Archbishop Paglia criticizes pontifical academy, JPII Institute before his leadership; Bishop Barron weighs in

June 23, 2026

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the retired president of the Pontifical Academy for Life (2016-2025) and grand chancellor of John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences (2017-2025), offered strong criticism of the two institutions before he assumed leadership.

Archbishop Paglia said in a recent interview with SettimanaNews, a Dehonian news site, that an emphasis of his work “was the rethinking of the concept of ‘nature,’ which was the foundation of a static and immutable vision of natural law, and with it the questioning of the essentialist and ahistorical paradigm on which all sexual and family moral theology developed so far was based.”

“A historical conception of nature undermined the paradigm of a natural law understood as a set of immutable principles, and it is here that the greatest criticism and resistance have arisen,” he continued. “Here the ‘opponents’ had understood well: a very profound reform was at stake.”

Msgr. Levio Melina, former president (2006-2016) of what was then known as the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family (before its refounding by Pope Francis), responded that Archbishop Paglia’s criticisms are “ideological and superficial, since it does not address the substance of the scientific work carried out at the Institute.”

Referring to St. John Paul II, Msgr. Melina added:

What, then, was the unspoken motive behind the dismantling of a flourishing institution founded by a holy and prophetic Pope? One might answer: the difficulty of accepting the message on marriage and the family that the Church has proposed thus far, which Paglia considered unreasonable and impractical. From this perspective, his intervention has in fact prevented the further development of a proposal capable of remaining faithful to the Church’s traditional teaching while at the same time presenting it in terms understandable to contemporary man—a proposal endowed with pastoral fruitfulness that would truly enable people to live it out.

In a social media post, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, wrote that “what any truly coherent moral program requires is the very thing that Archbishop Paglia and his colleagues were endeavoring to eliminate, namely, absolute moral norms.”

Bishop Barron continued:

Ridding ourselves of these in the name of freedom or pastoral sensitivity actually renders moral discourse dysfunctional, just as relativizing the basic principle of logic would render any rational conversation impossible. The Archbishop’s interview, frankly, reminded me of the discussions I had at the Synod on Synodality with some of my German colleagues. Under the rubric of the development of doctrine, they were eager to relativize or radically change the principles undergirding classical morality. If this was and is truly the game, we have ventured onto perilous seas.

 

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Further information:

• Mons. Paglia: le “mie” riforme con Francesco (SettimanaNews, 5/21/26)
• The Confessions of Monsignor Paglia and the Crossroads for Moral Catholic Theology (The Catholic World Report, 6/19/26)