It says in the article what this is about.
I beg your pardon? Please tell me just one of the “many” doctrines that were changed “many times” in the past?
If religions are alive, as Catholicism surely is, they change. But while some changes may reflect a justifiable, even necessary, adaptation to new knowledge or circumstances, others may be a trimming of religious truth. How do you tell the difference? It is a question brought into sharp focus again with the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI.
Historically, Catholicism solved the problem of change simply by denying it. Understandings of the Trinity, the priesthood, the papacy, the Mass and the sacraments that emerged over a long time were projected back into New Testament texts. Theologians joked that when a pope or other official circuitously introduced a modification of church teaching, he would begin, ‘‘As the church has always taught. . . .’’
Such denial, still widespread, means that examining change in official teaching – or what became known in the 19th century as ‘‘development of doctrine’’ – poses two challenges: first, to establish that alterations – some more than minor – have unquestionably occurred; and second, to show how they can be reconciled with the church’s claim to preach the same essential message Jesus and his disciples did 2,000 years ago, presumably deriving criteria that can help distinguish legitimate evolution in the future from deviations or betrayals.
In ‘‘A Church That Can and Cannot Change,’’ some Catholic moral doctrines have changed radically. History, he concludes, does not support the comforting notion that the church simply elaborates on or expands previous teachings without contradicting them.
Slavery. John Paul II included slavery among matters that are ‘‘intrinsically evil’’ – prohibited ‘‘always and forever’’ and ‘‘without any exception’’ – a violation of a universal, immutable norm. Yet slavery in some form was accepted as a fact of life in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in much Christian theology and in Catholic teaching well into the 19th century. Christianity achieved a radical transvaluation of slavery. Jesus presented himself as a slave; slaves became saints; slavery became a metaphor and model for Christian life. Yet neither Jesus nor his followers directly challenged the institution of slavery. The fathers of the church accepted the buying, selling and owning of human beings. So did the popes: Muslim slaves were manning papal galleys until 1800. So did religious orders: Jesuits in colonial Maryland owned slaves, as did nuns in Europe and Latin America. Even St. Peter Claver, who in Colombia befriended, instructed and baptized African slaves, bought slaves to serve as interpreters. Theologians challenged abuses of slaveholding but rarely the practice itself.
It was at the urging of Protestant Britain that the papacy condemned the slave trade in 1839. In 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished slavery, the Vatican finally condemned it – with a kind of historical rewriting and self-congratulation that palpably offends Noonan’s sense of honesty.
Other exhibits deal with usury, religious freedom and marriage. Lending money for interest, long condemned as usury, became accepted as lawful. In certain cases, modern popes have claimed the power to dissolve marriages once considered indissoluble. And instead of insisting on government’s imposing legal penalties, including death, to uphold religious truth, today the church positively forbids it. Compared with treatment of slavery, most regrettably perhaps in the case of religious freedom. Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty reversed a long-held position that ‘‘error has no rights,’’ despite the fact that only a few years previously a theologian like John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit whose defense of American separation of church and state laid the groundwork for the decree, had been silenced. This kind of dramatic rehabilitation gives heart, rightly or wrongly, to critics of other teachings, like those on women’s ordination or sexual morality.
The four case studies demonstrate beyond question the fact and the extent of change. But do they offer insights that might aid Catholics in distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate developments in doctrine? In a negative sense, yes. In an unchanging element in Catholic teaching, a core continuity from Jesus to today. But from the cases one can deduce no rules of thumb to determine what falls within this continuity. The cases contravene the organic image of a gradual unfolding of latent truth. Nor does one find that categories like ‘‘unnatural’’ or ‘‘intrinsic evil,’’ meant to sort out the immutable from the mutable, make solid sense of past changes.
Genuine development arises from experience deepened by empathy. ‘‘That your love abound more and more in knowledge and in insight of every kind so that you test what is vital,’’ St. Paul wrote
St. Augustine’s rule of faith: a true understanding of divine revelation is one that will ‘‘build up that double love of God and of neighbor.’’
I’ll read it shortly. I read on a Bishops’ Conference’s news site that Pope Francis endorsed Cardinal Kasper’s view.