Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - No few Pastoral Letters, instead of citing the Pope as the touchstone of authenticity or guarantee of the catholicity of a bishop's teaching, name the current popular cardinal, theologian, or layman, even a non believer, or monk, considered authorised interpreters of the official Church teaching. What is more, at times one has the impression that a statement from one of the latter, even if it should deform the Catholic truth, has the same weight as a papal intervention. The same procedure is seen in the ecumenical and interreligious field, where some think that the voice of a Rabbi or an Imam can express the thought of the whole of the Jewish people, or the whole of the Muslim world, but they have no “hierarchy”, and since they are neither priests nor 'bishops', they are only 'private' experts or teachers.
What has happened? Forgetting that Lumen gentium confirmed the Church as the people of God, hierarchically ordered, the Magisterium of the Church constituted by the inseparable and necessary bond between the bishop of a Particular Church and the Supreme Shepherd of the universal Church, is removed or mutely opposed. As if we could possibly conceive a “ local responsibility ” neither strictly dependent on the Supreme Shepherd nor in theological and therefore juridical relationship with him. Historians are of the opinion that this all started in 1968 with protests against the Encyclical Humanae vitae of Paul VI.
Although, thanks to the media, scraps – without rhyme or reason, – of the Pope words, do enter homes, the ordinary faithful have the right, nevertheless to receive from the Bishops, clergy and the lay co-workers of the particular Churches, all of his teaching. Since the times of the Apostles, the Church has 'functioned' thanks to continual teaching, one condition for becoming one in heart and mind. This is traditio or handing on of the faith which comes about mainly in catechesis and in the liturgy, particularly through the homily. Unless the faith is handed on, there can be no reception by the faithful. The paradox we have reached now, is that there is so much talk about the reception of ecumenical documents, while the Petrine Magisterium is silenced, or worse, censured. It is good to remember that the teaching of the bishop is authentic only when it is in effective and affective communion with the teaching of the Pope. Five years after the Council, on 8 December 1970, Paul VI warned against a “ tendency to reconstruct, starting with psychological and sociological data, a Christianity divorced from that interrupted tradition which reconnects it with the faith of the Apostles, and to glorify a Christian life empty of religious elements”.
This sort of phenomenon produces division and counterposition in the Church. Could Catholics have developed Orthodox autocephaly or protestant free will? Would they have us believe in the existence, as in politics, of a diarchy or triarchy between Rome, Constantinople and Moscow? But this has nothing to do with the Catholic principles of ecumenism pronounced by Vatican II.
That attacks on the Church should come from the world is physiological, but that such attacks should come from within the Church itself, is concerning. In actual fact this conditions, at least from the human point of view, the effectiveness of evangelisation. Not rarely when the faithful hear a priest or a bishop preach in a manner which is not in conformity with that of the Pope, they experience the confusion this generates and demand uniformity of teaching! There is opposition and at times scorn in the Church today in the name of the Church of the future, a hermeneutics which also goes one Pope back: today we hear praise of John Paul II from the same people who labelled him as a reactionary and conservative when he was alive.
Disobedience is a sin to be confessed, not least because it ends up causing among the faithful indifference to the Magisterium, as well as confusion and bewilderment. The only secure direction for the boat of the Church, still in our day, is the living Magisterium of the Pope and the bishops in communion with him– we repeat “in communion with him”– this alone can help to form judgement of faith and morals, in order to choose good and reject evil in the light of the truth of Christ. He entrusted Peter with “my sheep”, that is the whole flock. This is Catholic hermeneutics. (Agenzia Fides 22/1/2009)
