring about human flourishing. The Pontiff
notes that the commandments of which Jesus reminds the [rich] young man are
meant to safeguard the good of the person, the image of God, by protecting his
goods, such as his life, his family, his property (13). Therefore, disobeying the
moral law offends God only to the extent that it hurts us who are His children: the
moral law benefits us not God!
So what, then, is freedom? John Paul II goes on to describe our freedom as a kind
of kingship (38). By this, he means that freedom permits us to be owners of our
good actions. When we freely choose to do what is right, we are the lord of these
good actions, and on account of this confer upon ourselves a merit and a dignity
impossible for irrational creatures. In a similar vein, some authors have contrasted
two understandings of freedom: freedom of indifference and freedom for
excellence.6 Freedom of indifference is a notion that true freedom is merely the
absence of any set goals or any coercion and, ultimately, the absence of even a
preference for what is good. Freedom for excellence recognizes certain goals and
the need to be guided by rules in order for the one possessing the freedom to attain
these goals and to flourish. One approach makes freedom itself a goal, the other
makes freedom the means to the further and higher goal of human perfection.
The difference can be seen by considering two different approaches to learning.
Take two similarly talented students of music. One is just given access to a piano and
told to experiment whilst the other is instructed in the rules of piano-playing and
corrected in her mistakes. After three years, the first will be free from all the rules,
but will not have the freedom of excellence possessed by the second who has
acquired the excellence to execute the works of her choice through the acquisition of

See, Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of
America Press, 1995).

skill. Morality is something similar. The virtuous person is morally skilled and so,
with joy and ease, does what is right and what is fully human: that is freedom.
Divorcing freedom from moral truth has a necessarily deleterious effect on the
notion of conscience, and this is another major theme in Veritatis Spelndor (54-64).
In reality, conscience is a judgment of the intellect about the morality of a concrete
action in the light of perennial and universal moral principles. When freedom is
divorced from truth, conscience inevitably becomes a power to create moral truth
according to personal preference (54).
But surely the Church teaches that we should follow our conscience? The answer is
yes, but it also teaches that we must form our conscience: as Newman said, a
conscience has rights because it has duties (34). When a conscience is not wellformed, this might excuse a person from a morally bad action but it never leads to
moral perfection. Let us see how this works (58).
If an engaged woman judges that she is obliged to consent to intercourse with her
fianc (as a married woman would be to the reasonable requests of her husband),
then for her to will not to do this would be to be prepared to will evil and hence to
have an evil will. Of course, objectively she fornicates, but she wills to do what is
upright (as far as she can judge).
However, the question we must throw at this scenario is whether the young woman
is excused for not knowing what is moral and immoral in matters of sex. If she
willed not to find out or she never took the opportunities she had to find out
then her poor judgment in these matters is not excused, and though she acts in
accord with her ignorance, she sins (62). But note: even if she is excused because of
her ignorance (she has what is called invincible ignorance) her actions are still
objectively wrong and so do not contribute to her moral growth or her moral dignity (63).
In its treatment of freedom, Veritatis Splendor also notes an interesting paradox. On
the one hand, freedom is exalted as the goal of human life (rather than a means to
other goals), and on the other hand it is almost denied. Here John Paul II is thinking
of ideas like behaviourism. He is also thinking of a moral theory called the
fundamental option (65-69). This theory claims that a person may consciously
engage in what the tradition has identified as gravely immoral acts (such as adultery
and abortion) but retain a fundamental orientation towards God. It should be seen
straight away that such a theory has to deny the traditional distinction between venial
and mortal sin. The notion of mortal sin (garnered ultimately from Scripture, 1 John
5:17) implies that individual acts freely chosen and known to be gravely immoral can
kill the life of grace in the soul of the perpetrator, even when this action is not
directly opposed to belief in God. At its core (and through a distinction between socalled categorical and transcendental freedom), the theory of the fundamental option
seems to deny the radical character of human freedom or of self-determination
because it denies that individual moral choices can ever be so free as to reposition a
person either towards God or away from God.

John Paul II condemns this reductive understanding of human freedom and

reaffirms that mortal sin and separation from God can occur in a direct and formal
way, in the sins of idolatry, apostasy and atheism; or in an equivalent way, as in every
act of disobedience to Gods commandments in a grave matter (70).
THE CHURCH AND MORALITY
In his discussion on moral conscience, John Paul II touches upon the place of the
Church in the formation of consciences through her capacity as a moral teacher. In
fact, the encyclical taken as a whole represents a claim that the Church is a singular
authority in these matters.
It is very important to note, however, that this does not mean that morality is a
religious matter (or that insisting on traditional morality is the imposition of
religion), at least not in the confessional sense of the word religion. This is as
much as to say that, for the most part, we do not need to rely upon revelation in order
to know what is morally right and morally wrong. Certainly, the Bible has its fair
share of moral instruction, but this only reiterates what can be deduced by unaided
human reason. In fact, the whole notion of the natural law (strongly reaffirmed in
Veritatis Splendor) makes this clear: morality is written on the human heart in the
sense that clear thinking about what it means to be human is sufficient to give us the
moral principles we need for upright human conduct. For example, clear thinking
about human nature leads to the conclusion that private property is commensurate
with being human: it is on the basis of this (and not of revelation) that we know
stealing to be wrong.
But if this is so, why do we need an authority like the Church in matters of morality?
Two points need to be made. First, it most definitely has been revealed to us by
God that He expects us to live according to natural law and that our salvation, while
not consisting in this, does depend upon it (1 Cor 6:9-11). Second, sin makes us
morally thick. It blurs our clear perception of moral principles. Furthermore, there
will always be new circumstances into which the principles of morality must be
applied (e.g. nuclear weapons, reproductive technologies). Putting these two facts
together, it would have been negligent (or even cruel) of God not to have established
on earth some authority in matters of moral truth; and, to be quite honest, there is
only one organization on earth claiming this authority!
All this should be enough to understand why the modern atheist is wrong when he
says that the abolition of God will have no detrimental effect on morality.
Moreover, his attempt to explain the very existence of morality without reference to
God is doomed to failure. Dawkins, for example, tries to explain the pervasive and
uniform phenomenon of morality by appeal to natural selection.7 He notes that
some animals act for the good of the group or form symbiotic relationships with
other creatures, both of which enhance the survival and reproduction of the

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 211-223. For a good critique of
this see, Thomas Crean, God is no Delusion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 95-106.

individual or of other individuals with similar genes. In this way, Dawkins claims,
genes causing altruistic behaviour are positively selected for.
However, even if this were so, this can only ever be an explanation of why animals
(or humans) act in certain ways. It will never amount to an explanation of why they
ought to act in certain ways: and without such an explanation there is no explanation
of morality. For example, Dawkins explanation might explain why humans do not
indiscriminately kill each other but it does not explain why they ought not to do so.
Without an external law-giver who is also the source of human nature (on the basis
of which a coherent set of principles of morality can be founded), there can be no
sense made of the word ought and hence, ultimately, no morality at all.
Finally, and perhaps even more importantly, the Church is also established by God
as the source of that power without which the moral code cannot be lived in full, at
least not with joy. As the guardian of the Sacraments, the privileged source of grace,
the Church empowers us to keep the moral law through the gift of the Holy Spirit
(102, cf. 22-23).
And this brings us to a final point. As some commentators have noted, the day of
the promulgation of Veritatis Splendor is not without significance. The encyclical was
promulgated on 6th August, 1993, the Feast of the Transfiguration.8 This reminds us
what the moral life is. It is not the acquisition of brownie points on some loyalty
card which, at death, can be cashed in for a ticket giving entry to the Eternal Funfair.
Rather, it is a life in which we pursue what is good for human beings and, by that, are
changed from within to become good.
John Paul II quotes approvingly from Gregory of Nyssa that we are in a certain way
our own parents, creating ourselves as we will, by our decisions (71). Seen in this
way, the moral life is a transfigured life that makes us more like God, Who alone is
Good, and Who ultimately fits us to be elevated by Him to a participation in His
own Divine Nature in order to enjoy His Beatifying company for eternity.
Dr. William Newton, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Austria.
January 2014.

J. A. DiNoia, Veritatis Splendor: Moral Life as Transfigured Life, in Veritatis Splendor and the
Renewal of Moral Theology, 1-10.