Taming the Theologians

Of all the beneficiaries of the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic theologians were among the most blest. Before the Council, most of them seemed to be little more than academic valets to the Popes, limited to being apologists for the fixed doctrinal formulations laid down by the 16th century Council of Trent. When Vatican II opened the doors to modern scholarship, especially biblical research, theologians were quick to seize their new opportunities. Within a few short years, some of them were questioning everything from the church's teachings on sexual ethics to papal infallibility --even such root doctrines as the nature of the Eucharist and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

The era of such unfettered speculation seems to be coming to an end --at least for theologians who want to be considered believing servants of the church. Last month in Rome, 27 members of the Vatican's international Theological Commission used their fourth annual meeting to discuss how theologians could keep their intellectual pluralism within a unified faith. The trend was centrist. The conservatives were less conservative, the liberals less liberal than the year before. The commission's consensus: diversity can be allowed in forms of expression and formulation, but not in basic belief. The church needs a "missionary and pastoral pluralism" that allows for a "translation of the faith for diverse cultures," said Commission Secretary Philippe Delhaye, of Belgium's Louvain University, but it cannot tolerate a "pluralism of rupture" that challenges faith and church authority.

Commission Member Yves Congar, a French Dominican whose own works were under suspicion in preCouncil days, emphasized that even a broadened Catholic theological spectrum cannot mean "the coexistence of persons holding contrary views." Catholic diversity can only embrace those who share "identical basic views but express them differently." Roman Catholicism simply cannot afford the kind of theological pluralism that liberal Protestantism has enjoyed, says Congar--a limitation, he admits, that is both a strength and a weakness. "My Protestant friends at the World Council marvel that we were able to achieve so much in four sessions of the Vatican Council, while it takes them ten years to produce one document. We were able to do this because of our doctrinal unity. On the other hand, we will never have the 'spread' theologically that they have had with Earth, Tillich, Bultmann and others."

Some Catholic theologians including Moralist Bernard Haring have argued in recent years that they are part of the church's evolving magisterium, or teaching power. Theological Commission members--who range from Bishop Carlo Colombo, Pope Paul's favorite theologian, to progressives like Congar and German Jesuit Karl Rahner --now seem willing to accept a more tangential role. The Pope defined that role for them last month when he addressed them as "specialists of the science and of the intelligence of the faith." As for the magisterium, Paul VI has made it clear over the years that he considers only the bishops and himself to possess the power "to tell the people what God asks them to believe."

Congar agrees. "The theologian today is recognized as a mediator between the magisterium and the world," he says. "The magisterium possesses the charisma representing the unity of Christ." The magisterium's role is to express "what is true," Congar emphasized, while today's theologian is expected to chart new modes of defining those truths. "The theologian must be in constant contact with human sciences, with latest developments in all kinds of thought. Take the question of sexuality. We cannot speak of such a matter in the same terms we used before Freud. The theologian has the responsibility of elaborating and searching."

Party Whip. Yet this elaboration and search is now being sharply questioned, especially when it leads to the relaxation of discipline. One of the questioners is Jean Cardinal Danielou, a Jesuit theologian once regarded as a liberal, who has become a kind of party whip for orthodoxy. Danielou recently took to Vatican Radio to deplore the "false concept of liberty" that he says has sprung from a misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council. "We must put people on their guard against books, journals and conferences where false ideas are propagated," he said. One idea he cited as false was that of "women religious giving up their dress, abandoning their own works, only to immerse themselves in purely secular activities, substituting banal and political activities for their orientation toward God."

Nor are many new theological ideas welcome in teaching. Last fortnight The Netherlands' Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink returned from Rome after doing some explaining about a controversial high school catechism* course. The course, more than a little untraditional, emphasizes the student's need, as one of its authors puts it, "to believe according to his own way of thinking." It lets students decide for themselves, for instance, whether Jesus was God; it offers the Resurrection as an inspiring belief rather than historical fact. The authors--some 50 theologians, most from the Catholic University of Nijmegen--are convinced that this open-minded approach is the best way to reach questioning Dutch teenagers. The bishops of the two dioceses involved have reservations about the course, but apparently prefer it to the adhoc sex-and-sociology classes that preceded it. Nevertheless the Vatican has ordered the new course withdrawn from use.

Whatever the merits of the Dutch arguments, one progressive in the Curia insists that liberals must preserve a recognizable core of faith or lose their credence within the church altogether. Says he: "When the liberals become so vague, so completely speculative, doubting and unsure of their own beliefs, they leave their own followers with a loss of identity, direction and dedication. If all we can offer is a vague kind of 'social gospel,' the same thing can be found in secular political movements and the church loses any reason for existence. Unless the liberal theologians offer something solid and begin to attract a liberal following, I fear the next generation of the church may be overwhelmingly conservative." Says Congar: "Time is on the side of Rome --the public gets tired of being told something new every day."

*Not to be confused with the 1966 "Dutch Catechism" that is still internationally used. Its newer editions have an appendix of Vatican-authored clarifications.

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