Letters

The Catholic Church and radical change

The signs of the times

Sat Aug 27 2022 - 00:12

Sir, – Breda O’Brien asserts (Opinion & Analysis, August 20th) that radical change in church teachings “revolve around clashing and ultimately incompatible visions of the church”. This view is not consistent with the Catholic Church’s own history of doctrinal development and the vision of church as the people of God, as set out in the documents of Vatican II documents. The vision of the “people of God” as a “pilgrim” community is a challenge to the monarchical, authoritarian, judgmental, clerical, rule-oriented church, where Gospel values were often missing in its judgments, in its treatment and exclusion of women and other marginalised groups, in the silencing of theologians and in the edict to not even speak about women priests.

The scandals of the 20th century exposed this model of church and its disconnection from the lived experiences of many who read the Gospel in light of the “signs of the times” (Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes).

The call for radical change is strongly reflected in the submissions by the Irish and other hierarchies to Pope Francis’s synodal project. Is it a surprise that the Vatican II generation seeks a church that is more inclusive, less authoritarian and more humble so that it becomes an authentic model of Christian living?

Those who insist that change never takes place in the Catholic Church ignore developments in teaching. The church did not condemn slavery until the 17th century. Freedom of conscience was condemned in 1832 as “madness” by Pope Gregory XVI. In an encyclical in the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII opposed the equality and participation of citizens in civic and political life. The Pacem in Terris encyclical (1963) of Pope John XXIII completely overturned this teaching.

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The Vatican document on religious freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, of 1965 emphasised the freedom, equality and participation of the person as well as a ”relationality” model that sees people in multiple relationships with God, neighbours, the earth and self.

The church teaching on marriage on the eve of Vatican II was based on the primacy of procreation and a long-standing suspicion of sexual pleasure. Gadium et Spes (1965) placed equal emphasis on the mutual love of the spouses.

When the Catholic Church speaks about economic, global matters, social justice, it engages with experts from other disciplines. For example in the recent encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis engaged with the scientific research on climate change.

We legitimately ask why the same methodology is excluded from sexual teaching? The church’s insistence that homosexuality, according to Pope Benedict, is “objectively disordered, leading to a tendency to evil” is clearly at odds with the scientific community which delisted homosexuality from a list of conditions in 1973.

Theologian, Mary Hunt puts it very well when she says: “The growing biological and social scientific consensus in favour of the broad range of ways in which human beings live out their gender identify undermines the fragile and indefensible sexist and heterosexist anthropology on which the Catholic teaching on human sexuality is based”.

The call for recognition of the equality of women was evident in all submissions. While civic society has recognised women’s right to equality in all areas of life, the Catholic Church has been and continues to be slow to catch up, to even acknowledge the presence of women in Jesus’s ministry and their role in running and supporting the emergent Jesus community in house churches in first-century Palestine.

In the church’s teaching on social and political issues and economics from the time of Rerum Novarum 1891 and climate change Laudato Si the church has followed the call of Vatican II to read the “signs of the times”. The Catholic Church has never stopped developing its teaching; calls to deny these developments fly in the face of its own history. – Yours, etc,

GINA MENZIES,

Churchtown,

Dublin 14.