Vouching for fidelity:

...Instead of the gratitude and trust, perhaps a modest testimonial dinner, consonant with your lifetime of service, church leaders swoop down and strap you to a lie detector, probing outrageously for the missing silverware...

...Yet a colleague has assured me she would recite the requisite words, but only after adding a mental proviso: "I shall adhere to these official teachings with whatever assent the whole church intends...

...Anglicanism is the halfway house on the one side, and liberalism is the halfway house on the other...

...The Anglican church, on the contrary, is absurdly indecisive...

...Only at this point did I really get angry...

...Compare, for instance, the temperament and bullying tactics surfacing in three contemporary conservative usurpations of church power: the Vatican of John Paul II, the Lutheran Missouri Synod, and the Southern Baptist Convention...

...And the present loyalty oath, I am convinced, represents just one more fallible political maneuver to impose a one-sided partisan version of Catholic faith on the entire church...

...He insists that his previous record of loyalty speaks for itself and needs no reaffirmation...

...Nothing seemed certain any more, he said, even our shared belief that Christ is genuinely human and divine...

...Yet precisely this detestation of error and muddle is the militant raison d'etre of the CDF, just as this attitude animates the fundamentalist reactions today in almost all world religions...

...Sensitive to this barrage of sanctions, which function collectively as a kind of McCarthyite loyalty oath, I find myself of three minds, each representing a different characteristic response I have been picking up from fellow Catholics...

...THE VATICAN'S LOYALTY OATH VOUCHING FOR FIDELITY AGAIN & AGAIN & AGAIN At the very time that glasnost is working its way through the Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe, Vatican officials have levied on pastors and theologians a revised Profession of Faith and an Oath of Fidelity, and forbidden the public airing of opinions that challenge official church teaching...

...So I began by answering his question with a simple "yes...

...After all, donning the role of theologian does not automatically confer on a person the privilege of representing an official tradition with accuracy...

...Even less can relationships within the church be inspired by the mentality of the world around it...

...I think this is the style of thinking William James grasped incisively in his distinction between those minds primarily shut to error and those primarily open to truth...

...It provides the most rigorous alternative to the chaos of the Communist or Fascist modern state...

...More accurately, as we can learn from the tyrannical abuse of parliamentary procedure in any democracy, what counts most in church politics is the person who predetermines the agendum, stacks subcommittees, redistributes minor offices, or edits and publishes the final text...

...For example, papal court-watchers gossip today about the slapdash manner in which the present texts of the Oath of Fidelity and the Profession of Faith first appeared...

...In high school geometry class, I once experienced an instant of sublime certainty, as the intellect passed with strict logic from proposition twelve to thirteen...

...Given a choice of death, I would prefer to sacrifice my life to save another person, or to die for a cause like human rights or nuclear disarmament than for some tendentious churchy formula...

...The distaste expressed by these visionaries for compromise and provisional religious insight goes too far...

...If its own mind is not made up, it can hardly hope to withstand disorder from the outside...

...Yet neither of these historical civil models should be mistaken for the embryonic church of the New Testament...

...Though I grew away from these people, they have persisted, sitting out the last few decades of aggiornamento, impatient for the restoration of Counter-Reformation certainties, just as many tough old Leninists must be counting today on the brevity of their glasnost nightmare...

...VERNON RULAND Vernon Ruland, S.J., professor of religious studies at the University of San Francisco, is author of Eight Sacred Horizons: The Religious Imagination East and West (Macmillan...

...I caught a whiff of the direction this conversation was taking, for he soon circled around politely to my own personal belief in Christ's divinity...

...I argued that he had no warrant to solicit knee-jerk token reassurances, but must stretch his attention span for a careful definition of terms, a responsible awareness of implications...

...It occurred the instant Eisenhower admitted our State Department had been lying about U-2s flying over Soviet territory...

...Similarly, the fine print in the present Oath of Fidelity and Profession of Faith, and in the more recent "Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian," all issued by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), merits the most exacting scrutiny...

...Or imagine being pressured unexpectedly, after decades in a loving marriage, to vouch for your fidelity, again and again, through pledges that grow wordy, banal, and finally hypocritical...

...Also, in first-year college I delighted in confuting imaginary adversaries by rattling off scriptural proof texts or Thomistic arguments for the existence of God...

...As the Communist Manifesto asserts, our particular notions of freedom, culture, and law, which we presume to be eternal laws of nature and reason, actually spring from preconceptions held by a specific current ruling elite...

...Let me describe the unusual overlay of attitudes this man's question evoked in me, for they mirror the three states of mind I want to explore later...

...A facade of doctrinal coherence and tidy hierarchical efficiency, major endowments of the church romanticized by Newman and Waugh, have been purchased, I fear, at an ugly price...

...My second state of mind about the oath, however, after sounding out a wider range of opinions, has been a sort of disciplined reserve, earmark of the more seasoned theologian...

...Standards of conduct, appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy, cannot be purely and simply applied to the church...

...But I think its actual civil reality operates, not like a democracy, of course, but like a Renaissance autocracy-and a very Machiavellian one...

...If summoned to do so, I could only violate my conscience and intellectual integrity by taking the oath as I now read it...

...Even in a post-Leninist era, I am convinced that any religious loyalty worthy of the name must survive a bracing Marxist dialectical critique...

...A slavish maximalist interpretation of these words could stifle honest scholarship, ecumenical collaboration, the church's doctrinal development, and its indispensable thermostat of prophecy...

...The first group prefer to believe nothing without clear compelling evidence, rather than risk being duped...

...The latter often dismiss most Eurocentric theology as the self-serving projection of a secure academic elite, often male, celibate, bourgeois, cosmopolitan, insulated from rural poverty...

...Almost a century before this, John Henry Newman offered a similar argument: "There are two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to atheism...

...More recently, my own first reactions, and those of many colleagues, on reading about the new loyalty oath were visceral...

...Another friend often urges me to recognize limitations of culture and temperament, and train myself to trim down CDF rhetoric to the dimensions of a Roman traffic signal, treated by most Italian drivers not as a command but as a request...

...For I commit myself by faith, not to specific religious words, but to the ineffable God or Godhead through a flawed, finite medium of both words and action...

...The combined profession and oath calls not only for faith in infallible doctrine, but also for a "religious submission of will and intellect," toward "whatever is expressed by the holy shepherds as authentic doctors and teachers of the faith, or established by them as the church's rulers...

...The combined Oath and Profession of Faith has now been imposed in several dioceses on those about to assume the appointment of bishop, clerical religious superior, deacon, seminary professor of theology and philosophy, or pastor, among others...

...Any kind of crankiness or individual self-assertion in the ministers of a religious body shakes one's confidence in them...

...First, I felt hurt and insulted that a colleague should doubt my orthodoxy...

...For what dresses itself up as a serene doctrinal consensus, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might have emerged from lobbying and power plays no less fallible or sinful than those in our own Congress and Supreme Court...

...Your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of your existence as a class...

...Their dream-church strikes me as a neo-Platonic essence, wiped clean of earthy civil politics...

...I suspect that at least a few martyrs in early Rome, in Tudor England, or in Tokugawan Japan must have struggled with these same misgivings about mortal words or images, before settling on their final affirmations...

...Placing himself in the latter set, James observes that after all, our errors are not such dreadfully solemn things...

...It could shape docile minds into a blank check, expected to cover some Kafkaesque memo inserted next Wednesday for instant belief...

...But then, I welcomed a chance to affirm and explain my faith...

...Though I can barely resuscitate these feelings now, they must surely provide the basis for any empathy I feel today for traditionalist and papal integralist members of my own Roman Catholic family...

...Yet the church's current leaders seem blind to this kind of critique, and to the relativity of their own power base...

...On the contrary, the Vatican today is managed for the moment by a specific church clique, trying to shape the rest of the church according to its own predilections, no doubt fervent and well-intentioned...

...In a parallel controversial clause, this submission (obsequium) is expected toward authentic teachings "even if [church leaders] intend to proclaim them with a non-definitive act...

...Thomas More's biographers single out a decisive moment when his resourceful legal mind sifts through the newly imposed Oath of Supremacy, eager to salvage a minimalist literal reading that can satisfy both conscience and King Henry...

...This man had the undeniable duty to challenge me...

...It lacks the requisite nuances pervading even the pope's more recent "Constitution on Catholic Universities," which demands from theologians "an assent to Catholic doctrine according to the degree of authority with which it is taught...

...Fifteen years ago, when I first began teaching courses in college theology at the University of San Francisco, an older Jesuit academician, not a theologian, approached me to acknowledge his eroding sense of solidarity with younger priests in our religious community...

...Long before the 1960s, most Catholics, myself included, had learned to prize our church for its tough discipline and uniformity, its disdain for whatever proclaimed itself the latest worldly modernity...

...I have already implied a third state of mind about the loyalty oath, but in my own consciousness, this attitude survives as just a faint atavistic impulse from adolescence...

...After this single word, he interrupted me with enthusiasm and expressed immediate relief and kinship...

...But what is so contemptible about a spiritual halfway house...

...In a Daily Express column of 1930, Evelyn Waugh explains his reasons for conversion to Rome-first of all, its competent church organization and discipline, its clear consistent teaching...

...A few months ago, a diocesan priest friend of mine, required to take the revised Oath of Fidelity before being named pastor of a large urban church, told me he must in conscience reject the oath and thus his long-cherished appointment...

...The CDF oath, on the contrary, angling for an undiscriminating belief in anything or everything, risks settling for belief in nothing...

...I can remember the day I first lost my naive patriotic trust-a delayed maturity, I am ashamed to admit...

...Now it is no secret that Cardinal Ratzinger's CDF and other neo-Catholics have been colliding repeatedly with third-world liberation theologians...

...I admire the decision of this priest, the forthright testimony of a Christian martyr, even though my own priorities in objection to the oath may sound less explicitly religious than his...

...The second group are willing to risk being duped again and again, rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of an accurate guess...

...With no explicit papal approval, no apparent consultation, they were issued retroactively to beat a deadline from the previous year, a date after which all Vatican edicts were supposed to undergo scrutiny by a special commission...

...It smacks of a neurotic hankering for absolutes, for Apollonian clarity and logic, an inability to handle ambiguity and mystery, perhaps a failure of nerve...

...Thus, I feel a glimmer of affinity now with the relief experienced by some Catholics at this long-overdue "return to orthodoxy," terminating an interlude of religious mayhem unleashed by Vatican II...

...Now I cannot but respect convictions so fearless and white-hot, especially in our own culture of affable pluralism, often no more than window-dressing for religious lassitude and anti-intellectualism...

...At first examination, the scope of this pledge in its present form seems recklessly vague and broad...

...Recall the indignant reply of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when asked why he did not become Protestant after leaving the Catholic church: "What kind of liberation would that be, to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent, and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent...

...In a similar dramatic moment, I lost my ecclesiastical innocence during the first public debates among prelates at Vatican n, especially in evident back-room tradeoffs and crusty ward politics...

...In its "Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian," for instance, the CDF cautions dissenting individuals against recourse to the mass media or public opinion polls...

...Was his question just another shallow California referendum-"Vote NO on abortion," as the placards read, or "YES on Proposition 23...