The Sensus Fidelium, Moral Theology, and Youth

If we are reading the signs of the times, it is apparent that there needs to be more effort put into the moral training of our youth. But this would be a mighty task because the common approach when it comes to catechizing teens is to avoid controversy, talking over their heads, or saying anything that may be perceived as offensive. And to put a stronger emphasis on the Church’s moral teachings, which seems somewhat urgent and which the Magisterium has repeatedly emphasized, can be controversial, may go over people’s heads, and may even offend. That said, in an age marked by relativism, addiction, and meaninglessness, this is the kind of challenge young people are yearning for, and, more importantly, it is the kind of educational confrontation they need.

Simply put, the sensus fidelium today calls for a renewed emphasis on moral theology in the formation of young people. This is the specific challenge that our young Church ought to be given before they find themselves in the midst of the world.

Teens do not like being talked to as if they are incapable of understanding the real message. This condescending approach is the grave error in education that we oftentimes see today. Those who beat around the bush and never even attempt to teach the hard truths tend to use compassion as their justification, but it is anything but compassionate to deprive young people of what they have a right to know. In this attempt to “bring things down to their level,” it gives young people who are thirsting for truth nothing to strive for, nothing to be challenged by, and worst of all, no mystery to look up to and contemplate.

It was the bishop of Raphoe, Ireland who recently said that young people are seeking “clarity, coherence and tradition.”¹ Identifying those born after 1995 as the “i-Gen,” Bishop Niall Coll asserted that this generation has grown up “entirely in a post-Christian, digital, morally fragmented culture.” Young Catholics, in his eyes, “are less interested in conversation and more in formation that produces conviction and confidence.” Genuine conversation is, of course, necessary for true education to be had, but Bishop Coll’s point is that young people are tired of aimless discussion that is not rooted in truth. In this sense, synodality — a big theme of Pope Francis’ pontificate and which seems to be a big theme for Pope Leo as well — can lose its purpose. “If not anchored in Scripture and doctrine,” Coll says, synodality “risks endless discussion without direction.”

If we continue to try and pull the faith down to our human minds, not only will we eventually pull so hard that we fall into the Enlightenment errors of rationalism and skepticism, but the pit of moral confusion which those ideologies produce — and which we currently find ourselves in — will only deepen. According to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, this was the specific sin committed in the narrative of the golden calf. In his commentary on this infamous Old Testament violation of God’s law, he writes: “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world.” The answer is the rope of faith, which does not entail trying to tug the infinite weight of God down, but a strong grip and a receptive heart that allows the divine to take one up to itself. Here, it is not a bringing of the faith down, but an upward gaze into the mysteries and truths of faith.

The Seraphic Doctor’s Counsel

In St. Bonaventure’s On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, his thesis is that everything needs to be brought into relation to the highest form of wisdom (i.e., theology).² He lived at a time when the monastic educational tradition and way of life was being challenged by new universities and the urbanization of medieval Europe. The problems he saw had a lot to do with secular knowledge. He did not reject the arts and sciences, but rather, he posited that they need to be incorporated into the world of faith and theology. A similar response is needed today, and that entails the understanding of right conduct from the lens of Divine Revelation. Morals and the teaching of how to live was a big deal for Bonaventure. He writes, “The light of sacred Scripture is to be found in the illumination of moral philosophy.” And for this great Doctor of the Church, moral training was seen as one of the chief aims of Scripture itself:

The whole of sacred Scripture teaches these three truths: namely, the eternal generation and incarnation of Christ, the pattern of human life, and the union of the soul with God. The first is concerned with faith; the second with morals; and the third with the ultimate goal of both.

Bonaventure’s educational philosophy is rooted in the wisdom of St. Augustine, who concludes that “the only true teacher is one who can impress a likeness, infuse light, and grant power to the heart of the hearer.” And so the specific task at hand when it comes to the moral training of our youth is to impress the pattern of Christ’s life onto their hearts and infuse them with His light. How can this be done in an educational setting? Bonaventure says that Augustine’s writings “lead us by the hand to divine wisdom,” and this is the perfect image for the modern educator (be that a parent, catechist, priest, deacon, etc.).

Advice from a Modern Convert

In the teacher’s pursuit of divine wisdom, the students follow. Here, a class is capable of striving for truth together without turning truth into something it’s not. A teacher leading his pupils by the hand to divine wisdom is different than a teacher leaving his students in their seats and only giving them the “divine wisdom” that society has presumed they can handle. In reality, though, young people can handle a lot more than we like to believe and if we continue to water things down, their minds will eventually find something else that will challenge them. Young Catholics are yearning for “formation that produces conviction and confidence,” Bishop Coll says.

After more than fifty years of delivering formal lectures, both in universities and to public audiences of all sorts, Mortimer J. Adler — arguably the greatest educational philosopher of the twentieth century — strongly believed something that modern man would shudder at: “Never talk down to your audience about any subject. If you do so, they will quite rightly turn you off.” In his book How to Speak How to Listen, Adler, who ended up converting to Catholicism shortly before his death in 2001, elaborates on this important point, writing:

Always risk talking over their heads! . . . It will not hurt if some of the things you say may be beyond their reach. It is much better for them to have the sense that they have succeeded in getting some enlightenment by their effort to reach up (even if they also have the sense that some things to be understood have escaped them) than it is for them to sit there feeling insulted by the patronizing manner in which you have talked down to them.³

In a recent article entitled “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are,” the author points out that “we live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt.”⁴ Nobody, especially in the West, can honestly deny that breakdown. We do, indeed, live in the age of the excerpt. But before the age of the excerpt, there was the age of relativism. (And that age did not just disappear.) So what we have today is a convergence of the two ages, and the result is a culture whose collective mind has been shaped not by a universal law “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:15), but rather, tens of thousands of competing soundbites that all lay claim to “the right take.”

The Sensus Fidelium

Every period of salvation history has a different situation; that is, a unique problem or problems that demand appropriate responses. In the sixteenth century, for example, millions of people left the Church and followed the new doctrines taught by the Reformers. That was their response to the situation placed before them. Others stood firm and held to the traditions taught by the Apostles (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and that was their response to the sixteenth century situation.

Sensus fidelium means “the sense of the faithful,” and the Vatican’s International Theological Commission (ITC) states that this concept “began to be elaborated and used in a more systematic way at the time of the Reformation.”⁵ It makes sense that the People of God, during a time of great turmoil, started thinking deeply about this “sense of the faithful.” What should we do? How should we respond? What is God’s will for us in this moment? These are questions that have their roots in the sensus fidelium.

Today, widespread misconceptions about the sensus fidelium can be summarized by looking at two extremes. One extreme is individualism, which proposes that the faithful are to find new solutions apart from what the Church has already defined. Here, the “sense of the faithful” is simply a matter of private judgement divorced from the preexisting foundation. Saint John Henry Newman pushes back against this kind of mentality, stating in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, that “the new truth which is promulgated, if it is to be called new, must be at least homogeneous, cognate, implicit, viewed relatively to the old truth.”⁶ The other extreme is a stationary, motionless and static view of Christianity, wherein the mysteries of the faith cannot be better understood or built upon. While this kind of rigidity does not pridefully attempt to invent new doctrines apart from the Deposit of the Faith, it is driven by fear and, as such, leaves the faithful deadened and frozen in times of crisis.

Moral Theology

If the sensus fidelium relates to a kind of situational awareness that seeks action when action is needed, it is easy to see how there is an inherently moral dimension to this “sense.” Last year, the Cultural Research Center published a study on Americans’ views of moral truth. It found that “74% of adults trust feelings over facts to discern moral truth, two-thirds reject absolute moral truth, and nine out of 10 embrace Syncretism — a blending of competing worldviews.”

On top of that, the study found that “69% of Catholics and 61% of those who attend a mainline Protestant church reject the idea of absolute moral truth.” For those who have paid attention to both secular and religious studies on this issue, these percentages are not surprising. Back in 2002, 64% of adults said truth is always relative to the person and their situation, and the percentage for teens at that time was even more lopsided: “83% of whom said moral truth depends on the circumstances, and only 6% of whom said moral truth is absolute.”⁷ Those teens would be in their 30s or 40s now, perhaps with children of their own, teaching in schools and parishes, etc.

The reason these studies matter is because it helps us make sense of the moment in salvation history we are in. And this is where the sensus fidelium and moral theology meet. The sense of the faithful, for the entirety of the twenty-first century, has begged for moral theology to be taken more seriously. Moral theology is simply the study of human actions under the light of Divine Revelation. On an individual level, this discipline forms man’s conscience in line with faith and reason so that he can properly discern the correct moral choices in life. On a societal level, this discipline upholds the natural and divine law as the standards for right and wrong.

The last four popes (John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV) have been adamant about the grave danger of moral relativism. Pope Francis called it “the spiritual poverty of our time . . . which obscures the splendor of truth and . . . pushes us toward the shifting sands of confusion and despair.”⁸ More recently, on Jan. 27 of this year, Pope Leo spoke about the “spread of relativism,” warning the world that “no authentic progress is possible without respect for the natural and fundamental right to know the truth and live according to that truth.”⁹ This is what moral theology is: The study of truth for the purpose of living in accordance with it.

If we are at least attempting to read the signs of the times, the need for sound moral training — through the lens of the Church that Christ established — does not seem optional, but rather, necessary today. And why might it be significant that this has been a unanimous plea from the magisterium over the past 50 years? The International Theological Commission explains:

Being responsible for ensuring the fidelity of the Church as a whole to the word of God, and for keeping the people of God faithful to the Gospel, the magisterium is responsible for nurturing and educating the sensus fidelium.¹⁰

Simply put, a key element of the sensus fidelium is the openness and responsiveness to the living and breathing teaching arm of the Church (i.e., the magisterium). This is what makes the sensus fidelium explicitly Catholic, for it does not respond on the authority of individual and private judgement. Rather, it responds to the signs of the times with fidelity to Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.

The Youth

If the solution to our modern problems is, as is being proposed in this article, a more direct and aggressive moral training for the youth, then all that is left to do is act. But this presupposes that adults accept the challenge of dedicating themselves to the study of morals. A degree is not needed (although it may be helpful), and the start should be Part Three of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which covers topics such as:

• Freedom and responsibility
• The sources of morality
• Good acts and evil acts
• The formation of conscience
• The human virtues
• The theological virtues
• The different kinds of sins
• The natural moral law

If adults committed themselves to knowing the basics regarding these topics and had the courage to teach this to teens, it would significantly mitigate the moral crisis we see today among the youth. Of course, the Faith cannot be presented as if mere teaching is the end-all-be-all. Here, the words at the beginning of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ are helpful: “If men used as much care in uprooting vices and implanting virtues as they do in discussing problems, there would not be so much evil and scandal in the world.” But how can one uproot a vice he does not first know about, or implant a virtue he is ignorant of? We cannot love what we do not know, and so the task at hand for a world so detached from reality is to get back to the basics.

The misconception on the part of adults who have authority over the education of young people is that if the topics such as the ones mentioned in Part Three of the Catechism are taught, it will go over their heads. This is a condescending lie. The intellectual capacity of young people is very apparent, especially when looking at the demands of the school system. If students can spend most of their day, as well as after school, studying and learning complex math equations and chemistry formulas, they are fully capable of knowing the difference between natural and divine law, the sources of morality, the different kinds of sins, etc.

The reality, though, is that everybody knows this stuff doesn’t go over their heads; it’s just a little controversial. And on this point, the advice  of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is helpful: “For the young who seek to live by truth, this will at first severely complicate life.”¹¹

Answering the call of the sensus fidelium to start taking moral theology more seriously is something that educators need to initiate. The Church has a treasure trove of resources in this area, and there are not too many fields of study more pressing for teens than this. We not only live in the age of the soundbite and excerpt, but we live in a world where parents, teachers and clergy are competing with thousands of random voices that all diminish objective truth and reality. And those loud, passionate, and clever voices are unfortunately winning over many young people. How exactly to implement an effective movement of moral theology for young people is a matter of prudence. But the question before us is not whether they can handle moral theology. The question is whether we have the courage to teach it.