Does It Make Any Difference Whether Rome Has Spoken Or Not?
Rome Has Spoken. . . A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements and How They Have Changed through the Centuries. By Maureen Fiedler and Linda Rabben, Editors (The Crossroads Publishing Co., 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017, 1998), 244 pp. PB $19.95.
The traditional saying, "Rome has spoken, the case is closed," has not exactly proved to be very true in practice in the case of some of the Roman decisions of recent years. Rather, in today's atmosphere of organized theological dissent, Roman decisions on some issues have provided the occasion and even the impetus for further debate and discussion, some of it quite unseemly, concerning various disputed or controversial issues in the Church today.
Comes now the activist dissident organization called the Quixote Center with a new book, which is presumably supposed to clinch the arguments once and for all in favor of today's theological dissenters. Entitled Rome Has Spoken . . . and subtitled "A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements and How They Have Changed through the Centuries," the book brings together many Church statements, past and present, on eighteen different issues considered controversial today, and provides supposedly expert commentaries on them by the book's two editors and by various collaborators and writers, some of them long known in the ranks of dissenters (but others holding down mainstream, apparently respectable academic positions in both Catholic and secular institutions).
The Church statements themselves come not only from the popes, but also from Scripture, from councils and synods, from Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and even a few from entities not officially part of the Church's magisterium, such as the Papal Birth Control Commission. Edited by Sr. Maureen Fiedler, S.L., Ph.D., and Linda Rabben, Ph.D., both of the Quixote Center, this collection of Church statements with commentaries frankly aims, in the words of co-editor Fiedler in her Introduction, to show "that Rome may have spoken, but the case is not closed." Co-editor Rabben adds even more confidently in her Afterword that, "the case is never closed" (emphasis added in both cases).
We don't have to strain to get the idea: little effort has been made to be subtle: the aim is to make the revisionist case against Church authority which has been promoted by Catholic theological dissenters over the past thirty years and more; the method is to show how often the Church has "changed" in her teachings and rulings in the past, and hence to establish that she can "change" today in the direction the dissenters want to see.
Superficially, especially in the eyes of readers who may not be very knowledgeable or critical, the book may seem to score a few points against Church authority: certainly those already predisposed to "question authority" will find some items here that seem to bolster the case against the Church. A closer, more informed look at the material however, will show that the dissenters' case for Church doctrinal malleability ultimately fails.
The idea of compiling a collection of Church statements bearing upon the disputed questions of the day is, of course, not a bad idea in itself. In this collection, though, the compilers and commentators don't distinguish carefully between doctrinal and disciplinary questions: nor do they seem to understand the difference between legitimate doctrinal development and deviation from or corruption from authentic Catholic doctrine. Also, the biased and tendentious way the statements collected here have been selected and interpreted to yield the foregone conclusion which the dissenters want in the way of Church "changes" yields neither an accurate nor a complete picture of the issues.
"The Church does change," Sr. Fiedler asserts in her Introduction, as if anyone doubted it. "Church teachings, policies, pastoral practices, and structures have evolved, and even turned around completely, in the past two thousand years. . . Popes have changed their minds, reversed their predecessors' positions or quietly buried or blurred old views that had become irrelevant or embarrassing. ..."
This is to overstate the case. Nevertheless, there is truth in it: the Church does change, and the popes have changed their minds on some things; nobody disputes this. The important thing, though, is to understand in what ways the popes and the Church can and even must change, being in the world: and in what ways they must "guard what has been entrusted" to them (1 Tim. 6:20). Making this kind of essential distinction is not one of the strong points of this book.
The Church has never claimed impeccability for her leaders, after all: the popes and bishops are obliged to go to confession like everyone else. Nor does anyone at all imagine or pretend that the popes and the bishops have never made any mistakes in their governance of the Church in so many climes and over so many centuries. On the contrary, Church leaders have frequently acknowledged their own sins and mistakes and shortcomings, and those of the Church, e.g.. Pope Adrian VI in Martin Luther's day: or Vatican Council II's Nostra Aetate on some past Christian treatment of the Jews, followed by Pope John Paul II's recent interventions on the same subject; or the latter's actions concerning the Church's mishandling of the Galileo case (these last two issues, the Jewish People and Copernican Theory and Galileo, are among the eighteen controversial issues treated in the book).
In the same vein, nobody doubts that Church policies and practices have sometimes been influenced by the bad example of the world around her. Practices which are now morally condemned such as slavery or torture, but which were once legal in the societies in which the Church found herself, sometimes tended to be accepted without protest by the Church herself: nor did she necessarily always take the lead in working for the abolition of these evils.
So, yes, the Church's position on some of these things has "changed." Even actual Church teachings have sometimes undergone "change." But here again, the important thing is whether the changes in question represent legitimate "developments of doctrine," as Cardinal John Henry Newman classically laid out the case over a century and a half ago, which Vatican II then adopted as official Church teaching (Dei Verbum, #8): or whether the changes would represent a corruption of authentic doctrine, as in some of the "changed" teachings adopted by the Protestant Reformation, or those advocated by today's dissenters, notably in this volume.
In this book, the editors and commentators pounce almost gleefully on all the changes and inconsistencies they descry--not only to try to show that the Church has changed-- again, nobody doubts it--but also to show that the Church can change in the ways they want to see her change. The question regularly on the minds of these editors and commentators (e.g., p. 176)--reproduced as well on the back cover of the book--is: "Will the Roman Catholic Church ever change its position on women's ordination, contraception, clerical celibacy, or even infallibility itself?" Not only are changes on these particular things thought possible, they are believed to be imperatively called for.
Meanwhile, though, Church authority continues to insist that on these particular issues, as on certain others, there will be no changes. Some of these issues, according to that same Church authority, even form part of the patrimony, which the Church has from Christ. There are some things, which the Church cannot change. And after due reflection on some of these same particular questions, inspired in part by the incessant contemporary pressure for changes, Church authority has expressly reaffirmed that there will be no changes.
Who is in the right here, and how can we tell? Here we touch directly upon the nature of Church authority, especially her teaching authority, or magisterium: and upon the nature of the decisions made by Church authority. Christ committed the continuation of his Words and his Works into the hands of his chosen apostles: "I am no more in the world, but they are in the world" (John 17:1 1). At the same time, Christ promised them the assistance of the Holy Spirit in fulfilling the tasks he committed to them (cf. John 15:16-17,25, and passim).
The apostles and their successors, the bishops of the Church, with and under Peter, the head apostle and his successors, the bishops of Rome, the popes, have since then together constituted the Church's official teaching office, or magisterium. The special task of the magisterium has been to guard, to transmit (as well as help develop), and to deliver intact to each successive generation of Christians the truths of Christ revealed to mankind for the sake of our sanctification and salvation. As a matter of proven historical fact, in crucial instances some of these truths of Christ have only been preserved and transmitted to us because of the functioning of the Church's magisterium in history.
It is idle, therefore, to imagine or pretend, as does the contributor of the chapter on Theological Dissent in this volume, Fr. Richard McCormick, S.J., that the Church's historic magisterium has somehow been changed or will be changed in our day so that the desired doctrinal "changes" bubbling up from the fever swamps of today's theological dissent might possibly be adopted by the Church, contrary to her consistent past decisions and rulings.
Fr. McCormick gives five reasons why he thinks theological dissent is justified today: 1) the Church's self-definition since Vatican Council II as "the people of God" requires the participation of all, not just the hierarchy, in arriving at the Church's doctrinal decisions: 2) today's "educated" Catholics deserve a say in doctrinal decisions in a way that may not have been true in the days when only the clergy were "educated": 3) ecumenical relations with non-Catholics today require that we listen to and learn from them: 4) any exercise of authority today requires "dialogue" by those subject to the decisions of authority: and 5) since the Church is now wholly separated from the state, there is no need to impose any "orthodoxy" on people by means of state power, as was sometimes done in past times.
None of this appears to take into consideration the actual task of the Church's magisterium assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard and transmit Christ's revealed truths to successive generations of Christians. Nor is it clear how acceptance of Christ's revelation is linked to one's level of "education." Fr. McCormick may well not personally consider all Catholic doctrine to be up for grabs: nevertheless it is not at all clear to the reader who ponders his five arguments in favor of theological dissent how the revealed truths of Christ could ever be guarded and transmitted under the new "authority" system he describes.
If the Church's magisterium is really no more than the collective knowledge and wisdom of the Church's members, as all of the five reasons Fr. McCormick gives seem to imply, then what Christ may or may not have revealed becomes almost irrelevant: what Church members in their collective wisdom decide is henceforth what counts.
Fr. McCormick's ruminations reveal a man who apparently not only no longer believes that the Church's magisterium enjoys the special assistance of the Holy Spirit in its authentic decisions: he also no longer, apparently, even understands the nature of any kind of authority, whether or not assisted by the Holy Spirit. The "authority system" described here by Fr. McCormick would never allow the Church to arrive at any definitive decisions on disputed questions at all--since any decision arrived at could always be called into question again by the "dissent" of "educated" members of the people of God. There is simply no place at all in this system for Harry Truman's famous "buck" to stop.
In Fr. McCormick's account, the magisterium is not primarily engaged in preserving, developing, and expounding a definite deposit of the faith "once delivered to the saints" (Jude 3): rather, it seems to be simply engaged in sifting arguments and arriving at positions on the basis of the best knowledge of the day.
By the Church's own account, though, the principal task of the magisterium is to guard the deposit of faith as it has been handed down in the Church. It follows that the pope and the bishops have to retain the ultimate doctrinal decision-making power in the Church in their hands if the Church is to have an authoritative teaching office in any real sense.
For that is what "authority" ultimately consists of: the power to decide. The Church's magisterium is, precisely, the Church's decision-making organ as regards what the Church's teachings are or are not. Hence, when legitimate authority makes a decision of this kind--with the promised assistance of the Holy Spirit, no less! --the case is necessarily then closed. This is true unless and until legitimate authority itself modifies its own decision in cases where that is possible and called for.
It is not, and cannot be, up to others, i.e. . . theologians, or "educated" Catholics, to arrive at alternative decisions on disputed questions against the magisterium. Decisions of the magisterium can be commented on or criticized, and reasons given; alternative solutions can be offered, by theologians or by others. But things can only be decided by the magisterium itself. This is the basic meaning of the traditional saying. "Rome has spoken, the case is closed." Once the supreme authority in the Church has decided, the case is closed. Necessarily. This follows from the basic nature of what authority is, quite apart from Christ's promise of the assistance of the Holy Spirit in the authentic decisions of the Church's particular teaching authority.
The view expounded in the book Rome Has Spoken . . . that the case is not closed, indeed, is never closed, even after authoritative Church decisions have been rendered, needs to be examined further. As we have now seen, this view represents a practical denial that there really is any such thing as effective authority in the Church. While it would be instructive to look at all of the eighteen different disputed questions or controversial issues on which Church statements have been compiled in this volume--the case against Church authority is not adequately made in a single one of these chapters--we must confine ourselves here to the four issues that seem to be of most concern: women's ordination, contraception, clerical celibacy, and infallibility.
Three of these issues are doctrinal issues. The fourth issue is disciplinary, but is nonetheless still subject to the regular authority of the pope and bishops to govern the Church. We shall deal with the celibacy issue first, since it is disciplinary: and then we shall take up the three doctrinal questions.
Clerical Celibacy
The chapter entitled Married Clergy gives the unnuanced statement that "Roman Catholic clergy were permitted to marry during the first eleven centuries of Christianity." This statement is taken on its face to be an apparently irrefutable argument for allowing married clergy today. The Church only imposed the discipline of celibacy, according to this account, because of the passing of Church lands from father lo son meant that such lands were alienated from the Church: and, especially, it is strongly emphasized, because of the Church's alleged negative view of women.
The current Church explanation and rationale for clerical celibacy that sees the life of the celibate priest as patterned after that of the virginal and celibate Jesus, totally wedded with undivided heart to the service of God's people, is scarcely touched upon. Even though St. Paul had already articulated this ideal of the celibate priesthood in apostolic times (cf. 1 Cor. 7:8: 32-33, etc.), and Pope John Paul II simply continues to insist on this same ideal today, the witness of both Scripture and tradition are passed over, as are the pronouncements of the modern popes on the subject of celibacy. They are passed over in favor of citing such passages as Matthew 8:14, with its mention of Peter's mother-in-law, as well as 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1:6 calling for bishops, presbyters, and deacons to be "married only once."
The Commentary on the Married Clergy chapter is supplied by activist ex-priest and president of CORPUS/USA, Anthony T. Padovano, who breathlessly marshals all the usual arguments for a married priesthood and claims that "a mandatory celibate, male-only priesthood violates biblical values, apostolic practice, human rights, and spiritual norms." He is confident that the modification or abolition of the rule of celibacy is only a matter of time.
In considering such a disciplinary question as this, given that the Church has permitted, and in limited cases still does permit. a married clergy, it is important to stress that the general rule of celibacy in the Western Church is one that the Church has discovered over time best serves Christ's purposes and the needs of the people of God (not to speak of the needs of priests themselves!). Christ did not supply the Church with a ready-made Code of Canon Law at her founding, after all, any more than he provided her with a ready-made Catechism of the Catholic Church. From the beginning, the Church has been obliged to work some things out for herself; this was implicit in the commission and authority given to the apostles. And, of course, the Church has properly worked many things out for herself over time. The fact that she has done so is one of the best of all arguments for the kind of living Church based on the apostles and their successors, which Christ has in fact bequeathed to us.
Similarly, even in the case of doctrinal questions derived from revelation, the Church has been obliged to think some things out and through over time. Thus, what may at first sight appear to be inconsistencies in past or present teachings on such subjects as the Primacy of Conscience, Religious Freedom, and Usury--to mention three more of the topics to which chapters are devoted in this book --in reality represent cases where the Church over time has simply arrived at a clearer understanding of what is meant by conscience, religious liberty, and usury, respectively.
Any unbiased observer, looking at the totality of the Church's statements on so many subjects over so many centuries, must be struck by the remarkable consistency, which the Church, especially the Holy See, has exhibited over a longer period of institutional history than any other institution in the world. The nit-picking around the edges represented by this volume seems paltry by comparison, and virtually all of the inconsistencies discovered by these editors or authors can be adequately explained by knowledgeable persons.
The Church has long taught, for example that, "Error has no rights." That was true then, and it is true now. However, the realization that "persons" do have rights brought about a different formulation of the question and resulted in Vatican Council II's Declaration of Religious Liberty upholding the latter on the basis of the rights and dignity of the person which the Church had always affirmed.
Similarly, the question of what constitutes usury became reformulated because of a different and improved understanding of the use and function of money. This reformulation of the question did not, however, mean that there had been a "change" in (or contradiction of) the Church's ancient condemnation of usury: the Church has always condemned the unjust taking of interest, and she does so still.
These distinctions must be kept in mind when considering the way in which the doctrinal questions of ordination and contraception are dealt with in this volume. For the facts are--which the various Church statements included only confirm--that the Church has always condemned contraception as sinful, and does so still; and that the Church has never ordained women, and does not ordain them today. Let us look now at how both of these doctrinal questions, as well as infallibility, are treated in this book.
Women In The Church
The issue of female non-ordination is covered in the book's chapter entitled "Women in the Church"; it is not dealt with in connection with the Church's teaching and practice concerning the sacraments. Sacramental questions are downplayed in this book generally, as a matter of fact; they do not seem to be of much interest to these activists--which raises the question of why certain women seem to want ordination so badly when it is not clear that they any longer even believe in the sacrament of Holy Orders.
Co-editor Sr. Fiedler provides the Commentary on this particular topic herself, and she is nothing if not frank about why she wants ordination: namely, power. And by this she means not the "sacramental power" of the priest, but simply "political power." The idea that ordained priests actually possess real sacramental power does not even seem to interest her very much: but it has not escaped her attention that the pope and the bishops and the priests "run the Church," and she and her consoeurs are determined to get in on this part of the "action."
Sr. Fiedler confidently asserts that Christ "never ordained anyone--male or female-- to a 'ministerial priesthood' as we understand it today." She goes on to claim that Jesus' "counter-cultural attitude toward gender roles suggests that he intended women to minister in the community as the equals of men." The magisterium may not properly understand this, even with the help of the Holy Spirit, but Sr. Fiedler understands it. She also believes women at first did exercise priestly function in the early house-churches, although there is no real historical evidence for this view; she nevertheless cites a plethora of dubious modern feminist "studies" in support of her thesis. According to her, however, women were early excluded from the priesthood because of the prejudices of the patriarchal Greco-Roman society into which the Church was born.
As far as Sr. Fiedler is concerned, there is no valid reason for excluding women from the priesthood today except for the continuing prejudice of the "patriarchy" with its negative view of women. She dismisses with a figurative snort the earnest attempts of the Holy See in Inter Insigniores (1976) or of Pope John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994) to explain to the faithful and to the world that the teaching concerning the Church's inability to ordain women is, in fact, a solemn teaching of the supreme magisterium of Christ's Church: it is in no way outmoded "prejudice."
The attempt of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to make clear in its Responsum ad Dubium (1995) that the nonordination teaching actually "belongs to the deposit of faith," Sr. Fiedler simply characterizes as "a last-ditch attempt to bolster the patriarchal tradition. . . The theological community," she adds (alas, only too accurately!), "has by and large dismissed this contention as specious and unfounded." She is as confident that women will one day be ordained as Anthony Padovano is confident that priests will one day be able to marry.
What conclusion can we draw from such an obstinate and determined refusal to credit the judgment of the supreme authority of the Church to the effect that the ordination question has been settled? What seems clear is that the authoritative decisions of the teaching Church no longer matter very much to such as Sr. Fiedler; these people no doubt first learned to "dissent" from authoritative Church teachings; eventually they arrived at their present position, where they simply set Church decisions aside entirely if they happen to clash with or contradict favored modern ideologies such as radical feminism.
Contraception
Contraception, of course, is the issue where modern theological dissent first began. The Church was thought to be so self-evidently mistaken in continuing to find contraception morally wrong that it was her own magisterium that got discredited in people's minds. This situation by and large continues today. The very evidence of the Church statements on the subject collected here, however, is that the Church has consistently condemned contraception from the time the subject was first mentioned in Christian literature up until the present day.
In order to accommodate the book's general thesis that "mistaken" Church teachings such as this one must now be changed, however, the commentator here, one Maggie Hume, a journalist, resorts to arguing that what has already changed is the grounds upon which the Church's condemnation of contraception is based. These grounds have shifted, according to her: ancient Church condemnations of the practice, which sometimes even compared it with murder, were innocent of such modern concepts as Pope Paul VI's "open[ness] to the transmission of life" or Pope John Paul II's "full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love."
The appropriate rejoinder to such a portentous "discovery" as this, however, can only be: so what? It is false reasoning to imply that the Church's teaching has changed merely because the rationale now generally used to justify the teaching has shifted; this in no way means that the grounds upon which the Church formerly based her condemnation were wrong: it merely means that the Church has discovered new and profounder grounds for what she has always undeviatingly taught.
The living magisterium of the Church, reflecting upon the evil of contraception-- which the Holy Spirit would never have allowed the Church to approve of in any case-- has in our day, and in direct opposition to the sustained campaign of the theological dissenters, found new and even more solid grounds for continuing to condemn the evil. The contraception issue surely provides a classic case of why the Church needs a magisterium.
Infallibility
We need not dwell at length on this topic, however controversial it continues to be in the minds of some. Christ promised the apostles that the Holy Spirit would guide them "into all the truth" (John 16:13), and the Church's doctrine on infallibility, among other things, expresses the truth that the same Holy Spirit has continued to guide Christ's Church "into all the truth" up to the present day. The infallibility of the Church has always been a necessary corollary of the belief that the Church speaks for Christ; if she does not speak for him, why should the faithful repose any trust in her at all?
The topic has recently become controversial again, however, and has been assigned a separate chapter in this book, primarily because of the recent efforts of Pope John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to settle the ordination question by declaring it to be part of the deposit of faith and hence, in effect, infallible. Since for dissenters this non-ordination teaching is so obviously and self-evidently "mistaken." however--like the teaching against contraception formerly-- the issue of infallibility itself gets called into question.
But there is really no problem if the Church's teachings on contraception and female non-ordination are, in fact, true and correct. The Church's magisterium maintains that they are true and correct, and faithful Catholics ought therefore to be disposed to believe what the Church says.
If they do not believe it, however, if they dissent from it, and if, indeed, they produce and publish an entire book such as the present volume aiming to prove that it is mistaken, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are no longer exactly "faithful Catholics." By their own choice they are rejecting what the Church insists on: they no longer evidently believe in or credit "the holy Catholic Church" of the Creed. Their criteria for judging questions are no longer, evidently, those of the faith or of the Church: their criteria for judgment are instead derived from modern secular ideologies, in this case radical feminism, which they appear to have adopted in place of the faith.
For example, at the very beginning of the book, co-editor Sr. Maureen Fiedler declares that:
All language about God is imagery, and no image can presume to limit God to one gender, lest we engage in linguistic idolatry. God is not only Father, but Mother, Friend, Spirit, Creator, and so forth.
This kind of logic seems compelling to many today, as anybody familiar with the current Church scene in the United States can testify. But what, exactly, is being asserted here? What is being asserted is that the revelation of Jesus of God as a Father, our Father, is being replaced by a modern ideological imperative holding that the Creator of the universe cannot be considered only or essentially a Father. Jesus himself may have taught us that God is our Father, but Sr. Fiedler knows better: she thinks this would violate feminist dogma, which now apparently takes precedence over Catholic dogma. It also represents a practical denial that we possess a revelation teaching us that God is a Father in a unique way.
Thus, just as we saw above how theological dissent was supposedly justified on wholly secular grounds, unrelated to the Church's task of guarding the deposit of faith, so here we see the very idea of revelation being unraveled in order to serve the aims of a modern secular ideology.
Does it make any difference, then, whether Rome has spoken, or not? Yes, it makes a difference, a huge difference. If it weren't for Rome, it is sometimes hard to see how even the Church could withstand or hold out against some of the false modern ideas such as female ordination or contraception whose time is so widely believed to have come.
These ideas appeal irresistibly to many, at least temporarily, even to many professing Catholics, even to some holding official positions within the Church. The appearance of a superficially plausible book such as this one published by a supposedly mainstream publisher testifies to it.
In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Cardinal Newman wrote at length about how religious truth by itself could never stand against "the wild living intellect of man . . . the all-corroding, all-dissolving skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries. . ." We see more than a little of that here, its power and insidiousness only compounded by the modern ideologies which underpin it. For Newman, only "the supereminent prodigious power" that was the Church's magisterium could ever hope to stand against the corrosive acids of skepticism and modernity. In our day, the Holy See has surely proved Newman's point: it is a good and necessary thing that Rome has spoken on the twin issues of ordination and contraception.
Kenneth D. Whitehead is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education who now works as a Catholic writer and translator in Falls Church, Virginia. Most recently, Mr. Whitehead is the author of Political Orphan? The Prolife Cause after 25 Years of Roe v. Wade (New Hope Publications, New Hope, KY 40052, 1998).
© Ignatius Press - The Homiletic & Pastoral Review
This item 3429 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
