Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia — the former head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome, as well as the former head of the Pontifical Academy for Life — recently granted an interview in which he openly admitted that one of his goals was to change the Catholic Church’s moral theology.
Archbishop Paglia said that he wanted to move away from “armchair theology” grounded in natural law theory and toward a new paradigm that focuses on the lived experiences of real people in their concrete circumstances.
His comment about “armchair theology” was a criticism of moral theology that he thought had become too academic and detached from the real world of real people. It was directed primarily at the former theologians of the John Paul II Institute, whom he dismissed without proper academic due process after taking charge, replacing them with theologians who would ground their approach in the social sciences as much as in theology.
In this latest interview, he is brutally honest about his ultimate aims. And he has elicited a profound and important response from the Institute’s former president, Msgr. Livio Melina, who was also among the professors Archbishop
