Deadening the Intellectual Life of the Church, Cardinal Newman
In his book Apologia, Cardinal Newman (who had a far tougher time with intellectual freedom in his day than we do in ours) says that he believes in the dogma as taught by the Apostles and interpreted by the Church, and in the universally received traditions of the Church, “which in all times are the clothing and the illustration of the Catholic dogma as already defined,” and other decisions of the Holy See, which come “with a claim to be accepted and obeyed.” Then he says he feels “no temptation at all to break in pieces the great legacy of thought thus committed to us” by the likes of St. Athanasius, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. Then he says keeping “Infallibility and Reason” in ongoing tension is “necessary for the very life of religion” because it brings them together “for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature.”
This is a description of what I think should be going on but is not going on exactly because of the deadening of our intellectual life.
Besides the issues of obsession with obedience, mandatums, the illogic of “not infallible but irreformable,” and the unjust process of sanctions, two things strike me.
One is that all of the issues that seem to be roiling the Church today (birth control, celibacy, women’s ordination, collegiality) have little to do with “dogma as taught by the Apostles.” They are essentially operational issues. Yet power is exercised by the hierarchy to forbid their discussion (e.g., the nun put under interdict for advocating women’s ordination). The hierarchy seems to want to bring down the full power and weight of the magesterium on these issues, even though they have little to do with essential doctrine. That’s why Ad tuendam fidem (i.e., the creation of a category of doctrine that is not infallible but irreformable is so dangerous, besides being illogical).
Secondly, in the meantime, little relative energy is being put into the articulation of the basic truths of the faith in a way that makes sense in the modern world. We never even get to “the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process” the truths that might rightly be considered infallible, so “Infallibility and Reason” are not being kept in ongoing tension on topics of consequence because all the focus is on mandating obedience to what are essentially bureaucratic issues.
Also, I wonder if the intellectual life of the church has lost its zip not so much from outright repression but from a growing sense of the irrelevance of the authority of the institution. If that’s the case, then the dialectic Newman suggests of “Infallibility and Reason” isn’t going to work.
