Giants dissent, gently, over
authority
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff Miami
Theologians from around the country looked on as two eminent
Jesuit theologians, Fr. Avery Dulles and Fr. Richard McCormick, debated the
role of authority and dissent in the church during a pre-convention gathering
of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
Dulles, a systematic theologian, is a strong supporter of Pope
John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. Moral theologian McCormick, like many theologians,
objects to their heavy-handed use of authority and resistance to doctrinal
debate.
Under John Paul and Ratzinger, investigations of theologians have
become common events, often with negative results for church careers.
Resistance to doctrinal development is most notable in moral theology, as
opposed to social teaching, where flexibility remains the norm, McCormick
said.
Dulles and McCormick agree that a presumption of truth
should be granted to magisterial teaching -- that is, to pronouncements
emanating from the churchs hierarchy -- and that theological dissent has
a time-honored place in the search for truth.
They differ strongly, however, on the relative weight that should
be given to the two spheres, reflecting what Dulles said was a major
fault line in contemporary Catholic theology.
While acknowledging the legitimacy of debates over the
conditions and limits of infallibility, Dulles charged that an increasing
number of theologians refuse to grant popes and councils a role in defining
revealed truths. The epistemological position of those theologians -- that
revelation is an ecstatic encounter with God that has no doctrinal
content, -- is irreconcilable with the Catholic tradition,
Dulles said.
Calling on theologians to energetically strive to heal
existing rifts in the church, Dulles sharply criticized aggressive
patterns of dissent and a general climate in which dissent from
noninfallible doctrine is considered courageous, authentic and forward-looking,
while submission is viewed as cowardly, hypocritical and retrograde.
Can anything justify the actions of those who go to the
extremes of organized resistance, recruiting a constituency, calling press
conferences, publishing paid advertisements, soliciting signatures to petitions
and setting themselves up as a kind of alternative to the magisterium? he
asked. It has become common to speak of public dissent as though it were
as desirable and normal in the church as in civil society, a line of
reasoning, he said, that obscures the distinctiveness of the church
and weakens it as a community of faith and witness.
McCormick said the problem is rather the attitude of Vatican
officials who act as if all doctrines except social teachings are written
in stone and treat any talk of doctrinal development as
confrontational.
Practically speaking, most theologians believe the
churchs moral teaching is proposed infallibly, he said. He noted
that canon law asserts that nothing is understood to be infallibly
defined unless this is clearly established.
Further, McCormick said, a variety of circumstances can affect the
strength of the presumption of truth due a given doctrine. Among
these, he said, is a prevailing atmosphere of oppression and careerism in the
church.
McCormick referred to an article in the May 28 NCR that
described the shock of Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, for 14 years head of
the Congregation of Bishops, at the amazing careerism in the ranks
of the episcopate. Such an atmosphere, McCormick said, could easily lead
to suppression of ones true thoughts and convictions.
McCormick also said that the presumption due a doctrine is
weakened where official teachers overlook or neglect certain sources
essential to the accuracy of a moral position. If public dissent has
become a problem, McCormick said, it is largely because of the attitudes
and statements of John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger, who suppress
authentic development through an overly rigorist stance.
Theologians praised the courteous tone of the debate as a model
for others, but some challenged its neo-Scholastic model of determining truth
through authoritative dogmatic definitions and determining doctrinal
levels: that is, whether a doctrine should be considered
infallible.
Lisa Sowle Cahill, moral theologian from Boston College, said,
I think that, to a lot of people in the church, this discussion is very
arcane. The whole point of the conference, apart from the
Dulles-McCormick debate, has been to show that doctrinal development is a
much more fluid, organic process, she said. Recent Vatican efforts to
gain more control over theologians are occurring because no one is paying
attention to that model, Cahill said. In and of itself, it
doesnt have as much claim as it used to.
National Catholic Reporter, July 2,
1999
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