The pope says!
Callahan, Sidney
OF SEVERAL HINDS SIDNEY CALLAHAN THE POPE SAYS! And then what? Last month I gave a lecture on women in the church, and promptly incited a vigorous rebuttal. My conservative...
...One is a development-in-continuity sense, as doctrines change while being appropriated anew by each generation...
...When lack of assent begins to appear, it may not indicate heresy or apostasy, but herald dramatic development...
...In much the same way tradition can be interpreted in more than its plain literal sense...
...I believe in the one, holy, apostolic church inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit to reveal God's truth through the ages...
...The lady did not hurl the dreadful words "cafeteria Catholic" my way, but the implication was there...
...No, no, I protested (dangerous word), I am a convinced Roman Catholic...
...Will it be enough when we meet the Lord to claim that "the pope made us do it...
...One sense is what Thiel calls dramatic development which includes discontinuity, reversals, even extinctions...
...My conservative (female) critic offered correction and admonition for my fundamental error...
...This constant re-appropriation seems to give meaning to the wonderful term "neo-past...
...More can be expected...
...Another more intriguing dimension of tradition leading to renewal is an incipient, anticipatory sense of development, in which new insights begin to emerge among some marginal minority and point where the universal church is going...
...Some papal fundamentalists talk as though the last act of conscience that a Catholic ever has to make is to submit mind and will to the pope and to church authority...
...Like the dinosaurs, some firmly entrenched teachings have vanished...
...Recently, my understanding, if not my arguing ability, has been sharpened by reading John E. Thiel's book, Senses of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith (Oxford University Press, 2000...
...Many ultraconservatives I've met in my travels applaud and celebrate the moral certainty given to them by their Catholicism...
...Suppose the church authorities say it is morally permissible to confine Jews to ghettos, enslave blacks and Indians, burn heretics, join Hitler's army, or kill women and children in free-fire zones...
...Who are you to set yourself up as an individual in opposition to the pope and the authentic magisterium...
...A certain disorder accompanies creative change...
...Alas, however, my critic was also a convert, and took a very firm line...
...After all, the canons become canonical and constant by the lived assent of the Spirit working within the faithful...
...From their point of view the great thing about being a Catholic in a confusing and deteriorating world is that you have an infallible guide to truth...
...Indeed, I am a convert and fully appreciate our communion...
...Only time can tell whether something novel, local, and contested will become part of the universal consensus...
...Christian truth is not an inert lump deposit, but a rich multithematic symphony played out through time...
...Since Vatican II, doctrines barring the exercise of religious liberty or declarations of no salvation outside the church are gone, if not forgotten...
...More is coming...
...I find the affirmation of a dynamic plural movement of the Holy Spirit through time and culture to be true to the Gospels and to the chaos and complexity of history...
...The present challenge is to make wise discernments...
...Commonweal 7 June 15,2001...
...This side of the eschaton the Spirit pours forth living waters, filled with novelty...
...Wellsprings of feminist, liberation, or ecological theology may be anticipating the church's future direction...
...While all interpretations of tradition yearn for the Spirit's one truth in a whole coherent network, Christians should not pretend to possess some narrow, false, Platonic ideal...
...In addition, there are three other senses or ways to interpret a complex tradition—just as there are different senses of Scripture...
...Catholics, Thiel claims, do not collapse tradition into Scripture and so must grant that tradition has its own integrity as a source of revelation...
...Thiel points to three more dynamic senses of tradition...
...But two other senses of tradition provide for more radical reform and renewal...
...Trust the One who makes all things new, sometimes known as She Who Is...
...Actually, if someone sincerely believed he was doing the right thing lighting Joan of Arc's fire, he is probably in heaven with the rest of the dead-wrong, dutiful Inquisitors, but I don't like to concede this point in argument...
...But how can you deny, I reply, trying to be a good dialogue partner, that the church has changed its teachings over the centuries...
...Tradition in its plain literal sense includes all the formal written decrees of councils, encyclicals, etc., but also all of the practices that are handed down in the church...
...Today, Catholics have no problem accepting that there can exist more than one literal interpretation of a scriptural text: Scripture can be read in an allegorical, mystical, or moral sense that complements the plain meaning of the inspired texts...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 12
