In short summary, the PBC refers to the authors of the Gospels as “sacred authors” without requiring or denying whether they were the actual Apostles themselves.
Failing to mention Matthew by name is not the same as reversing what it said 50 years earlier when claiming that Matthew was the author of the Gospel of Matthew.
This is the same thing taught by Vatican II in Dei Verbum.
Dei Verbum 19, while not mentioning Matthew by name, teaches that the writers of the Gospel were eyewitnesses to the events they wrote about:
**Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven (see Acts 1:1). Indeed, after the Ascension of the Lord the Apostles handed on to their hearers what He had said and done. This they did with that clearer understanding which they enjoyed (3) after they had been instructed by the glorious events of Christ’s life and taught by the light of the Spirit of truth. (2) The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their churches and preserving the form of proclamation but always in such fashion that they told us the honest truth about Jesus.(4) For their intention in writing was that either from their own memory and recollections, or from the witness of those who “themselves from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word” we might know “the truth” concerning those matters about which we have been instructed (see Luke 1:2-4). **
The Council Fathers did not seem to buy in to the new-fangled (last 200 years or so) modernist theory that Matthew didn’t write Matthew and that the book was composed by an anonymous disciple decades later. The Council Fathers were surely aware of the claims dating back to the 2nd century that Matthew wrote Matthew.
We also have the fact that (sometimes daily) we hear “A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew”.
I think it is pretty clear that the Church’s historic position has been that Matthew wrote Matthew. And the Church has done nothing to suggest a reversal of this view.
God bless,
James
