Slacken the Reins of the CDF

So says The Tablet in an editorial in the issue dated June 11, 2005.  Read on:

The new head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said in his first major statement concerning his new job that he saw it as “helping the Church see how beautiful and wonderful God’s love is”. If that becomes the tone with which the CDF approaches its work in future then Pope Benedict XVI’s appointment of Archbishop William J. Levada, who is standing down as Archbishop of San Francisco, will look truly inspired. The Pope himself, whom Archbishop Levada succeeds in this position, used to emphasise the CDF’s disciplinary rather than its evangelistic role, though he would not deny that one served the other. It is possible that any new Prefect’s best intentions do not long survive contact with the reality of the CDF’s brief, which inevitably includes the distasteful business of disciplining clergy who have gone astray.

The Pope has chosen someone with a background interestingly different from his own, chief pastor of one of the world’s most free-thinking (and free-living and -loving) cities. As an American, furthermore, he should have an instinctive feel for natural justice and due process, and no doubt an awareness that one of the major criticisms of the CDF is its perceived deficiency in that area. Theologians regularly emerge from contact with it both enraged and hurt by the way they were treated, with a profound sense of unfairness. In the literal sense, that causes scandal, for it weakens the value of the Church’s witness to justice elsewhere. The CDF’s mistake has been to understand itself as dealing only with a theologian’s opinions and hence not with the theologian as a person with rights. But for opinions read convictions, and to put someone’s convictions on trial comes very close to putting the individual on trial. That is certainly how it feels to the accused.

The CDF would silence many of its critics if it learnt to slacken the reins, and not to regard every new or unusual theological idea as automatically suspect – or “relativistic”, to use the term becoming fashionable under the new pontificate. Dialogue with the modern world cannot be conducted without risk, but the Holy Spirit is at work among the faithful and does not need a bodyguard. Catholic orthodoxy has a robust buoyancy of its own. Unconventional opinions are rarely as dangerous as those in authority seem to fear, and today’s new thinking frequently becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

The challenge facing the CDF is to foster a climate in which the freedom of theological debate is respected and valued and those who put forward bad arguments are contradicted by good ones, not ordered to retract on pain of penalties. That means building up the vocation of theologian, and regarding theological speculation as a worthwhile exercise for the good of the Church, even when it asks searching questions of the Magisterium.

Every time a theologian is investigated by the CDF that climate of free exchange is diminished, and even those not accused or suspected are bound to feel the chill. The head of the CDF ought to be regarded as the theological community’s best friend in high places; and friendship does not preclude a frank word of caution where it is deserved.
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Michael P.