What came to be known as proportionalism first developed among Roman Catholic moral theologians from the mid 1960s onwards, largely as a reaction to what had long been traditional Catholic teaching about a small number of acts which were deemed to be intrinsically evil, regardless of circumstances. Its proponents hold that, when we are endeavoring to ascertain the moral rightness or wrongness of an act, we need to take into account all the positive and negative consequences of that act in whatever is the particular context. Given the following comment by Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, one might have expected that the scholars concerned would have had an easy ride: