Part Two - Development and Reversal in the Church’s Teaching
This is Part Two of a four-part series about the development of doctrine. You can read Part One here.
Constantly moving forward
All of this raises the questions: How does the Church’s understanding of Revelation grow? How does doctrine develop and who develops it? Again, Dei Verbum is the key text. In the same section quoted previously, the Dogmatic Constitution affirmed that Tradition develops with and through the whole Church: from the prayers and lives of laypeople, to the study of theologians, and, ultimately, the teaching authority of the pope and bishops in communion with him. In other words, as Pope Paul VI said to Archbishop Lefebvre, Tradition “is inseparable from the living magisterium of the Church.” It is ultimately the Magisterium, and only the Magisterium, that definitively resolves any apparent contradictions because the “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church” (DV 10).
Further, Dei Verbum states that “the Church constantly moves forward” until “the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her” (DV 8). Rather than seeing what is ancient as the greatest understanding of Revelation, the Council Fathers understood that as time progresses, the Church “moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth.” In a general sense, we have a greater understanding of Revelation now than we did in the 1500s, 1200s, or 400s. Here, the organic images of rivers and trees that St. John Henry Newman used can be helpful. A river is greater and more powerful at its mouth than in the small mountain spring that is its source. Likewise, a mighty oak tree is grander and stronger than a sapling. Pope Francis captures this growth in understanding, even to the point of correcting past teachings, in his response to the dubia:
“On the one hand, it is true that the Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but it is also true that both the texts of the Scripture and the testimonies of Tradition require interpretation in order to distinguish their perennial substance from cultural conditioning. This is evident, for example, in biblical texts (such as Exodus 21:20-21) and in some magisterial interventions that tolerated slavery (Cf. Pope Nicholas V, Bull Dum diversas, 1452).1 This is not a minor issue given its intimate connection with the perennial truth of the inalienable dignity of the human person. These texts need interpretation. The same applies to certain considerations in the New Testament regarding women (1 Corinthians 11:3-10; 1 Timothy 2:11-14) and other texts of Scripture and testimonies of Tradition that cannot be materially repeated today.”
In other words, the living Magisterium is our interpreter of historical texts, not the other way around. We cannot appropriately use our understanding of past texts to judge the living Magisterium, otherwise, we end up severely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the Catholic faith. We cannot genuinely understand historical texts apart from the Church’s current teachings. The living Magisterium, working in dialogue with the faithful, is our only sure guide and interpreter of Scripture, Tradition, and historical documents, sifting through what is of perennial substance and what is the result of cultural conditioning (cf. DV 8). There is also danger in accepting an historic teaching as binding if it has not been repeated in generations because "frequent repetition" of a doctrine is one of the ways for us to know the importance of a magisterial teaching (Lumen Gentium 25).
This danger becomes clear if we try to imagine a catechist telling a new convert to Catholicism that "none of those who are outside of the Catholic Church” including “Jews, heretics, and schismatics” can be saved and all of them are damned to Hell (Council of Florence, 1442AD); or a pastor telling his congregation that receiving any interest on a loan is gravely evil (Vix Pervenit, 1745AD) but that slavery "considered in itself and all alone, is by no means repugnant to the natural and divine law" (Instruction of the Holy Office, June 20, 1866). Finally, imagine a Catholic school principal writing a bulletin article asserting that Catholic parents are forbidden to send their kids to public school without the permission of their bishop (Divini Illius Magistri, 1929AD). We must avoid reading past magisterial documents the way that fundamentalists read Scripture.
Hermeneutic of traditionalism: relativism and fundamentalism
In light of Pope Benedict’s “contrasting hermeneutics” framework, I would like to identify a third hermeneutic: the hermeneutic of traditionalism. This hermeneutic proposes that contemporary magisterial teachings must be understood and interpreted through the lens of historical teachings. This is a tempting hermeneutic because it appears solid and faithful. However, it is ultimately a type of subjective relativism and religious fundamentalism.
This hermeneutic of traditionalism presumes that individual Catholics have the ability and authority to interpret Tradition, which is what Newman said of Protestants who relied “upon their own personal private judgment” to interpret Scripture. In other words, this position posits that individuals can correctly interpret the Church’s historical teachings and judge whether or not the “living teaching office of the Church” has contradicted Tradition based on that interpretation. This hermeneutic is flawed because it makes the individual member of the faithful, and not the living Magisterium (the pope and the bishops in communion with him), the authentic interpreter of Tradition.
This distorted understanding of Tradition is also a kind of religious fundamentalism. It betrays a desperate need to have unchanging certainty in religious beliefs. Like the Protestant Christians who felt like their entire faith was threatened by the theory of evolution, within this Catholic fundamentalism is the fear that even the slightest deviation from historical teachings threatens the legitimacy of the entire Church.
Further, this hermeneutic of traditionalism is also related to the hermeneutic of discontinuity. Namely, it is defined by the idea that there is a Truth (i.e., Tradition) that can be abstracted from the actual texts of the Magisterium. As with the hermeneutic of discontinuity, the traditionalist hermeneutic holds that for the sake of faithfulness to the Truth, it may be necessary not to follow the teachings of the Magisterium. Ultimately, as Pope Benedict warned in his 2005 address, a hermeneutic of discontinuity “risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church” because it asserts that the texts of the Council and post-conciliar teachings are not entirely faithful to the Truth of the Catholic faith.
Those advancing the hermeneutic of discontinuity and the hermeneutic of traditionalism also use similar arguments in order to undermine the authority of the living Magisterium. Reactions to the teachings of Pope Paul VI illustrate this. The pontiff’s 1968 encyclical prohibiting contraception, Humanae Vitae, was not well received by many of the faithful. Many Catholics readily asserted that our assent is only really required for the pope’s infallible teachings, and because Humanae Vitae was not an ex cathedra teaching, it was more like “optional advice” rather than authoritative teaching. It was also popular to emphasize the messy process that went into drafting the encyclical. Paul VI famously rejected the conclusions reached by the majority of the papal commission that had been established to advise him about the morality of birth control and instead reaffirmed the minority position, that the Church's prohibition on contraception should remain in place. Catholics who argue against Humanae Vitae often focus on these details (“how the sausage was made”) in order to undermine the final product.
The same type of argument is regularly used by those who adhere to the hermeneutic of traditionalism against Paul VI’s liturgical reforms, post-conciliar teachings, and even the Second Vatican Council itself. For example, prominent traditionalists have been arguing for decades that any non-infallible teaching can be questioned if it appears to contradict historical teachings. Especially since the release of Traditionis Custodes, some Catholics have argued that because the development of the reformed liturgy after the Council was messy (i.e., Eucharistic Prayer II being composed on a restaurant napkin), its legitimacy is questionable and obviously inferior to the liturgy that came before it, despite the fact that the reforms were promulgated by the Magisterium. In other words, the opposition against both Humanae Vitae and the reformed liturgy boils down to the same argument: The pope broke with the Spirit of the Council and therefore his teaching is illegitimate / The pope broke with the Unchanging Tradition and therefore his teaching is illegitimate.
Not just traditionalists
It is important to note that this hermeneutic of traditionalism with its distorted concept of Tradition extends far beyond members of the SSPX or Catholics who describe themselves as “traditionalists.” In fact, many Catholics who attend the reformed liturgy and support the teachings of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI—many of whom even criticize “Rad Trads” for their excesses—have fallen prey to this false hermeneutic. They do this whenever they presume that any deviation between a teaching of Pope Francis and the teachings of his predecessors is a rupture with the substance of a doctrine and not a true reform with a mix of continuity and discontinuity.
One example of this fundamentalist understanding of Tradition comes from Cardinal Burke and his assertion that Pope Francis’s teaching about the possibility of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics is a rupture from prior teachings. In fact, the cardinal expresses a distilled version of the hermeneutic of traditionalism in his 2019 interview with Ross Douthat. In reference to Amoris Laetitia, Burke said, “I haven’t changed. I’m still teaching the same things I always taught and they’re not my ideas. But now suddenly this is perceived as being contrary to the Roman pontiff.” The idea that one could not possibly be in schism because their beliefs have not changed rests on the premise that Church teaching cannot change.
Examples of this hermeneutic of traditionalism can also be seen in the criticism directed at Francis’s prohibition of the death penalty. Like the Second Vatican Council’s teaching about religious freedom, Francis’s magisterial teaching about capital punishment includes a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels.” Some of the current pontiff’s teachings are indeed changes from those of his predecessors, but they are not ruptures. Francis is reaching back to deeper truths.
In 2018, the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a “Letter to the Bishops” explaining the pope’s revision to the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty which said, “The new revision of number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved by Pope Francis, situates itself in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine” and “expresses an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium” (7-8). In Fratelli Tutti, Francis said, “I sometimes wonder why…it took so long for the Church unequivocally to condemn slavery and various forms of violence. Today, with our developed spirituality and theology, we have no excuses” (Fratelli Tutti 86). Then he goes on to cite Scripture, Church Fathers, and past popes to demonstrate that his unequivocal condemnation of the death penalty is a reaching back to the deeper revelation that every human being has infinite dignity (cf. FT 264-265).
In Part Three we will look at that history of the Church’s teaching about slavery as a case study of development…and reversal.
As will be discussed in Part Three, the Magisterium not only tolerated slavery as Francis indicates, but explicitly allowed it.