I keep coming back to the same question: Why the dishonesty?
I genuinely do not understand how people who hold themselves out as traditional, orthodox, faithful Catholics can be so ruthless in distorting the truth about other Catholics.
I cannot see into anyone’s heart, but after nearly a decade of open and obvious distortions of reality from Catholic journalists, influencers, and media personalities, it is becoming impossible to believe there is an innocent explanation.
A recent example involves Archbishop Renzo Pegoraro, who was named president of the Pontifical Academy for Life last year following the retirement of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia at age 80. Michael Haynes of the Catholic Herald announced earlier this month on X that Pegoraro “has argued Catholics can support ‘imperfect’ euthanasia laws.”
It should be noted that Haynes brought up the wrong issue in his post: the archbishop was discussing assisted suicide, not euthanasia. Both are contrary to Catholic teaching but they are not identical. Assisted suicide presumes that the individual chooses death and performs the final act, whereas euthanasia is carried out by another person and can be performed without the patient’s consent. Although the issues are related in that they both fall under the broader category of “assisted dying,” the Church consistently distinguishes between the two in its teaching documents, such as the 2020 document Samaritanus Bonus from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Haynes continues to conflate these two issues throughout his article. He even describes a 2019 Constitutional Court ruling that opened the door to legalizing assisted suicide as a “law which partially decriminalised euthanasia in Italy.” He treats Pegoraro’s prudential argument as though it was an endorsement of the act of euthanasia in some cases — without seriously engaging the archbishop’s words or the relevant moral principles he invokes.
What did Archbishop Pegoraro say?
The Italian situation Pegoraro was discussing is more complicated than Haynes’s framing implies. A 2019 Constitutional Court ruling effectively legalized assisted suicide in Italy in certain cases. The court left it to Parliament to establish a national policy. To date, a national policy has not been passed. Also — absent a national policy — several local governments have enacted regional policies for regulating assisted suicide.
Veneto — long associated with the center-right — recently passed an assisted suicide policy. In a September 6 interview with Avvenire, posted to the Academy’s website in English, Pegoraro criticized the haste with which the law was adopted and argued that the state’s priority should be palliative care and helping patients choose life. Then, looking ahead to the national debate, he raised the question of an “imperfect law,” saying, “From a Catholic perspective, the issue is, in short, to assess whether we are dealing with an ‘imperfect law’, to which it would nevertheless be morally right to give one’s consent, given that Parliament might otherwise readily pass more permissive and libertarian laws, which would be far more detrimental to the dignity of the sick and the value of life.”
The Pontifical Academy’s English translation of the interview is titled “Decriminalizing Assisted Suicide: The Academy’s Perspective.” Pegoraro explicitly says, “There is no such thing as a right to assisted suicide.” In it, he says that healthcare workers must never “cause death or assist in suicide,” and that suicide is something “to be prevented, never supported.”
What he is actually discussing is the classic moral problem of whether one may vote for or accept a restrictive law to mitigate evil when the political alternative is a more expansive law permitting it.
The Francis-era Pontifical Academy for Life did not invent this principle. John Paul II taught in Evangelium Vitae 73 that when complete repeal of an unjust abortion law is impossible, a legislator whose opposition to abortion is clear may support measures aimed at limiting the harm of the law. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith repeated the principle in its 2002 Doctrinal Note on Catholics in Political Life. This is the principle Archbishop Pegoraro was invoking in the interview, applying it to assisted suicide.
Obviously Pegoraro would be wrong if there was a real possibility of passing an absolute prohibition and he was nevertheless promoting the legalization of assisted suicide. But that is not how he understands the situation, and as far as I can tell, it is a realistic assessment.
Haynes claims that Pegoraro “appears to contravene the Catholic teaching regarding the principle of double effect,” suggesting that voting for a more restrictive law is evil in itself. But Evangelium Vitae 73 addresses precisely this situation, and it says that supporting a more restrictive law “does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.” In other words, applying this principle is not invoking double effect, and is not doing evil at all.
How the narrative took hold
The response to the reports about Pegoraro was almost instantaneous because many Catholics have been conditioned to believe that the Pontifical Academy for Life is malevolent and filled with heretics.
In 2016 and 2017, Pope Francis undertook major reforms of two institutions founded by John Paul II: the Pontifical Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. He named Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia president of the Academy and grand chancellor of the newly reconstituted Institute. The reforms broadened both institutions’ scope and interdisciplinary approach, replaced lifetime Academy appointments with fixed terms, admitted non-Catholic experts, and reshaped the Institute’s statutes, curriculum, and faculty. In conservative and pro-life circles, a narrative soon took hold that both institutions had become damaged, heterodox, and morally suspect.
In the years that followed, it seemed that every significant development involving either institute was spun by certain segments of Catholic media as further proof of an effort to undermine Catholic moral doctrine. The Academy’s 2017 appointment of Oxford moral theologian and euthanasia opponent Nigel Biggar, an Anglican who had expressed support for legal abortion in some circumstances, prompted alarm. The 2019 removal of former president Msgr. Livio Melina from the John Paul II Institute was portrayed as a repudiation of its founding legacy. And the Academy’s 2022 appointment of atheist economist Mariana Mazzucato, whose Twitter activity following the Dobbs decision was interpreted as support for abortion, led to more accusations that it had abandoned its pro-life mission.
But in each case, the reality was more complicated. Melina’s chair at the Institute was officially eliminated as part of its restructuring, but he had come out publicly in favor of a restrictive interpretation of Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, even expressing sympathy with the arguments behind the four cardinals’ dubia in a public address.
The Academy’s statutes permit the appointment of non-Catholics with expertise “in fields pertaining to human life (medicine, the biological sciences, theology, philosophy, anthropology, law, sociology and so forth).” Biggar was recommended for the Academy by the Archbishop of Canterbury because of his extensive work opposing euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Mazzucato, meanwhile, was appointed for her expertise in economics, inequality, and public policy. Pope Francis praised her work even before her appointment. The Academy pointed out that her scholarly work did not promote positions contrary to human life, and Mazzucato herself pushed back against the accusations against her. At a 2024 Vatican press conference, after being confronted by Haynes about her views, she said she had given birth to four children in five years, said abortion was not something she thought about, and she asked that attention should be redirected to the economic and social questions that defined her work.
None of these explanations quieted critics of the appointments to the Academy or of the restructuring of the John Paul II Institute. But it should be noted that Pope Leo has not only upheld the decisions made by Pope Francis, but in the case of the Pontifical Academy for Life, he expanded on them by adding a new category, “supporters,” to bring non-academic advocates for the Academy’s mission alongside the current roster of academics and scholars.
A failure to communicate
In April 2023, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Archbishop Paglia gave a talk on end-of-life questions. Speaking about the situation in Italy created by the Constitutional Court’s 2019 ruling, he said that while he could not support assisted suicide, “I understand that legal mediation may be the greatest common good concretely possible under the conditions we find ourselves in.” The reaction in the English-language Catholic press was immediate. Catholic News Agency’s headline was “Pontifical Academy for Life president calls medically assisted suicide ‘feasible.’” LifeSiteNews called for him to be fired and resign. In an attempt to quell the firestorm of criticism, the Academy issued a note affirming Paglia’s “no” to euthanasia and assisted suicide and explaining that he had been addressing the specific legal situation in Italy.
At the time, I found the whole episode maddening, because even though it was clear to me what the press was doing, the Academy was doing little to explain itself to its English-speaking critics. The talk was in Italian. English machine translations of the full speech were making the rounds much more slowly than the sensational LifeSite and EWTN coverage. In his defense, Paglia never spelled out the reasoning that would have made his position intelligible to Anglophone audiences, and although the Academy’s note vouched for his orthodoxy, it didn’t explain it. I inferred that he meant something similar to what Archbishop Pegoraro said clearly — that a restrictive law might be the best available option. But I said then that I could not be certain, because he had not said so explicitly, and I wrote, “I am not going to put my reputation on the line to defend Archbishop Paglia or the Academy when they fail to competently explain what’s really going on.”
Three years later, however, Academy leaders seem to have learned their lesson. Pegoraro gave his interview to Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference. The Academy posted a full English translation on their website. There is no missing context — and still, reactionary voices in the media continue their spin. To top it all off, Haynes’s article dredges up the 2023 episode as well, claiming that Paglia opposed assisted suicide personally but “defended it for others.” No amount of clarity from the Academy seems to make a difference.
Humanae Vitae, again
The same press that has dogged Paglia and the Academy for the last decade is even willing to recycle old controversies that proved to be nothingburgers years before.
In May 2017, Vatican-watcher Marco Tosatti reported that Pope Francis had formed a “secret commission” led by John Paul II Institute theologian Fr. Gilfredo Marengo to revisit the teaching of Humanae Vitae on contraception ahead of the encyclical’s 50th anniversary. The story moved through the usual channels, and a panic set in that Francis was preparing to reverse Paul VI. OnePeterFive founder Steve Skojec issued a stark warning, “They’re coming for Humanae Vitae and its proscriptions against contraception, and they’re not going to stop until they get what they want.”
The following month, CNA published a story quoting the “controversial” Paglia on the rumors. The archbishop said of the study, “I can confirm that there is no pontifical commission called to re-read or to re-interpret Humanae vitae. However, we should look positively on all those initiatives, such as that of Professor Marengo of the John Paul II Institute, which aim at studying and deepening this document in view of the 50th anniversary of its publication.”
LifeSiteNews wasn’t having it. Even after Paglia’s reassurances, they continued to push the rumor that a plot to revise Humanae Vitae was underway at the Vatican, writing, “Although Fr. Marengo and Archbishop Paglia have protested much that no revision of the document is intended, Marengo himself seems already to be in the process of reinterpreting Humanae Vitae in troubling ways.”
Then, in July 2018 the research was published as a 284-page book in Italian by the Vatican’s publishing house as La nascita di un’enciclica – Humanae Vitae alla luce degli Archivi Vaticani (The Birth of an Encyclical: “Humanae Vitae” in the Light of the Vatican Archives). It documented Paul VI’s consultation of the bishops at the 1967 Synod, his personal corrections to drafts of the encyclical, and how he navigated his decision to reaffirm the Church’s teaching against the majority of the members of the commission he appointed. In other words, it was an in-depth history of the composition of the encyclical and the aftermath of its release. So the sensational rumor suddenly went silent, and the panic disappeared along with it.
Incredibly, after all that, the same rumors found new life on May 21 of this year. That day, SettimanaNews published a long retrospective interview with Paglia about his work under Pope Francis. Recalling the period of the two family synods, Paglia said (translated from the Italian):
Meanwhile the anniversary of Humanae Vitae (1968) was also approaching, and Pope Francis felt the need to bring the doctrine up to date with the new times [adeguare la dottrina ai nuovi tempi]. He asked me to prepare a text that would underline its prophetic character, while also showing some necessary updates [alcuni necessari aggiornamenti]. I prepared for him a text drafted with the collaboration of a group of theologians. He appreciated it very much, and asked me to continue the research, which flowed into subsequent texts.
Within days, LifeSiteNews reported that Paglia had “candidly” admitted Francis wanted to “adapt doctrine to the new times.” An Italian traditionalist blog, Messa in Latino, ran the headline, “Msgr. Paglia has admitted: ‘The critics were right.’” The Spanish website InfoCatólica ran the headline “Paglia confirms that the ‘opponents’ understood correctly: the demolition of the work of the PAV and the John Paul II Institute was premeditated.”
But Archbishop Paglia was not describing anything new. He was not revealing a secret motive behind his work at the John Paul II Institute or the Pontifical Academy for Life — the “text drafted with the collaboration of a group of theologians” he described was almost certainly the same research project that caused so much panic in 2017 and was published as a history book in 2018, and more theological work was published in subsequent years, but none of it was secret.
The reactionary Catholic press must think very little of their audience if they believe they can repeatedly create panic over the same conspiracy theories.
When distortion becomes dishonesty
The Catechism is clear in its teaching against rash judgment, which it defines as assuming “as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor.” Another offense against the Eighth Commandment is detraction — disclosing another’s faults “without objectively valid reason.” The sin of calumny is making “remarks contrary to the truth” that harm another’s reputation (CCC 2477). And the remedy the Catechism prescribes is one that Michael Haynes, the editors of LifeSiteNews, and many other figures in right-wing and traditionalist Catholic media consistently fail to apply: “everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor’s thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way” (CCC 2478).
It is a strange situation when the most aggressive purveyors of falsehoods about the leaders of the Catholic Church are self-described traditional and orthodox Catholics. Certainly the hierarchy should be criticized when they deserve it and corruption should be rooted out. But running ideologically driven false news campaigns against archbishops who are simply carrying out the pope’s initiatives to promote the family and human dignity is not that.
After nearly a decade of empty accusations, unsubstantiated rumors and false panic about the Pontifical Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute, it is time for Catholics to ask themselves if they should trust the people pushing those narratives.
Image: YouTube Screenshot. From left to right: Professor Mariana Mazzucato
, Monsignor Renzo Pegoraro
, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia
, and Professor Jim Al-Khalili
during a press conference for the Pontifical Academy for Life
at the Vatican on February 12, 2024.
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