There’s a difference between authoritarian morality and let’s call it reasoned morality. What’s the difference? Well obviously, the first is commands and the second gives reasons.
When bishops moan about attacks on the “religious freedom” of Catholics to punish gay people by refusing to officiate at their marriages or rent them rooms at bed&breakfasts, they cite “church teachings” as their reason for treating homosexuality as wrong and deserving of punishment. That’s authoritarian. “The church teaches that homosexuality is evil” is not reasons, it’s a detour around reasons.
That’s why the habit of punishing people for being gay is gradually (yet also, historically speaking, rapidly) crumbling away: it’s because once it’s pointed out that there are no real reasons for this stupid habit, people start looking for reasons and then finding that there aren’t any. Those people end up changing their minds, some slowly and some overnight.
The people who don’t change their minds are the ones who consider the invocation of phrases like “church teachings” adequate.
This thought is familiar from discussions and practice of child-rearing, too. Some command morality is needed for emergency situations and in the early years when the cortex isn’t developed enough to understand the reasons. But as the child grows and learns and develops the capability to understand reasons, it becomes practical for parents to explain reasons for doing one thing rather than another. It remains possible to have just rules with no explanations or reasons, but many parents prefer to shift more and more to reasons over time.
It’s possible to find some proffered reasons for some church teachings by browsing the Vatican’s website, but the putative reasons are not very convincing. The people who write the encyclicals probably don’t get enough practice in giving reasons for their commands.