POPE CITES HIS MORAL AUTHORITY.(MAIN)

Byline: PETER STEINFELS - New York Times

In an encyclical that Pope John Paul II clearly considers one of the most important of his papacy, the Roman Catholic leader asserts that there is a basic morality that transcends all eras and cultures and absolutely forbids certain actions.

The encyclical, named "Veritatis Splendor" (the splendor of truth), does little to spell out what these intrinsically evil acts are, but it does have an unmistakable subtext that refers to sexual themes.

Instead, the Pope presents an abstract treatise condemning recent trends in Catholic theology that seek to revise some of the church's moral strictures and allow more exceptions to others.

The encyclical, which will be issued Tuesday, is a response, the Pope wrote, to "a genuine crisis" in the church and society, "an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine." The Pope strongly reasserts the church's ability to identify and teach the basic morality and to require Catholic theologians to agree to these judgments.

In passages in which the Pope appears to halt only a hair's breadth from invoking the language of papal infallibility, he emphasizes that this is the first time such an authoritative and extensive outline of fundamental moral principles has ever come from the papacy.

A copy of the official English translation of the encyclical was obtained by the New York Times.

Many recent encyclicals, which are instructions from the Pope, have been addressed to all the Catholic faithful and even to all interested non-Catholics. In contrast, "Veritatis Splendor" is addressed directly to the church's bishops.

The Pope tells the bishops that they have a "grave obligation to be personally vigilant" and must take "appropriate measures to insure that the faithful are guarded from every doctrine and theory contrary" to official church teaching.

These measures appear to include censuring of dissenting theologians and removal of the word Catholic from the names of universities, schools, hospitals and social service agencies that do not reflect the papal teaching.

Because the Pope's condemnations explicitly refer to concepts and labels associated with some of the church's most eminent moral theologians, the encyclical could ignite bitter conflicts among Catholic bishops and theologians and within Catholic institutions.

Six years in the making, the encyclical has been the storm center of rumors, protests and differences of opinion within the Vatican. In July 1990, after a rumor that the encyclical might explicitly declare the ban on contraception to be infallible doctrine, a number of well-known Europeantheologians signed a statement warning that such a step would be catastrophic.

Reports based on an earlier draft and a text leaked last week gave the impression that the encyclical was a fiery denunciation of birth control, sterilization, masturbation, premarital sex, homosexual activity, abortion and other sex-related conduct.

But the actual text is far from that.

In fact, only a single paragraph contains a list of sexual sins, saying they are "condemned as morally unacceptable." That is the only time, for instance, the word contraception appears in a document 183 pages and over 40,000 words long. (There is another passing reference to contraceptive practices.)

The final text has dropped passages that mention papal infallibility and that underline the obedience owed to the Pope and bishops even when their teachings are not meant to be definitive. These appeared in a draft that circulated this summer.

Although the encyclical may be less sensational than its advance notices, it is no less important. At the very least, it will stimulate an important assessment of the state of Catholic moral theology, a development that will affect the Catholic faithful and, indeed, the church's role in public life.

Some church officials hope that such an assessment will take the form of positive discussions rather than arguments over which theologians fall under the papal censure.

And though the encyclical does not focus on sexual issues explicitly, they lurk just below the surface of its abstract theological and philosophical language.

Many of the actions that the church has traditionally labeled intrinsically evil and prohibited without exceptions or regard to intention or circumstances lie in the area of sexuality.

The debate in the 1960s over the church's ban on contraception, which led many married Catholics to ignore the church's teaching, also reinforced the position of some leading moral theologians that the church's way of defining intrinsically evil acts was too narrow.

Because these theologians emphasized that moral decisions involved weighing of moral and material goods and evils, they became known as proportionalists.

Some moral theologians, although not always the same ones, began to emphasize the rights of the individual conscience, especially in the face of church teaching that many Catholics found unpersuasive.

There was also a new emphasis on an individual's basic orientation toward God, often called a fundamental option, rather than on specific choices of behavior.

Finally, building on the church's traditional position that ordinary human reason could ascertain what is moral, some theologians argued that morality was a largely autonomous field of inquiry.

The church and the Bible might inspire moral behavior or give it heightened meaning, but they made no distinctive contribution to its content.

These are the currents of thought that the Pope finds threatening to his view of sound doctrine.

Despite the document's technical language, the encyclical is "one of the bluntest things the Pope has ever written," said Msgr. William B. Smith, professor of moral theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, Westchester County. "He wrestles with every hot potato of the last 20 years in fundamental moral theology. For me it is a moral masterpiece. For others it may be a moral horror."

The framework for the Pope's reflections is his alarm that contemporary culture separates morality and truth. In some cases, he says, actions are thought to be right or wrong simply on the basis that they have been conscientiously chosen.

While the Pope defends freedom of conscience and religion ("Each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey"), he also states that conscience "is not exempt from the possibility of error." To have a "good conscience," he writes, "man must seek the truth."

The Pope also rejects the idea that human freedom and human reason create values on their own, or impose them on nature, rather than discover the values that are inherent in the order of the universe God has created.

He defends the concept of natural law as a rational understanding of how human nature fits into that overall natural order, an understanding that can be clouded by sin, however, and therefore in need of the church's guidance.

Freedom and moral law are not opposed to one another, he argues. Instead, acting in accord with "natural law" makes people more, not less, free to fulfill themselves.

Many of the Pope's concerns about subjective and individualistic attitudes toward morality are widely shared among Catholic moral theologians, including those whom the encyclical criticizes. But some who are criticized are already protesting that the document caricatures their views.

"There is an awful lot of relativism in our culture," said the Rev. Richard A. McCormick, who is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Christian Ethics at the University of Notre Dame and a leading proportionalist. "But it is a misfire to think that going after Roman Catholic theologians on absolutes is the way to combat this. The people writing in the field considered to be proportionalists would not recognize what they've been trying to say. We all hold that some acts can be understood as wrong in themselves, but we define the act more broadly."

Proportionalists frequently note that the church does not forbid all killing of other people, making exceptions for self-defense, for example. What is absolutely forbidden is murder, a term that proportionalists say includes in its very definition certain assumptions about the intention and circumstances of the act.

"Moral theology's standard definition of theft," McCormick said, "is the taking of property against the owner's reasonable will." But that "writes the circumstances right into the definition," he said. "We've done this in almost all areas except contraception. This encyclical would not be there if we did not have 'Humanae Vitae.'" He referred to the papal encyclical in 1968 reaffirming the church's official ban on contraception.

"It is never said, but any analysis of rightness or wrongness of human activity that ends up justifying a contraceptive act will be dismissed from the start," he added.

But Smith, noting that the pope was a moral theologian before being made a bishop, said, "It would be difficult to say that he doesn't know what the nub of the argument is."