Matthew Shadle - Francis’s Theological Paradigm Shift
Podcast: Season 5, Episode 5
I connected with Dr. Matthew Shadle last year. Back in December, I ran across an article he wrote about Pope Francis’s apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam, which revised the statutes of the Pontifical Academy of Theology. This letter received widespread criticism from some theologians/commentators because it encouraged a “contextual theology.”
One theologian that heavily criticized this apostolic letter was Larry Chapp. I’ve genuinely valued and grown from Larry Chapp's blog and podcast over the past few years, especially what he has written about Vatican II and Dorothy Day. I also understand, and share, some of Chapp's anger at Pope Francis for the ways that he has handled clerical abuse cases. But I have not been able to understand Chapp's anger and criticism directed at Pope Francis's theology.
Matthew’s article helped me understand this criticism in light of the wider theological debates going on the the Church since Vatican II which helped me see a little better where Chapp’s criticism is coming from (even though I disagree with him).
I think Pope Francis’s theology helps the Church to avoid a type of fundamentalism that presumes that we “possess the truth” (to borrow a phrase from Pope Benedict), or that we have access to God’s revelation in a pure, unmediated way. God has always revealed himself through human beings who are fallen, limited, and bound by their language, culture, and understanding of the world. Therefore, as limited creatures, we can always grow in our understanding of an eternal God. In a key passage, Matthew wrote:
“As I already noted, Chapp, following the line laid out by thinkers like Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, argues that our experiences, both personal and cultural, must be “sifted” and “tested” in light of the truths of Revelation. The difficulty here is that this assumes that we have unmediated access to Revelation, independent of experience.
Yet the truths of Revelation come to us as passed on through Tradition, which means they are mediated through the cultural and historical contexts of our forebears in faith, as my example of St. Anselm with which I opened this essay illustrates. This doesn’t mean we don’t have access to the truths of Revelation; it simply means that Tradition itself must be “sifted” and “tested” for us to discern what it communicates to us about Revelation, a process in which the Magisterium has an authoritative, although not exclusive, role.
Second, we necessarily encounter the truths of faith within the horizon of our own personal and cultural context. Of course, in a certain sense, the truth of Christ must come first, relative to experience or culture, but this can’t mean that we somehow have access to that truth prior to, or independently of, our historical and cultural existence.
We encounter the truth of Christ through a dialogical process, first entering into dialogue with those who have passed on the faith to us, seeking to understand them and their testimony in their context, and then engaging in dialogue with our own cultural context, drawing upon it to better understand how we can live out our faith but likewise rejecting those aspects of our context that run counter to the Gospel. This is precisely the method proposed by Pope Francis.”
I really enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Shadle, I hope you do as well!
The episode is available on Youtube and your favorite podcast app.
This week, Dr. Matthew Shadle joins the podcast to discuss the theology of Pope Francis in the context of Vatican II. Specifically—responding to some of the critics Pope Francis’s recent apostolic letter, Ad Theologiam Promovendam—we talk about how the pope’s theology fits in terms of the Ressourcement theology that dominated at the Second Vatican Council and its development since then.
After more than sixteen years of teaching theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa and Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, Dr. Matthew Shadle is the Academic Assessment Coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. He received his B.A. in Religion from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio.
He has published Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford, 2018) and The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown, 2011), as well as numerous essays and articles on Catholic social teaching and its intersection with both fundamental moral theology and the social sciences, with special focus on war and peace, the economy, and immigration. He is currently the editor of Window Light, a Substack newsletter focused on Catholic theology and ministry.
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