Issues behind the Curran case
Komonchak, Joseph A.
CATHOLIC AUTHORITY, CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, CATHOLIC IDENTITY JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK ISSUES BEHIND THE CURRAN CASE THE CHURCH & MODERNITY: FROM DEFENSIVENESS TO ENGAGEMENT B ehind the well-rehearsed...
...How does theology serve a church now acutely aware of its missionary and evangelistic tasks in that era...
...To cultivate a view of theology which presupposes a common Christian culture and is more monastic than academic, more epiphanic than critical, runs a new sectarian danger of a profoundly un-Catholic sectarianism...
...If theology differed from them in the derivation of its first principles, it did not fear to justify itself by comparison with common intellectual methods and criteria, to engage contemporary challenges with a remarkable intellectual courage, and to use the new philosophical and historical resources being recovered from 30 January 1987: 43 The Curran case is now under review by an academic committee at Catholic University, We hope the committee affirms that Father Curran offers a model of scholarly, responsible dissent that should be prized, not disqualified, by a genuinely Catholic faculty...
...JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK teaches theology in the department of religion and religious education at the Catholic Universitv of America, Washington, DC...
...CATHOLIC AUTHORITY, CATHOLIC THEOLOGY, CATHOLIC IDENTITY JOSEPH A. KOMONCHAK ISSUES BEHIND THE CURRAN CASE THE CHURCH & MODERNITY: FROM DEFENSIVENESS TO ENGAGEMENT B ehind the well-rehearsed differences between the Vatican and Charles Curran over specific moral issues and over the issues of assent and dissent, lie fundamental differences over Catholic identity and mission in the modern world and over the role theology plays in determining them...
...Theology's main function was the defense and explanation of the official positions adopted by the hierarchical leaders of the counter-society...
...And here is where one may question whether the appeal to the council itself is adequate...
...The two questions intersect...
...The first was the contraction of Catholic Christianity into the anti-modern Roman Catholicism constructed in the last two centuries as a response to the developments that produced the modern Western world...
...The church changed more in ten years than it had in the previous hundred, most spectacularly perhaps in the abandonment of the specifically modern and anti-modern way of conceiving and realizing a distinct Roman Catholic identity...
...30 January 1987: 45 Cardinal Ratzinger's revised assessment is well known...
...Even more, the great Thomist venture was the all-too-brief effort to engage a major philosophical and scientific movement at its start, whereas the issue today is one of responding to a process of modernization which is already centuries-old...
...THE editors the ancient world for a critical mediation and reinterpretation of traditional authorities...
...Its chief'audience was the church and, within the church, the clergy...
...But in the narrow,-canonical sense now being urged, there is a danger that the word "Catholic" will again be deprived of its inner meaning of comprehensiveness and inclusiveness and become simply the bureaucratically controlled self-designation of one of the many denominations competing at the margins of the modern world...
...The whole purpose of this new construction was antimodern, designed to legitimate and render plausible a Catholic counterculture whose devotions and dogmas were an antidote to the spread of liberalism in economics, society, politics, and culture...
...But paradoxically this Roman Catholicism, in its near identification of Christianity with the institutionalized church, in its ever-increasing centralization andbureaucratization, was a characteristically modern phenomenon...
...Kaufmann has referred to this development as die Verkirchlichung des Christentums, literally "the churchifying of Christianity" — or the contraction of Christianity into the church institution...
...It was more typical of the council texts to postpone solutions to grave ecclesial and theological questions than to offer clear answers...
...These are implied in the judgment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Father Curran can no longer be considered "suitable or eligible to exercise the function of a professor of Catholic theology...
...Rome's defensive and distrustful fear "manifested itself in consistent rejection (practically without exception) of all Catholic attempts to meet the modern intellectual with empathy and dialogue...
...It is symptomatic that some suggestions have been made that the U.S...
...Father Curran works more according to the Thomist ideal, but he has been frank in admitting that his own work lacks the critical foundations on which an ideal-typically Thomist response to a new culture and within a changing church must be built...
...Nothing less than "an atmosphere of terror" was created, "an artificial, paralyzing quiet...
...Thomas today is by the most careful and difficult effort to lay new foundations for a critical mediation of the tradition in a transformed cultural and social context...
...Now anyone with much knowledge of the history of the church and of theology will recognize that this way of determining the meaning of the phrase "Catholic theology" represents a severe contraction of the meaning of both words...
...Off in what Bernard Lonergan called their "dogmatic corner," theologians engaged in activities largely intelligible and of interest only to themselves, careless of and irrelevant to the larger cultural and social demands and challenges of the day...
...The call for local churches to assume responsibility for an inculturation of the Gospel in their various circumstances undercut the uniformity and centralization which had marked modern Roman Catholicism...
...The far more^nuanced evaluation of the modern social, political, and cultural world weakened the sense of the need for the dramatically segregated identity of the preconciliar system...
...These changes, remarkable both for their suddenness and their scope, have produced the situation in which we now find ourselves, wondering what happened and why, what has been good in it and what bad, and what can be done about it...
...The call to reform, renewal, and aggiornamento placed every aspect of Catholic life under critical examination...
...Its practitioners came under the increasing bureaucratic control of the hierarchy at the very time when, as Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church (Ignatius Press, $12.95), "Rome could not adapt her spiritual horizon to the radical changes brought about by the French Revolution and particularly by German Idealism and its incalculable consequences...
...The "Thomists" want to engage the post-modern challenge headon, but they face the enormous problem of explaining how their project can succeed in the circumstances of a cultural individualism which in its extremes, even within the church, denies the very notion of communal authority and in face of questions so fundamental and critical that they would daunt even a latter-day Aquinas...
...bishops copyright the use of the adjective...
...Catholic theologians...
...Such an enterprise requires from authority more patience than Bonaventure's sympathizers showed in the thirteenth century and from theologians a good measure of Aquinas's intellectual courage...
...In the intentions of their authors, the council texts may have been only reformist, and this may have been true from a theological standpoint as well...
...do not teach on their own authority but by virtue of the mission they have received from the church...
...Theology was carried out within the church, but theologians did not need ecclesiastical mandate and their work was measured by more demanding criteria than the simple repetition of magisterial teachings...
...Counter-society and counterculture confirmed one another, deriving much of their internal strength and purpose from an official interpretation of liberal modernity as the apostasy which led Pius X to fear that it might be "a foretaste and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days and that there may be already in the world of the 'Son of Perdition' of whom the Apostle speaks...
...The need for such foundations is even greater today, of course, than in St...
...Their corpses bestrew Denzinger for more than a century . . , ." A second reason why we are once again at loggerheads over this narrowed notion of "Catholic theology" lies in the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council and of its aftermath...
...The Second Vatican Council was more prophetical than analytical, more hopeful than critical, when it turned away from that regime...
...In a set of documents markedly different in orientation, language, and content from those first presented to it, the council authorized a different response to modernity from that enshrined in modern Roman Catholicism...
...The Swiss sociologist F.-X...
...How does the church maintain the integrity of its faith and its structure in the modern and post-modern era...
...The problem, then, is twofold...
...In the course of the next 150 years, it constructed a new form of Catholicism as a counter-society autonomous and sovereign, centralized and bureaucratized, prizing clarity, order, and unity...
...As.Cardinal Ratzinger himself has noted, the post-conciliar theological division bears a certain resemblance to the debate at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century...
...Part of it is the attempt to bring theologians back under ecclesiastical control, particularly by a reaffirmation of the rules elaborated under the previous regime...
...The real question is what goals ought to be pursued and what methods followed...
...In both cultural crises, two prototypical responses were offered which, at the risk of great oversimplifying, I will call Bonaventuran and Thomist...
...The painful way in which this one case has played itself out is testimony enough of how severely the church was retarded in its ability to meet the cultural and social challenges of modernity under the regime of modern Roman Catholicism...
...The years since Vatican II, he maintains, have disappointed the glorious hopes of its popes and bishops...
...For the other, theology can be as much at home in the academic environment and has a public role that is not an accessory but an intrinsic dimension of its critical reflection on the church's traditional message...
...I have seen defenders of Cardinal Ratzinger unjustly accuse Father Curran of a wild appeal to democracy in the church and defenders of Father Curran equally unfairly charge the cardinal with "fascism...
...There is today a group of militant traditionalists who think that the answer to present problems lies in a return to the earlier attitude and its counter-societal strategies...
...Instead of a great leap forward, there has been a long process of decay, responsibility for which rests with those who went beyond what the council actually said and did, invoking a false "spirit of the council" in order to betray its letter...
...30 January 1987: 47...
...Thomas's day when Aristotle could be considered "the master of those who know...
...For lack of an intellectual environment within which to meet the challenge, "philosophers and theologians worked mostly on their own, producing only partial answers, and, as isolated individuals, they could easily be disposed of...
...But that their effect, at least in many parts of the Western world, was the sudden collapse of the church's anti-modern counter-society and counterculture, cannot be denied...
...There are great differences in the two cultural situations, however...
...On the other hand, to appeal simply to modern traditions of intellectual and academic freedom is to place one's hopes in a liberalism that has not been any more successful in preventing cultural disarray than it has been in overcoming economic inequalities...
...As Bernard Lonergan saw so well, the best way to follow St...
...Many of them began to refuse the domesticated role assigned them in the recent past, to locate themselves in non-ecclesiastical institutions, to question the modern rules of the theological enterprise, to measure their work by other than ecclesial criteria, and to address broader public issues and audiences...
...This modernization, furthermore, is a process to which the church had until fairly recently counterposed only a negative and condemnatory attitude, and to meet which it had not encouraged the fundamental philosophical, historical, and scientific work necessary for an adequately critical response...
...adjective "Catholic" was first employed by church fathers precisely in opposition to sectarian and regional claims...
...Two reasons, at least, can be adduced...
...one cannot be solved before or without the other...
...For the one group the natural home of theology is the church and even the monastery...
...Later, as a Catholic, he urged it against what he saw as a new and frightened Novatianism, hiding from the world...
...One can draw from it a definition of a "Catholic theologian" as a person who is formally authorized by the hierarchy to teach what the church teaches and to do so in the name of the church...
...The theological debates that followed Vatican II revealed divisions among the council's architects that were not visible during the conciliar debates...
...For all the selfcongratulatory poise they are making, the Vatican's position, at least as represented by Cardinal Ratzinger, is more subtle...
...The church then faced a cultural challenge of equal significance to the one it faces today and also found itself divided between the "ancients" and the "moderns...
...For the cardinal, the solution can only be a return to the council's letter and true spirit, the restoration of the balance upset by progressives...
...That these changes did not have to produce revolution can, I suppose, be argued...
...The congregation's judgment presupposes that it is the hierarchy, and particularly the Vatican, which has the chief or at least final say in determining whether something is or is not Catholic theology, whether someone is or is not a Catholic theologian...
...The Thomist feels at ease in the new intellectual environment and believes that, as earlier in the church's history, the church can once again despoil the Egyptians...
...One element integral to this change was the domestication of theology...
...Theologians imitated the council itself in largely abandoning the language and methods of NeoScholasticism...
...Nonetheless, these documents proposed a series of changes in the internal life of the church and in its relations to the world which possessed revolutionary sociological potential...
...it referred to the broad, worldwide communion of churches engaged in their creative and transformative encounter with the ancient culture...
...The cardinal, I think, would agree that his cultural and theological instincts are more Bonaventuran than Thomist...
...They embraced many of the disciplines which had developed as the intellectual instruments and effects of modernity...
...The RKV...
...Some effort to regain a sense of ecclesiastical identity and sense of purpose was probably inevitable...
...At the first session of the council, a series of draft documents was presented which the young Joseph Ratzinger described as marked by the "anti44: Commonweal modernist neurosis" of the previous several decades...
...In the high Middle Ages, although there was an alien intellectual challenge, there was also something like a living Christian culture which sustained the life of the great mass of largely illiterate believers...
...Theology now became an enterprise undertaken in church institutions and seminaries — apart from the centers of modern intellectual culture...
...The departure from what were modern Roman Catholic attitudes and strategies has, after all, been dramatic...
...Both virtues being, unfortunately, again rather rare, it is not surprising that many people in the church will regard the effort as an impossible ideal and take refuge either in an undiscerning accommodation to modernity or an equally uncritical retreat into authoritarian sectarianism, with each party justifying its choice by the excesses of the other...
...In either of these cases, it is something other than Catholic theology which will be attempted, and, if they are considered to exhaust the options, it will be the saddest conclusion to this whole sad affair — that the deeply Catholic effort at a creative and critical engagement with modern culture will be postponed yet again...
...The church emerged from the near chaos of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras gravely weakened spiritually, intellectually, administratively, politically, and financially...
...Part of this restoration involves the tightening of the bonds of ecclesiastical discipline apparent in the new Code of Canon Law, a reassertion of Roman authority, the appointment of "stronger" bishops, and actions against bishops considered too pliant...
...Rather than repeat condemnations, the Holy Father had said, the council should offer a positive vision of the Christian message...
...A mong the majority of bishops and theologians at the council there was more agreement about the inadequacy of the modern Roman Catholic system than about what might usefully and effectively replace it...
...It does not appear that "theology" may include a moment critical of official doctrine, and "Catholic" means "hierarchically authorized...
...Today there is no common Christian culture, and the problem is rather one of making the very case that Catholic faith is more than a vestigial appendix in a secularized body politic...
...I think it important to note these things, because I do not believe that the recent efforts at restoration are understandable (I do not say justifiable) except in the light of the experiment of Vatican II and the ambiguous experience of its aftermath...
...It is not one philosopher's thoughts that the theologian must engage today, but a whole intellectual world in which the metaphysics that underlay classic Christian theology is widely denied, where the human sciences are the chief rival to a theological understanding of human life, and where, in both philosophy and science, there is little agreement on the most basic methodological issues...
...Similarly, at the very time Christian reflection began to be called '' theology," it was a central part of the new intellectual experiment of the medieval university, where it held an honored place among the sciences of the day...
...Contemporary "Bonaventurans" want to leap back beyond the preconciliar attitudes to an earlier, pre-modern vision of the faith, but, rather inconsistently, they retain several of the modern anti-modern strategies, notably the'centralized bureaucratic structures of authority, the identification of teaching with legislation, and the reduction of assent to obedience...
...These changes involved developments in theology that have been no less dramatic...
...H ow then did it happen that "Catholic" and "theology" were so narrowed in their reference and use...
...and it would be a brave soul who would try to describe exactly what has taken their places or to argue that it is in all respects better...
...Bonaventure's Neo-Augustinianism is deeply suspicious of the appeals to the new reason and prefers an ancient, more organic view of the faith and a more meditative, even monastic type of theology...
...In this process of reasoning, fidelity to all official teaching and explicit ecclesiastical authorization play the critical roles...
...Newman was converted by his discovery of this rich meaning of Catholicity in Augustine's repudiation of the sectarianism of the Donatist heresy...
...Father Curran and Cardinal Ratzinger, and their failed conversation, typify how difficult it is to find another way in which the church may fulfill its role today...
...That mission requires that a theologian's views agree in all respects with official magisterial teachings of the hierarchy, for there is an "inherent contradiction" when "one who is to teach in the name of the church in fact denies her teaching...
...Sadly, as in economics, it is often made to appear that there is no third way between a laissezfaire policy and a bureau46: Commonweal cratically managed regime...
...In a series of dramatic events, these texts were rejected by the council members, who chose instead to follow Pope John's call not to indulge the prophets of doom who saw nothing in the modern world but prevarication and ruin...
...The church, both men, and the issues deserve better...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 2
