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CV NEWS FEED // Pope Francis has appointed an Italian priest who has contradicted Catholic teaching on homosexuality and contraception as a consultant to the Holy See’ doctrinal office.
The Holy See press office announced today the appointment of Fr. Maurizio Chiodi among a new batch of consultants for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The priest was appointed a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2017 and a professor at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in 2019, despite the fact that he has publicly dissented from and called into question the Church’s defined teaching on sexual morality on numerous occasions.
In 2017, Chiodi gave a lecture in Rome on Humanae Vitae in which he argued that in some cases a couple is morally “required” to contracept, directly contradicting the Church’s universal prohibition of contraception, taught definitively in Humanae Vitae and Casti Connubi. Chiodi argued from Chapter 8 of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia, in support of his justification for the use of contraception.
There are “circumstances — I refer to Amoris Laetitia, Chapter 8 — that precisely for the sake of responsibility, require contraception,” Chiodi said in the lecture, delivered at the Gregorian University in Rome.
He argued that artificial contraception “could be recognized as an act of responsibility that is carried out, not in order to radically reject the gift of a child, but because in those situations responsibility calls the couple and the family to other forms of welcome and hospitality.”
In 2022, Chiodi said in an interview that he thought the Church’s teaching that contraception is intrinsically evil is “reformable doctrine.” In justification of the rethinking of the moral judgment of the Church on the sinfulness of contraception, the priest argued precisely for what Pope St John Paul II condemned in Veritatis Splendor, namely, that judgment about the goodness or evil of a human act cannot be made based on the objective nature of the act prior to a consideration of the circumstances.
Also dissenting publicly from the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, in 2019, Chiodi asserted in an interview to the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire, that in some circumstances, “under certain conditions,” homosexual relationships may be “the most fruitful way” for homosexuals “to enjoy good relations.”
According to bioethicist Tommaso Scandroglio, writing at the time in the Italian Catholic daily La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, in the interview it appeared that Chiodi was open to considering homosexual acts as “objectively good.”
In a 2024 interview with the news outlet of the German bishops, katholisch.de, Chiodi again publicly questioned Catholic teaching, stating, “I believe that today we need to rethink the traditional – and for our time incomprehensible – ethical considerations on homosexuality.”
Chiodi was recently appointed a member of the Vatican study group on “Theological criteria and synodal methodologies for shared discernment of controversial doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical issues.”
