Promulgated on August 6, 1993, by St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor is the holy pontiff’s articulation of Catholic moral principles.
Seeking to address the philosophical and theological errors of modernity, this encyclical is more relevant and necessary 30 years later, as we see so many disturbing challenges to Catholic teachings today, especially those relevant to the nature, dignity, identity, and mission of the human person.
A view of the moral life
Veritatis Splendor views the moral life through the lens of the rich young man who comes to Christ asking what he must do to inherit eternal life. (#8)
This question of knowing what moral action to take is the fundamental response to an encounter with God and His Word.
Once a person comes to understand that God is his ultimate and supreme Good, the discernment of knowing how to act in a way that is convergent with the True, Good, and Beautiful becomes imperative.
Similar to the rich young man’s question, both the crowds who hear the preaching of John the Baptist in the desert and those who hear Simon Peter proclaiming the kerygma on Pentecost are cut to the heart and respond with the same question: What must I do?
Jesus tells the young man to keep the commandments, reminding us that the Decalogue of the Ten Commandments gives us a fundamental moral road map to embrace the good and eschew evil.
Entrusted to Moses by God Himself the Decalogue is both a supernatural revelation of divine teaching to guide our moral decision-making, but also points to the primacy of the natural law written on the human heart.
Man comes to know the Good, both through the voice of conscience within himself and also through God’s Word, spoken through history. We need to turn to Christ, as the rich young man did, to know good and evil.
Our ultimate purpose
St. John Paul II reminds us that our ultimate purpose is to live for the praise of God’s glory. (#10)
In this context, the moral life becomes the response to the gracious love of God, which has been made manifest in Jesus Christ in an absolute and saving way.
Guided by the Church’s magisterium, obliged to form our conscience in the Truth, graced with the efficacious power of the sacraments, a Christian has the capacity to know the Good and to act upon it.
In an age that diminishes or even denies the existence of absolutes, the human capacity to apprehend that truth, and the moral ability to live it, the pope reminds us of our capacity for heroic sanctity and sacrificial goodness, if we cooperate with the grace offered us.
When the rich young man tells Christ that he has kept all the commandments and asks what he still lacks, the Lord invites him to sell all he has and to follow Him.
This desire to go further in the moral life, to exceed the prescriptions of the law, through a life of heroic charity and goodness, finds its expression in the Beatitudes, which are “basic attitudes and dispositions in life.” )#16)
St. John Paul II sees a complementarity between the Commandments and the Beatitudes. The Hebrew Decalogue commands us to love God and to do no harm to our neighbor; the Beatitudes open us to the “horizon of perfection.” (#16)
We can easily see the integrated beauty of the moral life exemplified in the lives of the saints who show us the symmetry of the Ten Commandments and the Gospel, as they poured their hearts out in radical self-emptying love.
From the beginning of the Church, the Apostles and Church Fathers lay out the intrinsic unity and harmony of faith and life for a Christian, expressed in particular moral actions.
The unity and witness of the Church suffer damage, ”not only by Christians who reject or distort the truths of faith but also by those who disregard the moral obligations to which they are called by the Gospel.” (#26)
We see the sad consequences of the disconnect between faith and life all around us by those who reject all religious and moral principles and by those who seek to remain in the Church but redefine Her teachings to match their life choices and relationships.
St. John Paul II seeks to lay out here the principles necessary for “discerning what is contrary to sound doctrine and to answer some fundamental questions: What is man? What is the meaning and purpose of our life? What is good and what is sin? What origin and purpose does suffering have? What is the way to attaining true happiness? What are death, judgment, and retribution after death? . . . What is freedom and what is its relationship to the truth contained in God’s law? What is the role of conscience in man’s moral development?” (#30)
The divine revelation given to us by God and entrusted to the Church answers all of these questions.
The moral law is the North Star which guides us to salvation in Christ as we seek to embrace and live the Good.
The pope dedicates many paragraphs to the question of freedom, articulating it as an authentic gift from God. (#31 cf.)
The Lord gives us the freedom to choose how to live. We are not puppets on some divine string, because we are created in the image and likeness of God who is radically free. Authentic love is the fundamental purpose of our existence, and love can never be coerced. Faith as well must be a free act of one’s will and conscience.
Our freedom is a sacred gift and an expression of our dignity as children of God.
In today’s culture, many people understand freedom as an absolute, as mere license, the ability to do whatever I want as long as no one else gets hurt.
“The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one’s conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one’s moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has it origin in conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity, and being at peace with oneself.” (#32)