T
T.More
Guest
What are thoughts on this excerpt from Francis Oakley’s Council Over Pope? Towards a Provisional Ecclesiology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 176-178. He is a Catholic who writes on on issues facing ther Church and is President Emeritus of Williams College.
Let it be admitted, then, that the decrees and the ecclesiologies of Constance and Vatican I are in direct conflict one with another—and this despite the fact that both have to be regarded as meeting the requirements for dogmatic validity. What does this mean? It means no less than this: that the absolutist claims traditionally and currently made by the official Church for the magisterium cannot be sustained coherently by anyone who is ultimately willing to accept the evidence of history. It means that the claim to attach infallibility to particular conciliar or papal pronouncements must simply be dropped. Accordingly, it reduces also the claims so often made, and with such notable lack of restraint, for the binding force of papal pronouncements which do not lay claim to infallibility—or because of their subject matter (as in the case of Humanae vitae), cannot do so. It means, again, that conservatives no longer have to twist or reject the findings of the majority of biblical exegetes or to continue to manipulate scriptural texts in order to hold them to conformity with the obvious meaning of conciliar or papal doctrinal pronouncements in the past…It means, indeed, that Catholics can throw off their peculiar bondage to the recent past, that theologians, bishops and popes can slough away their obsessive preoccupation with protecting the “continuity” of papal and conciliar teaching, that no unsurmountable barrier need now divide the Roman Church from the other Christian churches. At the present moment, finally, it means both that Peter can be delivered from his chains and that those radicals who have not given up entirely on the institutional church can now permit themselves a measure of hope for a genuine and thoroughgoing transformation of that Church. …The trouble, of course, lies in the fact that it is a conclusion which demands of us what Charles Davis, in a recent exchange, demanded of the Scripture scholar John L. McKenzie, namely: the willingness to admit that the formulations of Vatican I’s definition of infallibility are not merely “unfortunate” (countless Catholic theologians admit that), but that they are simply wrong. For if the linguistic distance separating the two words is slight, the psychological distance separating them is usually immense. And precisely because of this psychological distance, I would argue, it is absolutely vital that the coming Vatican III should itself be willing to meet that demand, to renounce, that is—publicly, unambiguously, and in the most solemn terms—the absolutist claims traditionally and currently made on behalf of the Church’s teaching authority. So great a renunciation, so abject an admission of fallibility, so radical a commitment to honesty, would have an electrifying effect on the whole Christian world. It would liberate Catholic conservatives from the chains that bind them to an all too human past, it would free liberals from their bondage to an all too human present, it would leave all Catholics open, as rarely before, to the full, direct, and devastating impact of the Gospel message. In an abysmally divided world that hungers, fears and hates, the Church would then be delivered from its unhealthy, debilitating and narcissistic preoccupation with its own identity and its own future, and freed to bring the whole of its formidable spiritual, moral and material resources to bear on the mission of mercy, relief and reconciliation. Then, truly, could it come to be the lumen gentium and the sal terrae.
Let it be admitted, then, that the decrees and the ecclesiologies of Constance and Vatican I are in direct conflict one with another—and this despite the fact that both have to be regarded as meeting the requirements for dogmatic validity. What does this mean? It means no less than this: that the absolutist claims traditionally and currently made by the official Church for the magisterium cannot be sustained coherently by anyone who is ultimately willing to accept the evidence of history. It means that the claim to attach infallibility to particular conciliar or papal pronouncements must simply be dropped. Accordingly, it reduces also the claims so often made, and with such notable lack of restraint, for the binding force of papal pronouncements which do not lay claim to infallibility—or because of their subject matter (as in the case of Humanae vitae), cannot do so. It means, again, that conservatives no longer have to twist or reject the findings of the majority of biblical exegetes or to continue to manipulate scriptural texts in order to hold them to conformity with the obvious meaning of conciliar or papal doctrinal pronouncements in the past…It means, indeed, that Catholics can throw off their peculiar bondage to the recent past, that theologians, bishops and popes can slough away their obsessive preoccupation with protecting the “continuity” of papal and conciliar teaching, that no unsurmountable barrier need now divide the Roman Church from the other Christian churches. At the present moment, finally, it means both that Peter can be delivered from his chains and that those radicals who have not given up entirely on the institutional church can now permit themselves a measure of hope for a genuine and thoroughgoing transformation of that Church. …The trouble, of course, lies in the fact that it is a conclusion which demands of us what Charles Davis, in a recent exchange, demanded of the Scripture scholar John L. McKenzie, namely: the willingness to admit that the formulations of Vatican I’s definition of infallibility are not merely “unfortunate” (countless Catholic theologians admit that), but that they are simply wrong. For if the linguistic distance separating the two words is slight, the psychological distance separating them is usually immense. And precisely because of this psychological distance, I would argue, it is absolutely vital that the coming Vatican III should itself be willing to meet that demand, to renounce, that is—publicly, unambiguously, and in the most solemn terms—the absolutist claims traditionally and currently made on behalf of the Church’s teaching authority. So great a renunciation, so abject an admission of fallibility, so radical a commitment to honesty, would have an electrifying effect on the whole Christian world. It would liberate Catholic conservatives from the chains that bind them to an all too human past, it would free liberals from their bondage to an all too human present, it would leave all Catholics open, as rarely before, to the full, direct, and devastating impact of the Gospel message. In an abysmally divided world that hungers, fears and hates, the Church would then be delivered from its unhealthy, debilitating and narcissistic preoccupation with its own identity and its own future, and freed to bring the whole of its formidable spiritual, moral and material resources to bear on the mission of mercy, relief and reconciliation. Then, truly, could it come to be the lumen gentium and the sal terrae.
