Veritatis Splendor After Thirty Years: Exposition and Critique

Some thirty years ago, as an antidote to widespread dissent from Catholic sexual teaching among many theologians and faithful, Pope John Paul II published his encyclical Veritatis Splendor . His stated purpose was “to reflect on the whole of the Church’s moral teaching with the precise goal of recalling certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances (a ‘new situation’) risk being distorted or denied.” In this essay, we focus on John Paul’s teaching on natural law in Veritatis Splendor and offer several critiques of it.