Mater et Magistra

 

Mater et magistra. “Mother and teacher.”

“Mater, si, magistra, non.” That is how William F. Buckley responded to Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et magistra: “Mother, yes; teacher, no.”

In 1961 Mr. Buckley’s clever response to the pope was heresy to most Catholics. That was because he, and most Catholics with him, had a too restrictive view of what a teacher is.

Jesus once said that he alone is the teacher, all the rest of us are learners. A good teacher learns from students—teaching is not a one-way street. That is the principle that Pope Francis tried to get us to accept in his effort to promote “synodality,” which is intended to help church teachers learn from the rest of the church. That was as true of the pope himself as it is of the rest of us.

At least since the 1940’s, when Pope Pius XII began to grapple with new questions arising from scientific knowledge of the human body, the official teaching agents of Catholicism, the “magisterium,” have seemed to feel responsible for issuing definitive statements about the morality of every new scientific advancement. What has happened is that Catholic moral teaching has become less and less persuasive to our fellow seekers of truth, inside and outside of the church boundaries. There is a host of questions where public moral sensitivity has moved away from what the magisterium says ought to be done. 

We believers need to enter into honest dialog with everyone else about such questions. We are all learners.

Twenty-five years ago a Catholic personal friend of mine, Mary Lyndon Shanley, published a book titled Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-sex and Unwed Parents. I was impressed by her approach to the moral issues raised by the list of topics in the subtitle of her book. Our Catholic magisterium has a long list of official statements about all of these issues, but as far as I can tell, few people, and few Catholics, are guided by what the magisterium has said. That leaves faithful Catholics with the choice of being counter-cultural and obeying what the church officially says, or abandoning the official teaching and floating free in an atmosphere without moral guidance.

The same dilemma is at the root of serious political divisions in our country. Because our faith leaders have not engaged in serious dialog with others who do not share our beliefs, one whole segment of the Catholic population has voted for a political party that has abandoned programs designed to alleviate hunger and disease in poorer nations. The Democratic party has used the politics of U.S. Catholic leaders as a reason to banish anyone who considers abortion a moral evil from the party. We are in the middle of a religious war once again, forgetting the past two centuries of peace that arose from the First Amendment of our Constitution and that were re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its decree “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” Dignitatis Humanae.

Catholic moral thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the wider culture surrounding the faith community. Thomas was condemned by the University of Paris because he used Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved from destruction by Muslim scholars.  Surely Pope Leo XIII had that in mind when he wrote in 1879 that Catholics should use Aquinas as a guide for their thinking.