When a pope apologizes

April 16, 2010

          Every time I pass a certain house on Lind Street in Quincy, I think of the time when a group of students living there were arrested for throwing a dog off the bridge into the Mississippi River at Quincy. They were drunk, which of course was no excuse.

          But then I think of a story my father told, more than once. When he was young, probably around 1915, he used to “fire boilers” at the Dominican Sisters’ convent in Springfield, Illinois. A sister there befriended stray cats. The cats became a nuisance. So my dad would shoot the cats and throw the corpses into the boiler. Telling the story years later, he would end by laughingly quoting the sister, “I can’t imagine what is becoming of my cats.” He was proud of his ingenuity.

          Our sense of what is morally acceptable changes. One generation sees no problem with shooting cats (or drowning them in a sack, which was another common custom). A later generation arrests you for doing it.

          There are far more serious changes in history. For centuries, church authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, regarded charging interest on loans as immoral (the practice was called “usury”). For centuries, Catholic church leaders defended the institution of slavery as morally acceptable. After all, didn’t the apostle Paul write a letter to Philemon telling him to take back a runaway slave? Paul didn’t question the institution of slavery itself.

          A Latin quotation from my seminary days comes to mind (courses were taught in Latin back then): “In processione generationis humanae, semper crescit notitia veritatis.” “In the course of human history, the knowledge of truth continually expands.” The quotation is from the Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. It would be hard to find a stronger affirmation of what might be called “evolution” in human thought.

          Catholic theology is in a bind again, just as it was in the days when it had trouble with usury and slavery. Today it is dogma about contraception, stem cell research, and homosexual behavior.

          Today the bind is worse. Before 1871, the evolution of Church teaching was accepted. Change was usually controversial, especially when politics or economics were involved (as it was both regarding usury and slavery), but the change eventually came about. But in 1871 the First Vatican Council declared that the pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on issues of faith and morals. That locked the Catholic Church into a position as untenable as the ancient custom of the Persians, who, according to the biblical book of Esther, regarded any decree of the king as unchangeable.

          The position didn’t look untenable when the Council bishops passed it, though two American bishops left the Council rather than vote in favor of it. (One of the bishops was from Little Rock, Arkansas. The joke was “the Little Rock met the Big Rock.”) Probably the other bishops regarded the move as a gracious gesture of support for the aging Pius IX, who was in the middle of the trauma of losing control of the Papal States.

          Statements ex cathedra (“from the chair”) are so rare that there have been only two since 1800: the declarations by Pius IX and Pius XII regarding Mary’s immaculate conception and assumption into heaven. The problem is that Roman authorities have not been able to resist the temptation to throw the cloak of infallibility over everything else that they put into the mouth of the pope.

          Pope John Paul II seems to have done everything in his power to undercut the concept of infallibility. The author Luigi Accattoli, in his book When a Pope Asks Forgiveness: The Mea Culpa's of John Paul II, counted, as of 1998, 94 times when John Paul apologized for something one of his predecessors did. The condemnation of Galileo was the most famous case. Yet John Paul II never took the implied step of saying that the doctrine of infallibility is untenable.

          Catholic moral practice, in the U.S. at least, is moving inexorably away from the official positions of the papacy. Judging from the birth rate among Catholics, the practice of contraception is not seen as immoral. A small group of conservative Catholics use this as an example of how the Church has sold out to secularism and modernity, but I know all kinds of adult Catholics who take their faith very seriously, make great sacrifices to make their faith real in their everyday lives, but never talk about contraception. Neither do most priests.

          Homosexual behavior, stem cell research, and artificial nutrition and hydration are issues where Catholic doctrine is slowly losing credibility. This is sad, because a Catholic sensibility has much to say about those issues. Instead, we are asked to keep silent about the ideas and go to war about the politics.

          There is a fine line between “selling out to secularism” and “dialogue with the culture.” We Catholics cannot ignore that line.