From the Editor's Desk
[Theologians at the end of the seventeenth century] introduced "dogmatic" theology. It is true that the word "dogmatic" had previously applied to theology. But then it was used to denote a distinction from moral, or ethical, or historical theology. Now it was employed in a new sense, in opposition to scholastic theology. It replaced the inquiry of the quaestio by the pedagogy of the thesis. It demoted the quest of faith for understanding to a desirable, but secondary, and indeed, optional goal. It gave basic and central significance to the certitudes of faith, their presuppositions, and their consequences. It owed its mode of proof to Melchior Cano and, as that theologian was also a bishop and inquisitor, so the new dogmatic theology not only proved its theses, but also was supported by the teaching authority and sanctions of the church."
—Bernard Lonergan, "Theology in A New Context"
In the counterreformation era, Roman Catholic theology became "dogmatic" in the negative sense of contrary to Scholastic theology, both Protestant and Catholic; it became restrictive and focused primarily on defining and defending the faith, enlisting reason rather for polemics than the traditional fides quaerens intellectum by which theologians were at liberty respectfully to engage in quaestiones disputatae. Toward the end of the 19th century, pressures escalated due to the excesses of the French Revolution and other European revolutions that severed the long-standing church–state bond, with much loss of life and secularization of church property and ministries such as education. Gregory XVI (Mirari vos) and Pius IX (Quanta cura) condemned the forces of rationalism, skepticism, and liberalism, and Leo XIII (Aeterni Patris) sought to curtail theologians' injudicious engagement of Enlightenment thought by insisting on the use of Thomistic philosophy and theology in all Catholic seminaries and institutions of higher learning.
A century ago this month, Pius X issued the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis defining and condemning Modernism. Scholars in recent decades who have studied the Modernist Crisis have concluded that we not only can but must do better than this—better in how the Church's scholars are treated when their writings are delated, better in fostering an edifying relationship between theologians and those charged with doctrinal oversight. C. J. T. Talar's article in this issue of Theological Studies limns the history of the condemnation and what it has meant for the Church up to the present. At the time of the condemnation, the vast majority of Catholics had no idea what the encyclical was about, let alone who was being condemned, except for a few more notorious figures whose names found their way into newspapers. Indeed, for ecclesiastical overseers, newspapers were a major problem: the invention of the rotary press and lithography during the 19th century made newspapers affordable to the masses and so made control of information and ideas increasingly difficult, if not impossible, thus provoking great anxiety in ecclesiastical overseers.
Much has happened since those days of high anxiety, as the Church lived through the laws of laicization, the expulsion of religious orders, and the increasing secularization of mind and governments. As the centuries turned from the 19th to the 20th, the Church faced a great sea change, or as Hans Küng famously put it, a great paradigm shift from the "Counter-Reformation paradigm"—still largely informed by the "Medieval Roman-Catholic paradigm"—to the "Contemporary-Ecumenical paradigm" that forced the Church into a position of having to negotiate with multiple centers of power and influence. Deprived of the Papal States, the Roman curia retreated into what is little more than a symbolic state, and from there had to learn another way of being church in the modern world (in fact, this is an age-old lesson that accelerated since 1814). The old ways would not die easily. Indeed many of them served the Church well and needed to be preserved despite the changes forced on the Church in the new world order.
The style of negotiation, dialogue, and exhortation that the Church had to adopt in dealing with secular governments was not applied to internal church governance—not until the papacy of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, whose documents, as John O'Malley recently argued (Theological Studies [March 2006]), show a change in style that I see as analogous to that adopted by the Church's diplomacy following the French Revolution. However, as recent processes against prominent theologians have indicated, some of the structures and style of governance ad intra that have resisted change since the Middle Ages (see Peter Hünermann, Herder Korrespondenz 61.4 [2007]) require the same kind of sea change that the Church's style underwent in its relations ad extra.
What such a change might look like is this: Just as the Church in its divorce from the state reconciled itself to dealing with governments not by edict but by dialogue and negotiation (concordats), so the Church in its legitimate and necessary exercise of internal oversight might be much more effective and certainly more just if writings suspected of error were to be openly critiqued, first of all, by the author's peers—in the spirit of Jesus who in Matthew 5:25 urges that differences be reconciled rather on the way to court than in court. Most theologians have witnessed this kind of "fraternal correction" in meetings of professional societies and in published quaestiones disputatae—that time-honored mode of the early Scholastics by which peers respectfully critiqued each others' ideas, thereby facilitating theology's development as a condign aid to the Church's magisterium in the authentic teaching of the faith.
What I am suggesting is merely a retrieval of the Church's great tradition that celebrates reasoned faith—fides et ratio: the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition so opposed to gnosticism, Manicheanism, Catharism, nominalism, Lutheranism (Calvinism?), and Jansenism—and that correlates with the best aspects of Enlightenment (18th C.) and Liberal (19th C.) thought that championed human rights, such as the rights to due process (especially a speedy trial and habeas corpus), to know and confront one's accusers (no secret delations), and to a jury of one's peers. Parliamentary discourse, for all its faults, is based on the notion that argument will achieve an agreed-on "truth." That is also the idea behind quaestiones disputatae—confidence in reason, generously understood in Aquinas's sense.
If Talar's article is one bookend, its twin is just such a quaestio disputata, exemplifying the kind of peer review and confidence in reasoned discourse by which theology most fruitfully develops. Peer reviewing does not eliminate the Church's need for magisterial oversight, but it does show the kind of reviewing that the CDF itself might find more salutary in its official processes. Such an adoption was envisioned by Cardinal Ratzinger himself who, two years after his appointment as prefect of the CDF, intimated in two interviews that procedural changes were needed in that venerable institution (see Herder Korrespondenz 38 [1984] 360–68 and The Ratzinger Report [1985] 18–19, 68–69). Indeed, on June 29, 1997, the CDF published new guidelines. The ensuing dialogue between Ladislas Örsy and Ratzinger about these guidelines (Stimmen der Zeit [June and November 1998, March and June 1999, January and June 2000]) suggests that, while they do not yet completely cohere with contemporary expectations of due process, they are a step in that direction. Authentic development is crucial not only for theology and doctrine but for the CDF as well, if theologians and magisterial overseers are to cooperate in the mission of propagating "good news."
David G. Schultenover, S.J.
Editor in Chief