Change artists - conference focuses on how doctrine has changed over time

National Catholic Reporter, July 2, 1999 by Pamela Schaeffer

With bold strokes and painstaking detail, theologians illustrate doctrinal variations of past

Church teaching changes. Call it development, call it a dramatic reversal: It's a fact.

In sure -- if sometimes oblique -- assault on recent Vatican efforts to fortify controversial teachings with appeals to tradition, speakers at an annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America offered example after example of shifts in major teachings over time. The combined effect was to show that change, even dramatic reversal, is far from rare.

At the same time, organizers of the mid-June event hoped, by avoiding highly sensitive issues such as women's ordination, to mollify critics without compromising historical truth.

The society was stung after its 1996 conference when Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston described it as a "wasteland" and Jesuit Fr. Avery Dulles characterized it as a showcase for dissent. Theologians at that conference had, by overwhelmingly affirmative vote, opposed the Vatican's arguments against ordaining women.

This year Dulles was featured on the program.

Among major speakers, church historian and federal judge John T. Noonan Jr. traced shifts in teaching from outright condemnation of lending money at interest to acceptance of the practice; from support of slavery and the death penalty in the recent past to even more recent condemnations of both.

Barbara Hilkert Andolsen of Monmouth University in New Jersey pointed out that even teachings that reflect centuries of tradition are sometimes overturned. "Sometimes the church comes to understand that a belief or norm proclaimed by an earlier generation was, from perspective of a later generation, wrong or even pernicious," she said.

One such case, she said, was a centuries-long anti-Semitic stance. It culminated in the teaching that "Jews or heretics and schismatics," along with others outside the Catholic faith, should anticipate the "everlasting fire [of hell]" unless they joined the Catholic church before death. The teaching was curious precedent for present-day Catholic teaching that Jews and Christians are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham. Yet it was proclaimed by Pope Eugenius IV with backing of the Council of Florence.

Distressed by attack

In a debate with Dulles over the nature of authority and the role of dissent, Jesuit theologian Fr. Richard McCormick of the University of Notre Dame came back again at the church's ban on contraception. He argued that it was a wrongheaded application of a sound moral principle: that marriage and procreation should be inseparably linked.

In an interview after the convention, the society's president, Mercy Sr. Margaret Farley, said many members had been distressed by Law's attack. "We hoped that a fuller understanding of the CTSA would be visible, particularly in this convention," she said.

"I worked very hard to make the convention inclusive of the many voices we have in theology and in the church today," Farley said, "so when it was over I think it could not be said that the CTSA only privileges liberals or conservatives. My hope was that we would get beyond those labels by talking together about the substantive questions." Farley said she also made an effort to include people from different age groups. "Ages make a difference in every enterprise today," she said.

Among voices called in was that of Dulles, a theological giant who had chastised the society in the March 17, 1998, issue of the Jesuit magazine America, Although Dulles had not attended the 1996 meeting, he said his concerns were based on the society's annual report of proceedings, which includes major convention talks. Dulles, of Fordham University in New York, is a longtime society member. He received its highest award in 1970.

"Most notoriously," he wrote in America, "the convention had collectively opposed the church's teaching that its ban on ordaining women is irrevocable. A "landslide vote" on the matter, 216 in favor, 22 opposed and 10 abstentions, "was widely, and I believe correctly, interpreted as a dissent not only from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's declaration on the subject but also from the pope's call for definitive adherence to his teaching," Dulles said.

This year, Dulles, a staunch supporter of Pope John Paul II, agreed to debate McCormick, another theological heavyweight and a critic of the pope's centralized approach to church authority. Calling their two-part session "The Nature and Authority of Doctrine: A Search for-Common Ground," the two men set forth their differences over the magisterium's role in formation of doctrine and the appropriateness of dissent. (See accompanying story.)

Noonan, a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth District, and author of several books on doctrinal history, addressed several areas in which church teaching has shifted in response to human experience through time and cultures.

For example, church teaching condemning usury -- lending for interest -- was officially declared sinful in the 12th century and condemned in successive papal bulls. By the 19th century, though, Noonan said, the teaching was gone, buried mainly by "the customs of the market and public finance." Previously condemned "innovations" of theologians in support of lenders had prevailed.