J
JReducation
Guest
Whatever the conclusions are, all of us are going to have to live with them. I don’t think that Cardinal Levada, Pope Benedict and Bishop Fellay want to drag this on for another hundred years. It’s caused too much pain to be dragged on longer.
I’m reminded of the dialogue between Pope Benedict and Fr. Hans Kung. They met, at the pope’s invitation. They spoke and agreed to disagree. However, the Holy Father told Fr. Kung that his license to teach Catholic theology remained suspended. Fr. Kung agreed to that. On the other hand, the Holy Father expressed admiration for Fr. Kung’s work on ecumenism and encouraged him to continue working on that.
I’m bringing up this example, because sometimes the Holy See will split the losses and say, this part of what you’re doing is unacceptable and if you cease you may continue to do the part that is acceptable. The same thing happened with Fr. Rahner. There were parts of his writings that Pope John Paul called into question. He allowed him to use them in the classroom and in the seminary, but not fromt he pulpit. Fr. Rahner agreed. I had the privilege of hearing Fr. Rahner at the university. I heard him deliver a lecture and it was one thing, a purely academic exercise in systematic theology. That day, he celebrated mass for the us and his homily was very different from his academic lectures. The homily could have been written by John the Evangelist. There was no academic exercise or questions contained in it. It was strictly orthodox mysticism.
If you have a cooperative meeting of the minds, you don’t always have to throw everything out. You can sort through the questions and agree to keep what you both feel strongly about about and lay aside what is not mutually agreeable or if you don’t lay it aside, you can agree on limits, how much can you say and where can you say it or to whom. There are some points of concern that theologians and pastors have that the Church wants to see debated, but not from the pulpit or not in front of certain audiences.
This requires flexibility. I don’t agree with Bishop Williamson that such an agreement is a betrayal. The Church has done this on many issues for 2,000 years. How long was the Immaculate Conception held by the Church, but debated by theologians, before the Church brought the debate to a close? There was no sense of betrayal there by those who had to take their debate behind closed doors.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
