Catholicism has always been an intellectual religion. This is not
to say that — heaven forbid — it’s a religion only or especially for
intellectuals, but only that the church has been intensely concerned from the
start to hold, preserve, and share what it believes to be revealed truth about
God and the meaning of life.
No doubt there have been times when this intellectuality has
caused Catholicism to be — or anyway seem to be — too much a religion of the
head and too little a religion of the heart. On the whole, however, insistence
on clear thinking and careful formulations has served the Catholic Church well
and helped make it attractive to many people.
I thought of these things when I heard that Pope Francis in his
reorganization of the Roman Curia was assigning pride of place to
evangelization rather than to doctrine. According to advance accounts, the plan
calls for the merger of two existing evangelization dicasteries (“dicastery” is
Vaticanese for “department”) into a new super dicastery spearheading efforts in
this area.
It hardly needs saying that the pope can reorganize the curia as
he thinks best, just as popes before him have done. Moreover, there’s a good
case for placing evangelization at the top of the new organization chart.
What bothers me is the rationale offered by some Vatican insiders
who claim the shift signals a downgrading not only of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith but of doctrine itself. The controversy over changes in
leadership and program of Rome’s John Paul Institute for Marriage and Family Studies
in order to give it a more “pastoral” character seems to raise similar issues.
According to papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, writing in Commonweal,
the curia plan involves “relegating” CDF. Relegating to what? Ivereigh doesn’t
say, but presumably he means the move places doctrine in a subordinate
position. And why? Because, he says, citing a draft, the church’s “primary
task” isn’t teaching doctrine but “offering the kerygma, or the Good News of
Jesus Christ’s saving love.”
This is confused. If I may expand a bit on Ivereigh’s version,
the Good News lies in the fact that in and through Our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ, crucified and risen — and only in and through him — we are redeemed.
That is the “Good News of Jesus Christ’s saving love.” And it is immeasurably
rich in doctrinal content.
The importance of the doctrinal truth at the heart of the
Christian message runs throughout the New Testament. For instance: the Letter
to the Ephesians urges Christians not to be like children “tossed back and
forth and carried about with every wind of doctrine“ (Eph 4:13-15); the Letter
to the Hebrews tells readers, “Do not be led away by various and strange
doctrines” (Heb 13:9). Texts could be multiplied, but the point is clear:
orthodox doctrine matters.
In that Magna Carta of contemporary Catholic evangelization “Evangelii Nuntiandi,” published in 1975, Pope St. Paul
VI conceded that evangelization “does not consist only of the preaching and
teaching of a doctrine.” But he also insisted that “catechetical instruction”
is a tool of evangelization that “must not be neglected.”
“The intelligence … needs to learn through systematic religious
instruction the fundamental teachings, the living content of the truth which
God has wished to convey to us and which the church has sought to express in an
ever richer fashion during the course of her long history,” he wrote.
As yet another reorganization of the Roman Curia approaches,
there should be no downgrading of that.
Shaw writes from Washington.