Change artists
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff Miami
Church teaching changes. Call it
development, call it a dramatic reversal: Its a fact.
In sure -- if sometimes oblique -- assault on recent Vatican
efforts to fortify controversial teachings with appeals to tradition, speakers
at an annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America offered
example after example of shifts in major teachings over time. The combined
effect was to show that change, even dramatic reversal, is far from rare.
At the same time, organizers of the mid-June event hoped, by
avoiding highly sensitive issues such as womens ordination, to mollify
critics without compromising historical truth.
The society was stung after its 1996 conference when Cardinal
Bernard Law of Boston described it as a wasteland and Jesuit Fr.
Avery Dulles characterized it as a showcase for dissent. Theologians at that
conference had, by overwhelmingly affirmative vote, opposed the Vaticans
arguments against ordaining women.
This year Dulles was featured on the program.
Among major speakers, church historian and federal judge John T.
Noonan Jr. traced shifts in teaching from outright condemnation of lending
money at interest to acceptance of the practice; from support of slavery and
the death penalty in the recent past to even more recent condemnations of
both.
Barbara Hilkert Andolsen of Monmouth University in New Jersey
pointed out that even teachings that reflect centuries of tradition are
sometimes overturned. Sometimes the church comes to understand that a
belief or norm proclaimed by an earlier generation was, from perspective of a
later generation, wrong or even pernicious, she said.
One such case, she said, was a centuries-long anti-Semitic stance.
It culminated in the teaching that Jews or heretics and
schismatics, along with others outside the Catholic faith, should
anticipate the everlasting fire [of hell] unless they joined the
Catholic church before death. The teaching was curious precedent for
present-day Catholic teaching that Jews and Christians are brothers and sisters
in the faith of Abraham. Yet it was proclaimed by Pope Eugenius IV with backing
of the Council of Florence.
Distressed by attack
In a debate with Dulles over the nature of authority and the role
of dissent, Jesuit theologian Fr. Richard McCormick of the University of Notre
Dame came back again at the churchs ban on contraception. He argued that
it was a wrongheaded application of a sound moral principle: that marriage and
procreation should be inseparably linked.
In an interview after the convention, the societys
president, Mercy Sr. Margaret Farley, said many members had been distressed by
Laws attack. We hoped that a fuller understanding of the CTSA would
be visible, particularly in this convention, she said.
I worked very hard to make the convention inclusive of the
many voices we have in theology and in the church today, Farley said,
so when it was over I think it could not be said that the CTSA only
privileges liberals or conservatives. My hope was that we would get beyond
those labels by talking together about the substantive questions. Farley
said she also made an effort to include people from different age groups.
Ages make a difference in every enterprise today, she said.
Among voices called in was that of Dulles, a theological giant who
had chastised the society in the March [27], 1998, issue of the
Jesuit magazine [Commonweal]. Although Dulles had
not attended the 1996 meeting, he said his concerns were based on the
societys annual report of proceedings, which includes major convention
talks. Dulles, of Fordham University in New York, is a longtime society member.
He received its highest award in 1970.
Most notoriously, he wrote in America,
the convention had collectively opposed the churchs teaching that
its ban on ordaining women is irrevocable. A landslide vote on the
matter, 216 in favor, 22 opposed and 10 abstentions, was widely, and I
believe correctly, interpreted as a dissent not only from Cardinal Joseph
Ratzingers declaration on the subject but also from the popes call
for definitive adherence to his teaching, Dulles said.
This year, Dulles, a staunch supporter of Pope John Paul II,
agreed to debate McCormick, another theological heavyweight and a critic of the
popes centralized approach to church authority. Calling their two-part
session The Nature and Authority of Doctrine: A Search for Common
Ground, the two men set forth their differences over the
magisteriums role in formation of doctrine and the appropriateness of
dissent. (See accompanying story.)
Noonan, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth District, and
author of several books on doctrinal history, addressed several areas in which
church teaching has shifted in response to human experience through time and
cultures.
For example, church teaching condemning usury -- lending for
interest -- was officially declared sinful in the 12th century and condemned in
successive papal bulls. By the 19th century, though, Noonan said, the teaching
was gone, buried mainly by the customs of the market and public
finance. Previously condemned innovations of theologians in
support of lenders had prevailed.
Death penalty opposition recent
The death penalty has only in very recent times, under Pope John
Paul II, begun to be condemned by church leaders. Although bishops even in the
patristic era sometimes urged mercy in particular cases, no established,
coherent fundamental opposition was in place, Noonan said. By the Middle
Ages, death became the punishment for heretics, a practice supported even by
St. Thomas Aquinas. At first the church turned heretics over to the state to be
killed, but later punished heretics on its own.
There was now not even a fiction, Noonan said.
It was the church that punished capitally. In the papal states, the death
penalty was an ordinary part of criminal law enforcement, used against brigands
and heretics alike.
It was only at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that the
church would affirm religious liberty. It was well after World War II, when
most European states turned against capital punishment, that a pope would
finally declare that the death penalty was wrong.
In 1995, Pope John Paul II asserted in Evangelium Vitae
that those instances where societys defense required the death penalty
were very rare, if in fact they occur at all. As recently as
January of this year, Noonan said, the pope described the death penalty as
both cruel and unnecessary.
Yet, he said, the moral rule was still in flux because
the pope, while describing state executions as a species of homicide, an
attack on human life, stopped short of labeling governors
murderers.
As to slavery, the practice had the support of church leaders and
theologians into the 19th century, well after many Protestant leaders had begun
to denounce it. The practice earned official condemnation only in 1839, by Pope
Gregory XVI. As late as 1866, the Holy Office ruled that buying and
selling of slaves was not contrary to natural law, Noonan said. It
was only as part of a general European revulsion against slave trading in
Africa that Leo XIII issued an unequivocal moral condemnation of human
bondage.
Discovering evil of slavery
Finally, in John Paul IIs encyclical Splendor
Veritatis, he described slavery as intrinsically evil. Noonan
noted dryly that the pope reversed this moral teaching while expending no
effort on explaining how this universal precept had been allowed to sleep for
centuries.
In looking at whose experience counted in forming
moral judgments in the church, Noonan said, two broad levels of
experience may be distinguished: that of persons subject to or affected by the
rules and that of the persons enunciating them -- people who in numerous
cases -- Koestler, Camus and the American Protestants, for example -- were not
members of the institutional church.
In all five examples of doctrinal development, Noonan said,
the experience at the first level -- that of the people affected by a
practice -- had to be translated into a second level of experience, that of the
decision-makers in the church.
These developments would not have occurred without
challenges to convention, without argument, without conflict, without prayer,
without the assistance of the Holy Spirit and without connection with the core
constituents of Christianity, he said.
Noonans paper was third in a series of four major talks. The
first, by John Thiel of Fairfield University, Fairfield, Conn., asserted that
doctrinal conflicts in the church derive from different understandings of how
tradition develops. Against those who think of tradition as rooted in an
authoritative past, Thiel said continuity in doctrine is more accurately
recognized in retrospect, by examining the past through a present-day lens. As
in a novel, Thiel said, from the standpoint of the reader, the
storys coherence is ever being reshaped as plot unfolds, sometimes most
meaningfully through narrative shock.
Thiel noted that the judgments that the gospel of John was
divine revelation, that Nicea taught orthodoxly on the eternal divinity of the
Son of God, were made later, as the church, seeking to verify a belief,
sought to affirm continuity with the past.
In response to Thiels talk, Andolsen of Monmouth University
asserted that what is defined as tradition is too often in the hands of male
clerics. I propose that we need to give close attention to the role of
ordinary believers, especially those without formal education and others with
less social power, in the determination of authentic tradition, she
said.
Francine J. Cardman of Weston Jesuit School of Theology in
Cambridge, Mass., drew from themes of Augustine to urge charity in church
conflicts. She noted that Augustine had first urged charity and communion over
uniform doctrine practice in dealing with the Donatist crisis, a fifth-century
theological battle well-known to church historians. Donatists, followers of
Donatus of Casea Nigrae, were a schismatic group that first appeared in North
Africa in the fourth century. They argued that Catholics who had denied faith
under imperial persecutions were not truly Catholics, and their sacraments were
invalid.
Later, Augustine shifted his position, arguing that it was a
work of charity to force Donatists to return to the Catholic Church
through through imperial power. Earlier a proponent of the church of
wheat and tares, a church that tolerated pluralism until its
perfect holiness was revealed at the end of time, Augustine began
acting out of fear and, ironically, succumbing to a kind of Donatist
purism, she said.
Similarly today, Cardman said, this characteristic Catholic
inclusiveness and generosity has become suspect, hemmed in by the same
constraints of zeal and fear as was Augustine in his dealings with the
Donatists. Investigations of theologians anonymously accused of falling short
of norms of doctrinal literalism are one manifestation of this fear. The
current Roman zeal for exacting doctrinal uniformity and excluding unworthy
voices represents, somewhat ironically, a kind of Donatist purism that sweeps
away the chaff now rather than waiting for Gods good time.
Fr. Robert J. Schreiter of Catholic Theological Union, the
societys outgoing president, argued that tolerance for pluralism will be
increasingly important as globalization increases and Catholics of divergent
world views attempt to communicate with one another. Premature talk of
unity ... may be a way of suppressing difference rather than actually dealing
with it, he said.
Dulles said he had been pleased with this years convention.
I think the general mood was one of serious effort to be with the
Catholic tradition and not a mood of challenging the magisterium, he
said. It wasnt the same kind of one-sided meeting they apparently
had in 1996.
As for what Farley described as the neuralgic issues
-- womens ordination, reproductive issues, for example -- we
didnt consciously avoid them, she said. The topics that were
explored were utterly relevant to those issues, but didnt just spin
around them.
Farley said she had made a serious effort to encourage U.S. and
Canadian bishops to attend this years convention, but few did. Bishop
Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., a regular at the conventions, was kept away
by a recent surgery. Bishop Remi De Roo of Canada was there. Archbishop John C.
Favalora of Miami delivered a brief welcome at the opening session on June 10.
National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1999
[corrected 08/13/1999]
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