The leadership of the Church has a responsibility
to demonstrate that
the Church is serious about what she teaches.

Patience with dissenters?

By K.D. Whitehead

n Fr. Avery Dulles, S.J., has concluded that the Church, in the person of her supreme Pastor, Pope John Paul II, has now settled once and for all the issue of female non-ordination to the Catholic priesthood. The Fordham Jesuit believes that "Catholics can and should give the full assent that the pope has called for" to this teaching.

At the same time, recognizing what he calls "the complexity of the theological issues and the inevitability of dissenting views," Fr. Dulles also believes, as he stated in a public lecture at Fordham in April 1996, reprinted in Origins, the Catholic News Service's documentary service, that Church authorities "should be patient with Catholics who feel unable to accept the approved position." "While assuring the integrity of Catholic doctrine," Fr. Dulles declared at the conclusion of his lecture, "the bishops should show understanding for dissenters who exhibit good will and avoid disruptive behavior."

It is an important development, and perhaps even a turning point, that a theologian of such measured and careful views as Fr. Dulles has felt able and perhaps even obliged to state the obvious, namely, that the Church does not have the power to ordain women. If this is true-and it indubitably is true-then it would also seem to be high time for Catholics who have favored female ordination to begin to try to accept this fact. After all, in his 1994 letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Pope John Paul II plainly declared that the Church's inability to ordain women to the sacramental and ministerial priesthood was nothing less than part of "the Church's divine constitution."

The pontiff added that "this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful." It is hard to imagine how the Holy Father could have put it any more clearly or strongly.

That this strong and clear papal statement, impossible to misunderstand, nevertheless did not settle the question in the minds of many Catholics, points to another fact that-again, unfortunately, to state the obvious-many Catholics today no longer accept Church authority. The "cause" is no longer necessarily considered "finished" among many Catholics today just because "Rome has spoken"-or just because Church authority at any level has spoken, for that matter.

In 1995, a little more than a year after the pope himself had spoken "definitively," the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith felt obliged to follow up with yet another statement describing the teaching on the Church's inability to ordain women as having been "infallibly set forth by the ordinary and universal magisterium" (emphasis added).

Yes, the I-word: we sometimes had to wonder it if would ever be invoked again. When the whole project of theological dissent from Church teachings was first launched back in the nineteen-sixties, the claim was regularly made by dissenters and their fellow travelers that dissent from "noninfallible," non-defined teachings was all that would ever be involved. Of course Pope Pius IX had already long since excluded even this type of dissent in his famous 1864 Syllabus of Errors (see #22); but then the point precisely was that the ordinary magisterium was no longer being obligatorily followed. The position was, however, that all Catholics would accept infallibly defined teachings; the dissenters claimed to be loyal Catholics, after all.

So what was the typical reaction from the Church's current educated or knowledge class-the people who have what they themselves call "mature faith," or "adult faith," as contrasted with what they consider the "blind faith" of those who actually believe the Church speaks for Christ-what was the typical reaction of this knowledge class when the CDF came along and stated, in effect, "this is an infallible teaching"?

Why, the typical reaction of the well-informed and sophisticated Catholic was to disagree with that, to dissent from that! It turned out that the I-word did not make any difference at all. America, Commonweal, and the National Catholic Reporter all ran articles and letters questioning whether the teaching really was infallible, whether the CDF was competent to declare it so, whether the bishops of the world really agreed with the pope about it, and so on-demonstrating yet again, it would seem, that the very notion that definitive judgments of the Church's magisterium are supposed to decide or settle anything now belongs among those traditional Church credenda currently in a state of what Cardinal John Henry Newman once called "suspense" (a condition which we may fervently hope is only temporary).

In this turbulent climate, in which Catholic theologians typically assert and exercise the right to say pretty much whatever they please, mostly with impunity, it is a helpful development when a Fr. Avery Dulles has felt able and perhaps even obliged to remind Catholics that, after all, the pope and the bishops finally are the ones who do authoritatively speak for the Church. Who else is stating the obvious in this fashion with any chance of being heard by those who have now become accustomed to today's "private-judgment" Catholicism?

Apparently never a dissenter himself, Fr. Avery Dulles has nevertheless defended the right of theologians to dissent. In one 1986 essay, he did so on the curious grounds that Vatican Council II had sanctioned dissent, "implicitly by its action," he said (he could surely have found no support in any of the Council's sixteen documents for such a view). Vatican II's action in this regard, according to Fr. Dulles, was ratified by the issuance of pastorals in 1967-68 by the hierarchies of both Germany and the United States sanctioning certain types of "licit dissent."

Never mind that the type of theological dissent that has typically been encountered since Humane Vitae in 1968 has rarely, or never, been "licit," even in accordance with the "norms" proposed by the U.S. and German bishops. Rather, the kind of dissent that has typically been encountered has almost always manifested itself as very public, clamorous, and, indeed, absolutist and arrogant. In any case, the whole idea of any "licit dissent" from authoritative teachings obviously became untenable after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in 1990, issued its own Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, effectively excluding any kind of theological dissent as licit, and also in effect overruling the U.S. and German bishops.

Nevertheless, the fact that a Fr. Dulles is now to be found echoing the magisterium's call for positive assent is indeed something new. Fr. Dulles never completely belonged to the modern school of dissenting theologians; at the same time he has never been identified with those orthodox theologians who have correctly understood all along that theological dissent cannot be licit in the Church if the magisterium's claim to be able to teach the truth of Christ unerringly is itself true; no truth at all can be authoritatively taught if it can always "licitly" be dissented from.

Today's typical dissenters have instinctively understood this point by claiming to be a "theological magisterium" over against what they necessarily but erroneously style the "hierarchical magisterium." The truth is, of course, that there isn't any other magisterium in the Church except the hierarchical one.

In this situation, a Fr. Dulles now serves as a reliable windsock or weathervane indicating which way the winds are at long last blowing in the Church: the kind of theological dissent which has held sway, both in theory and in practice, virtually since Humanae Vitae, seems finally to be on the way out.

However, it has hardly disappeared yet. Far from it. It is the near universal current acceptance of the licitness of dissent, at least among educated Catholics, that is surely responsible for the state of affairs where the writers and readers of America, Commonweal, and the National Catholic Reporter, for example, no longer appear to imagine that they have any obligation as Catholics to assent to doctrine authoritatively taught by the Church, as in the case of the Church's inability to ordain women. Believing the faith as the Church proclaims it is evidently no longer considered by them a condition of being Catholic in the full sense; they no longer accept, or perhaps even understand, that the profession of faith, "I believe in the holy Catholic Church," necessarily includes an implicit corollary affirmation: "I believe in what the magisterium of the Church has authentically declared in the name of Christ to be part of the faith that it is incumbent upon Catholics to believe."

Now an Avery Dulles has come along and added his "moderate" voice to the voices hitherto mostly considered "extremist," reminding Catholics, in effect, that Vatican II's Lumen Gentium #25 really did mean what it said all along; it is just that too many Catholics seem to have been more interested in affirming to the exclusion of practically everything else what Gaudium et Spes #1 said instead.

But what about the notion of Fr. Dulles that Church authorities should be "patient" with those who feel unable to accept the fact that the Church is unable to ordain women? Well, he has not recommended anything that has not been pretty much in force in the Church already for approximately the past quarter of a century and more. The fact of the matter is that the patience, indeed the long suffering, of Church authorities in the face of today's open dissent from Church teachings and rulings, including dissent by some in positions where they are taken to be speaking for the Church by the simple fact that they remain where they are without correction, has been far greater than anyone would, antecedently, ever have imagined: Catholic Church authorities over the past generation have been given to patience, precisely, almost to the exclusion of anything else.

Considering how widespread open dissent from the teachings of the Church's magisterium has been, especially since Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, what is striking is how rarely instances of any actual disciplining of anybody have occurred; indeed these instances have almost never occurred unless Rome was behind the initiative, actively and steadily pushing the case in question. The recent mild rebuke to Fr. Richard P. McBrien by the U.S. bishops' Committee on Doctrine, for example, is one of the very few instances anywhere where any action has been taken apart from Rome against dissenting views, and, even then, no sanctions were imposed on the "freedom" of Fr. McBrien.

Virtually since the end of Vatican II, no more than around a dozen cases of public disciplining or censuring of any writings have taken place in the whole Catholic Church worldwide. To cite the names of Hans Küng, Charles Curran, Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Jacques Pohier, O.P., Matthew Fox, O.P., John J. McNeil, S.J., Leonardo Boff, O.F.M., Philip Keane, S.S., Anthony Wilhelm, Eugen Drewermann, Anthony Kosnik, et al., is pretty much to exhaust nearly all such initiatives worldwide over a whole third of a century.

Moreover, in nearly all these cases the penalties have been amazingly mild, especially considering how great the provocations were in at least some of these cases; some of these same people have gone on to greater fame (or notoriety) than the Church could ever have given them. When these names are placed beside those of the many open dissenters from Catholic doctrine who remain today in important positions in the Church, and in Catholic institutions and publications, in spite of their dissent, what must strike the disinterested observer is how mild and lenient Church officials have generally been, and continue to be, in the face of the simply massive dissent and defiance which has characterized the Church internally since Humanae Vitae. What is surprising is that an Avery Dulles could possibly fear any kind of a "crack down." Such a thing does not appear to be on the mind of anyone in authority.

Yet the kind of contemptuous dissent the typical anti-magisterium Catholic exhibits today really seems to preclude the "good will" of which Fr. Dulles speaks; such people are really pretending one thing (i.e., adherence in some sense to the Catholic Church) but doing something else (engaging in words and actions which indicate a necessary non-adherence to the Church as she declares herself to be). In many of these same cases the question of basic honesty further has to be raised: are these people serious about being Catholics, or not?

Again, why is a Fr. Dulles so very concerned about people who have generally been given every benefit of a doubt, along with repeated opportunities to come back and begin to think with the real Church, and so little concerned, apparently, about the harm steadily done to the Body of Christ and the faith of the "little ones" by the continued practice and advocacy of dissent by these same people?

As far as the bishops, the official teachers, are concerned, patience may well be an excellent strategy to follow in the case of the genuine confusion that exists among many Catholics in the pews, especially in the present cultural climate; but it is a deeply deficient approach in the cases of those who have any kind of role in which they are supposed to represent the Church in any official capacity whatever, from theologian or pastor down to volunteer CCD teacher in the classroom. Patience with the anti-Church positions some people have adopted aids and abets them in their basic dishonesty of pretending to be something they are not; and, not incidentally, it also necessarily confuses and disorients the sincere faithful who come into contact with them.

Leaving such people in place so that they can even appear to speak for the Church in any sense whatever already and necessarily constitutes sanctioning "disruptive behavior." Leaving them in place means, precisely, that the integrity of Catholic doctrine is not being upheld, and cannot be upheld, under such circumstances. The outside observer, like the average Catholic in the pew, can only assume in such cases that what dissenters do and say must in some sense be compatible with Catholicism; otherwise they would surely be removed by the authorities of the Church for what they do or say contrary to the mind of the Church.

It is impossible to escape the dilemma: when people are allowed to remain in positions espousing viewpoints that contradict the supreme teaching authority of the Church, the presumption inevitably is that these viewpoints must in some sense be compatible with the Church's viewpoint (or must assume that the Church's position is expected to change). But in the cases of both contraception and female non-ordination, for example, it is now beyond dispute that the Church's teachings on these matters will not change, and, indeed, cannot change. Continuing to favor dissenting positions on these doctrines is therefore incompatible with the profession of faith and with Church membership in the full sense.

Both the Church and dissenters from her teachings on these and other points must ultimately face the implications of this fact. The normal practice of secular organizations in our society in such cases is this: putative company spokesmen who disagree with management are quickly asked to leave. The Church, of course, can go on in practice temporizing over the issue and refusing to recognize that many of her elites apparently do not really believe in some of her doctrines; but this is merely to perpetuate the basic problem, and is an inherently unstable position for any institution to be in.

One of the principal reasons we have a Church today in which so many apparently no longer believe that Church authority ever decides anything authoritatively is that the bishops have already been "patient" with dissenters for so long. People at whatever level in the Church cannot speak for the Church if they are unwilling to accept what the Church says-everything that the Church says authoritatively: that is the point of Church authority.

At some point, it would seem that the leadership of the Church has a responsibility to demonstrate that the Church is serious about what she teaches; this urgently needs to be done for the sake of the "little ones" in the Church, confused by dissent, if for no other reason. Otherwise many people are going to go on not taking what the Church teaches seriously, as, unhappily, seems to be only too widely and obviously the case today.

The sage advice of Fr. Avery Dulles to Church authorities to be patient with dissenters is really a description of the situation we have in fact been living in for roughly the past quarter of a century; to continue in the same mode is simply to perpetuate the confusion and uncertainty of these past years. At what point do we begin to give some thought again to the souls of the dissenters, to say nothing of the souls of those regularly led astray by their dissent? n