Is the Pope a Catholic?

Is the Pope a Catholic? 

The Tablet

04 October 2017 | by Richard R. Gaillardetz

Doubts and corrections

Almost a year ago four cardinals sent Pope Francis the ecclesial equivalent of a doctrine exam, known officially as a set of dubia or “doubts”. Their questions were posed as humble requests for clarification but in fact the authors seemed bent on testing the Pope’s doctrinal orthodoxy. Then two weeks ago, more than 60 conservative scholars and clerics offered an extended “filial correction” of the Pope’s teaching, claiming precedent from the fourteenth century. It ran to 25 pages.
Fans of Pope Francis were incensed by such brazen disloyalty; indeed, the whole affair exhibits the manufactured outrage so common to our hyper-partisan culture. The reality is less sensational. What we are witnessing is simply an irruption to the surface of a tension that has rumbled on in the Church since the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
In the dogmatic manuals that dominated seminary education in the decades prior to the council, divine revelation was presented as a collection of propositional statements. Each individual doctrine was assigned a particular theological “note” declaring its binding authority. Church teaching authority was exercised along an exclusively vertical axis: the pope teaches, the faithful obey. Rarely, very rarely, the path along that axis could be reversed when the faithful were faced with the clear manifestation of papal heresy.

The result was a theological system that emphasised a timeless certitude inhering in all church teaching, a certitude that commanded docile and unquestioning assent on the part of believers. The Church was comprised of two discrete groups. On the one side was the pope, the bishops and other clergy who had sole responsibility for teaching; on the other was everyone else. This sense of the Church as a societas inequalis was simply a given for ordinary Catholics.
For all its shortcomings, the system was not without value. It offered unambiguous summary statements of church teaching that could be of real assistance for often ghettoised Catholics needing to preserve and defend their faith against outside ridicule and attack. But what happens when the Church’s official teachers, untroubled by doubt, become habituated to rolling out “true” answers to questions no one was asking anymore? What happens when you get a pope advanced in years but  with his ear surprisingly close to the ground and attuned to the concerns of ordinary Catholics? What you get is Vatican II.
One of the most important documents approved at the council was the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum). That document initiated a fundamental shift in Catholic theology and in the Catholic imagination. As a young Joseph Ratzinger observed but a few years after the close of the council: “The [council] fathers were merely concerned with overcoming neo-scholastic intellectualism, for which revelation chiefly meant a store of mysterious super-natural teachings, which automatically reduces faith very much to an acceptance of these supernatural insights.”
The council moved away from that moribund theological system and embraced a more theologically rich understanding of divine revelation that was, Ratzinger contended, “a true dialogue which touches man in his totality, not only challenging his reason, but, as dialogue, addressing him as a partner, indeed giving him his true nature for the first time”.
This revelation, moreover, was not given exclusively to the magisterium, whose job is to preserve this “deposit of faith” intact and to carefully pass it down to the faithful in an elaborate “trickle-down” scheme. Divine revelation, the council taught, comes to us not as a set of propositions but as a person, Jesus Christ, and is given to all the people of God. Its discovery is the task of all believers, who in their journey of faithful discipleship draw on their own human and religious experience, prayer, contemplation and study alongside authoritative magisterial teaching.
In the moral sphere, the council invited a much more inductive account of Catholic teaching, taking the concrete situation of the human person with much greater seriousness and affirming the authority of the individual believer’s conscience, not as an arrogant exercise of individual autonomy but as an act of deep fidelity to the inner voice of God.
More than five decades later, we find a relatively small but quite vocal group of Catholics who continue to find solace in the certitudes and clear lines of ecclesiastical authority typical of that earlier neo-scholastic world. Their deep convictions regarding the Catholic faith, grounded in a tidy, logically coherent system of truth claims, leads them to complain about a doctrinally sloppy Pope whose orthodoxy they assess in an exclusively propositional register.
If you believe revelation is a collection of certain truths that demand unquestioning assent, that’s how you are going to assess the authenticity of papal teaching. And if you find that teaching wanting, well, your only recourse is to reverse the path of the vertical axis of ecclesial authority and challenge the Pope’s orthodoxy.
Pope Francis is, we know, not afraid of conflict or challenge. Indeed, he invites honest and robust disagreement, as was evident in the two most recent synodal assemblies. It is also worth noting that he has not censured any of the four cardinals (only two of whom are still alive) who posed the dubia; in fact the whole culture of censoring theologians has dissipated in this papacy. Cardinal Robert Sarah, an indirect critic of the Pope’s liturgical policy, has not been removed from office. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was not fired, his curial contract was simply not renewed – and surely it is legitimate to want the people on one’s leadership team to share one’s fundamental pastoral vision.
Francis has not responded to the dubia and I think it very unlikely he will respond to the recent “filial correction” – for two reasons. First, because he does not accept the ­presupposition that authority works exclusively along a vertical axis. He presumes a synodal Church in which genuine authority – or more accurately, authorities – exist but they contribute to an entire Church whose members have learned to listen to others, including those with whom they disagree.
The second reason he will not respond, I suspect, is that he does not believe the measure of fidelity to the Gospel should be a speculative parsing of historically de-contextualised doctrinal propositions. Put more simply, Pope Francis simply does not work within that older neo-scholastic world view. As he himself put it in a speech he gave in Buenos Aires: “Doctrine is not a closed, private system deprived of dynamics able to raise questions and doubts.” At the conclusion of the Synod on the Family, he insisted: “The Church’s first duty is not to hand down condemnations or anathemas, but to proclaim God’s mercy, to call to conversion, and to lead all men and women to salvation in the Lord.”
Francis has embraced, more than any post-conciliar pope, the inductive methodology encouraged by the council in the presentation of church teaching. He is convinced that an authentic presentation of Catholicism must respond to the real questions and concerns that preoccupy people today. He is committed to a presentation of church doctrine that honours the challenges and integrity of each person’s faith journey.
What we are witnessing today is neither a humble request for doctrinal clarification, nor a stealthily-plotted, mean-spirited assault on the Pope’s integrity. What we are witnessing is the clash of two fundamentally different understandings of how to be a faithful Catholic in the contemporary world and two different understandings of what constitutes the Church’s core mission.
For some, fidelity is ultimately measured more by formal doctrinal assent to the Church’s teaching. These Catholics believe the Church’s mission consists in offering timeless certitudes to a world lost in a sea of relativism. For others, particularly for those who find Pope Francis’ leadership so compelling, fidelity is measured more by the concrete practice of Christian discipleship. For them, the Church’s mission should primarily be directed toward responding to the questions and yearnings of humankind today.
That is not to say that faithfulness to the teachings of the Church is not vital; but the ultimate measure of faithfulness to God’s call lies in witnessing to the Gospel of mercy and God’s boundless love.
Richard R. Gaillardetz is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College. He recently published An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis and the Renewal of Catholicism (Liturgical Press, 2015). A newly revised and expanded edition of his By What Authority? Toward an Understanding of Authority in the Church, is to be published by Liturgical Press in 2018.