Una Caro: In Praise of Monogamy, the note from the Dicastery of Faith which was approved by Pope Prevost, is expansive in scope but predictably suffers from a characteristic weakness common to all synodal modernist texts: it treats an ancient, clear, and divinely-established doctrine as if it were a theme requiring modern rediscovery rather than a perennial truth.
While we find ourselves in an age when the very idea of marriage is collapsing under the weight of sexual libertinism, gender ideology, and the cultural glorification of non-commitment, one would think a Vatican document on monogamy would possess the clarity of a trumpet blast. One would be terribly mistaken. The document is nothing of the sort. Instead, Una Caro whispers sweet nothings and prances like a dandy. It is a long, pompous, oh-so-earnest, pastoral meditation—yes, even a beautiful one in places—that refuses to call sin sin, error error, and truth truth. What the Church required was a hammer; what it got was a modernist tap-dance.
From the opening passages any hopes you had, that this document might be different from the usual post-conciliar garbage, are quickly dashed. The Note does not begin with doctrine, nor with divine law, nor even with the natural law that undergirds the whole Catholic understanding of matrimony. Instead, it begins with the introspective, therapeutic language typical of contemporary synodal ecclesial documents. The conjugal bond, we are told, does not arise from two persons “standing one before the other,” but from two people “standing with one another.”
Okay then, Captain Smooch, whatever you say.
The very definition of monogamous unity is phrased not in theological or juridical terms, but in the vocabulary of a marriage counselor. This is not an accidental stylistic choice—it reveals the entire lens through which the document views its subject. Marriage is not first a covenant, an instituted bond or an ontological unity, but a “relationship”, a “mutual journey”, and a “communion of life.”
But hey, what did we expect? The document is after all the artistry of Cardinal Soft Porn himself, aka Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández.
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