I’m going to help you out here. Here’s a good article by Avery Dulles.
http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/29/29.3/29.3.1.pdf
Let me quote a few passages:
"Nobody has ever undertaken to draw up a complete list of the Church’s dogmas, and the effort would be futile, because there are many borderline cases. "
“Catholic theology in the past few years has been radically reassessing the status of dogma, with the result that the Church’s position appears far less inflexible than is generally thought to be the case.
The concept of dogma underlying Bea’s remarks, though widely prevalent, is of relatively recent vintage. Neither in the Bible, nor in the writings of the Fathers, nor in medieval Scholasticism does the
term have this technical meaning. In ancient and medieval times"dogma” sometimes denotes simply an opinion or tenet of some philosophical or religious group—not necessarily true, let alone revealed. The term was used also in a juridical sense, to designate an official edict or decree. Even in the sixteenth century, as Piet Fransen points out, the Council of Trent “could ‘define a dogma’ while remaining perfectly conscious of the fact that the content of this dogma was not necessarily immutable.”
“…the current notion of dogma was forged in the controversial theology of the Counter Reformation.”
“In the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the faith was threatened by the attacks in the name of reason, Chrismann’s authoritarian view of dogma was found to be a handy weapon. At least in substance, it reappears in the official Roman documents of the period, such as the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, the Constitutions of Vatican I, and the anti-Modernist documents of 1907-10. The notion that there could be doctrines immune to historical limitations and capable of being imposed by the sheer weight of extrinsic authority reflects the nonhistorical and juridical type of thinking prevalent in the Church of the Counter Reformation. The roots of this mentality may be traced to Greek intellectualism andRoman legalism. More proximately, the absolutistic view of dogma reflects the characteristics of Catholic theology in a rationalistic era.”
Since most Catholics I have run into have never heard of Avery Dulles, I’ll briefly address those who don’t know him. He was both a theologian and cardinal (made cardinal by John Paul II in 2001). He taught theology at Woodstock, Catholic U, and Fordham. He was president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. A Jesuit. And much more. A fascinating bit of trivia is that he was the son of John Foster Dulles, Sec. of State under Eisenhower, and his uncle was Allan Dulles, head of the CIA.
