Part One - Development and Reversal in the Church’s Teaching
One of my goals with Third Space is to draw attention to some of the fundamentalist strains of thought within Catholicism and show that reality is more complicated, and more free. Fundamentalism, no matter what the flavor, creates an environment ripe for spiritual abuse.
One area where I see fundamentalist thinking is in the development of doctrine, or rather, in the rejection of development. In short, I believe a static view of Tradition is itself fundamentalist.
In the past several years, I’ve noticed an increase in Catholics—and not just folks who would be described as Traditionalist, but also more mainstream conservative Catholics—who spurn some specific doctrines that have recently developed and, ultimately, end up rejecting the development of doctrine itself.
In these discussions, I’ve seen fundamentalist dynamics like the literal interpretations of past magisterial texts, complete certainty about those interpretations, and a group culture that sees the in-group as the real Catholics, more faithful than Catholics outside the group. I’ve also seen old texts, plucked out of their historical context and imposed on consciences regardless of more recent magisterial teachings on that subject.
This is the first of a four-part series that takes a deep dive into how the Church itself opposes rigid traditionalism and instead proposes a dynamic, and even surprising, process of development.
Introduction
In his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, St. John Henry Newman sought to address a serious concern among the Protestant Christians of his day. Namely, if you look back through the Church’s history, there are places where the Church of one age taught something different from the Church of a previous age. This historical fact called into question the belief that the Church of the 12th, 16th, or 19th century was, in fact, the Church that Christ established. When faced with this historical reality, Protestants, according to Newman, felt forced, “to fall back upon the Bible as the sole source of Revelation, and upon their own personal private judgment as the sole expounder of its doctrine.” In response to this concern, Newman expressed a way of viewing Christian doctrine as a living organism that grows and develops, an idea that was later embraced by the Second Vatican Council. However, the concern that Newman was addressing is still alive today, and comes from within the Catholic Church.
When comparing the Church’s teachings before Vatican II with what was taught at the Council—or even when comparing some of Pope Francis’s teachings with those of his immediate predecessors—there are some clear differences. This historical observation can easily lead Catholics to view tradition as fluid, changing on a whim with the tides of modern culture. Or it can lead to the conclusion that the current teaching is a rupture from Tradition that needs to be corrected somehow. However, neither of these positions reflects the Church’s own understanding of Tradition and development, which is both more nuanced and more compelling.
This series will draw from the teachings of Second Vatican Council and of the post-conciliar popes to explain how the Church herself understands development. It will also look at the history of the Church’s teaching about slavery and wrestle with its implications. Finally, with this foundation established, it will look ahead to the Synod of Synodality and the prospect of future developments. In the end, this series will demonstrate that doctrinal development is dynamic and, at times, surprising because the Truth is not a static set of ideas, but a Living Person.
Combination of continuity and discontinuity
In a 1976 letter to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), Pope St. Paul VI said to the traditionalist prelate, “the concept of ‘tradition’ that you invoke is distorted.” Paul VI explained that Lefebvre understood Tradition as “a rigid and dead notion, a fact of a certain static sort” which “blocks the life of this active organism which is the Church.” Tradition, according to the pope, “is inseparable from the living magisterium of the Church.” This clarification that Paul VI offered Lefebvre is essential for understanding the doctrinal developments that came from Vatican II. It is also essential for the many Catholics today who believe that the Church’s teaching is unchanging and who, in turn, feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Church teaching could change in the future.
Those who believe that doctrine never changes often invoke Pope Benedict XVI's teaching that we need to reject a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” with Tradition and instead embrace a “hermeneutic of continuity.” The trouble is that this is not what Pope Benedict taught.
The late pontiff’s teaching about contrasting hermeneutics came from a Christmas address he gave to the Roman Curia in 2005. There, he criticized a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture" that sees the post-conciliar Church as disconnected from the prior nineteen centuries of Tradition. Furthermore, this hermeneutic pits the “spirit of the Council” against the “texts of the Council,” prioritizing the former as truly representing the will of the Council.
Pope Benedict contrasted this “hermeneutic of discontinuity,” not with the “hermeneutic of continuity,” but with a “hermeneutic of reform.” In doing so, he references Pope St. John XXIII’s 1962 speech that opened the Second Vatican Council. Quoting John XXIII, Benedict said: “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.”
This distinction between the “substance” of doctrine and “the way in which it is presented” is crucial. The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, picks up this distinction in a key passage about the development of doctrine: “This tradition which comes from the Apostles developed in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down” (Dei Verbum 8).
Here the Council Fathers draw a distinction between the “realities” of Divine Revelation and the Church’s understanding and expression of those realities. This is key: Pope Benedict—in that same Christmas address—said that “true reform” occurs when there is a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels” (emphasis mine). In other words, an authentic understanding of Tradition does not insist on rigid continuity but rather embraces continuity in the unchanging substance of doctrine and allows for discontinuity in the way that substance is understood and expressed. Benedict used the Council’s teaching about religious liberty as an illustration of true reform, going so far as to say that this development was a correction of some historical teachings. By affirming religious liberty, Benedict said the Council “recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church” and was “in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself.”
Benedict acknowledged that there can be “apparent discontinuity” between contemporary magisterial teaching and historical teachings. However, rather than seeing this discontinuity as a rupture or a denial of Tradition, he believes that the discontinuity of understanding and expression ultimately led to a deeper preservation of the substance of Divine Revelation.
Right away, it is clear that the idea that Church teaching never changes is not shared by Pope Benedict or the Council itself. The Church can, and has, corrected some historical decisions of the Magisterium. However, in matters of doctrine, any contradiction or reversal with the past is only a discontinuity of expression, not a discontinuity of substance. That being said, the discontinuity of expression can look like a dramatic change in substance. St. John Henry Newman uses the example of a butterfly to illustrate this point. A butterfly looks entirely different from the caterpillar it used to be, but the dramatic differences do not change the fact that they are, at the deepest level, the same creature. Pope Benedict pointed to the Council’s teaching about religious liberty as an example of this kind of dramatic change, where the Church chose to “define in a new way” how Catholics ought to relate to other religions. The Church’s teaching about slavery, usury, and the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics are all further examples of where the Church teaching today looks, in many ways, like a reversal from what it taught in the past.
This understanding of reform is explicitly reaffirmed by Pope Francis in his response to the dubia submitted by five cardinals, including Cardinal Burke, in the lead-up to the 2023 meeting for the Synod on Synodality. The cardinals questioned the pope about whether Revelation “should be reinterpreted according to the cultural changes of our time” or if Revelation “is binding forever, immutable, and therefore not to be contradicted.” If you apply Pope Benedict’s understanding of reform to this question, the answer is obvious: the substance of Revelation is immutable, but the Church’s understanding and expression of Revelation can change. And that is precisely how Francis responded:
“Therefore, while it is true that the Divine Revelation is immutable and always binding, the Church must be humble and recognize that she never exhausts its unfathomable richness and needs to grow in her understanding. Consequently, she also matures in her understanding of what she has herself affirmed in her Magisterium. Cultural changes and new challenges in history do not modify Revelation but can stimulate us to express certain aspects of its overflowing richness better, which always offers more. It is inevitable that this can lead to a better expression of some past statements of the Magisterium, and indeed, this has been the case throughout history.”
All of this raises the questions: How does the Church’s understanding of Revelation grow? How does doctrine develop and who develops it?
Part Two will be out soon…