A Minnesota county attorney named Mary Moriarty made news recently when she reversed her predecessor’s decision to try two teenagers, 15 and 17, as adults for the murder of a Minneapolis woman. (Police allege that the victim’s ex-boyfriend used them as hit men, giving them a gun and driving them to the woman’s apartment.) Now, instead of facing an adult sentence for murder if convicted, the two have been offered a plea deal that would have them serve two years in a juvenile detention facility.
Coverage of the story has focused on how the new prosecutor is carrying out the promise she made while campaigning: to promote “restorative justice,” which many, especially political conservatives, view as a code for special leniency based on the premise that certain criminals are themselves victims of systemic oppression. (Her dropping of charges against a Honduran man accused of raping a teenage girl, based on a note passed to the prosecutor during trial, is another example.)
Whatever all this means for the future of criminal jurisprudence and its possible effects on our culture, what strikes me here is the rationale offered by Moriarty: she said she is “following the science.” For science, she says, now tells us that since human brains are not fully formed until the mid-20’s; and so we must “treat kids like kids” and not hold them fully responsible for their actions.
There’s much to unpack here, from a Catholic perspective.
First, here we see shades of the movement in some Catholic circles to diminish people’s moral agency. Whether it’s the suggestion that countless couples’ marriages are actually invalid because they lacked full metaphysical certitude of the significance of their vows when they made them; or a tacit approval of Catholics who persist unrepentantly in adulterous or unnatural sexual unions, based on the premise that they’re simply incapable of doing otherwise; or the de facto elimination of mortal sin by making its subjective requirements for the human conscience so mysterious and extreme that they’re unattainable; there seems to be a parallel between these two legal and moral-theological fads of our moment.
Second, there’s this “science” business. That word, of course, took on a lot of baggage when it was used as a catch-all justification for lockdowns, church closures, and all manner of coercions during the pandemic. But it also has been showing up increasingly in Catholic moral discourse. The teardown and rebuild of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family that has vexed so many also came with a conspicuous name change: to the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences.
Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg, head of the European bishops conference, relator-general of the Synod on Synodality, and newly appointed member of Pope Francis’s Council of Cardinal Advisors—distinctly not a nobody—argues that the Church’s teaching on the disordered nature of homosexual acts is “incorrect” because it lacks the right “scientific-sociological foundation.”
Helmut Dieser (who is not a guest host for “Sprockets” but a German bishop and part of that country’s near-schismatic Synodal Way) seconds this notion, arguing that “science shows” us that homosexuality is “not a glitch” but a natural variant of human sexuality.
His position and Hollerich’s echo those of many others in the Church—in academic faculties, in ministry, in therapeutic professions, in positions of clerical leadership—who think that they have a silver bullet against traditional Catholic moral teaching.
Who can argue with science? It’s fresh, it’s current, it’s objective. The apostles and Fathers and Scholastics and Manualists of the past didn’t know what we know today, right? Not even the council fathers or John Paul II did. So to revise Catholic teaching in these areas, they say, wouldn’t be a contradictory change but a development based on new (and better) knowledge.
Keep an eye out for such invocations of “science,” folks. They’re not going away.