What Would Cardinal Newman Say?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK

These can be difficult times for Catholics serious about their faith. We find beliefs that we once thought unassailable being questioned by theologians and members of the clergy, everything from our understanding of Christian marriage, to sexual identity, to the morality of abortion, to our understanding of Jesus’ role in salvation history.
Stephen J. Pope and Richard R. Gaillardetz, professors of theology at Boston College, wrote an article for Commonweal in late February meant to soothe the nerves of Catholics disquieted in the above manner. Its relevance has been increased by the debates following upon Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. The authors seek to throw light upon the assertion “doctrine can’t change.”
They don’t challenge that position, but think it important for Catholics to keep in mind that Reinhard Cardinal Marx, the archbishop of Munich, and Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on separate occasions said that doctrine can “develop,” with Mueller stipulating — in the professors’ words — “as long as it remains in harmony with basic principles of Catholic teaching.”
Gaillardetz and Pope write, “Dogma, those teachings that directly communicate divine revelation (e.g., the Incarnation or belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist), can grow and develop, often significantly, but cannot be reversed.” On the other hand, many “normative Catholic teachings that go by the term ‘doctrine’ not only develop; sometimes they have developed in ways that amount to a substantial reversal, or what the theologian John Thiel calls ‘dramatic development’.”
The authors point to how “Catholicism went from supporting slavery to condemning it as an intrinsic evil and prohibiting usury to allowing it (while continuing to condemn unjust interest rates).” To how “in the nineteenth century, the papacy was an implacable enemy of both democracy and religious freedom, but in the second half of the twentieth century it became their most outstanding global defender.” To how “John Paul II presided over a significant development in the church’s teaching on capital punishment.”
They cite Vatican II’s assertion in Dei Verbum: “As the centuries succeed one another, the church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her.” They quote from Pope Francis’ address at the close of the Synod on the Family last fall: “The synod experience also made us better realize that the true defenders of doctrine are not those who uphold its letter, but its spirit.”
The doctrinal developments that Gaillardetz and Pope point to have largely taken place. The question is whether the changes being called for in our time — on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the status of divorced and remarried Catholics, for example — fit within Cardinal Muller’s guideline of “remaining in harmony with basic principles of Catholic teaching.” John Henry Cardinal Newman remains a valuable source of insight into this question.
In his 1845 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Newman wrote, “Old principles can reappear under new forms.” The responsibility of Church leaders is to “change in order to remain the same.” This means that a “development, to be faithful, must retain both the doctrine and the principle with which it started.” Our “faith is undeniably the historical continuation of the religious system, which bore the name of Catholic in the eighteenth century, in the seventeenth century, in the sixteenth, and so back in every preceding century, till we arrive at the first.”
We must seek the “natural and necessary development of the doctrine of the early church, and that its divine authority is included in the divinity of Christianity.”
The bottom line: In the development of doctrine, the goal should be to express the essence of the timeless teachings of the Church in language adapted to a modern setting, not to manipulate those teachings to make them compatible with the spirit of the times in which we live. Newman makes his point with two quips that cut to the quick. He reminds us that “Calvinists became Unitarians from the principle of private judgment.” And that the “fermenting process, unless stopped at the due point, corrupts the liquor which it has created.”
Newman insists that a true development of doctrine will not be the result of the Church bending to contemporary opinion, but a process through which error is “brought under the light of truth,” and “drawn off from error into the truth.”
I don’t want to put words into Newman’s mouth, but I think it fair to say that he is warning that those who are promoting a development of Church doctrine cannot engage in an exercise in sophistry in the service of one secular ideology or another, or “respectable opinion.”
I have seen up close what can happen when Christians seek to make themselves relevant by changing their teachings to accommodate the spirit of the times, when they ignore, in Newman’s words, “both the doctrine and the principle” of the moral issue or dogma in question. My experience was with an Episcopalian parish, but I have no doubt that the same circumstance can be found in many Protestant denominations and perhaps in more than a few theology departments at Catholic universities.
Several years ago I attended a few amateur nights at an Episcopal Church auditorium where the nieces of a friend were performing. The girls’ parents were ex-Catholics who joined this parish to escape what they called the “judgmental” views of their Catholic parish. I am not exaggerating for emphasis. The religious convictions of the members of this church — the ones I talked to, at any rate — were indistinguishable from the editorial page of The New York Times and the previous day’s discussions on National Public Radio.
The priest was a woman living with a “significant other.” No one thought it odd. Teenage same-sex couples walked hand-in-hand around the room. No one thought that odd, either. Global warming and the dangers of militarism and xenophobia were the topics of concern. I didn’t ask, but I would wager serious money that most of the congregation was “pro-choice.” The Episcopalians motto “All Are Welcome Here” expressed a moral relativism indistinguishable from the version you might hear expressed in a Greenwich Village coffee shop.
I am not saying the assembled Episcopalians were bad people. Quite the contrary. Many were tweedy and refined folks committed to doing their part to make the world a better place. But for them that meant being good liberal Democrats. Which they are entitled to be, of course. But they are not entitled to contort the Gospel’s message to make it fit a secular liberal agenda. From everything that I could tell they had done that.
Newman had it right: The development of doctrine “to be faithful, must retain both the doctrine and the principle with which it started”; it should be “change in order to remain the same.” Our religious beliefs flow from the Gospel, not the Zeitgeist.