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Msgr. Gherardini on the importance and the limits of the authentic
Magisterium
Source:
Disputationes Theologicae, December 7, 2011
The great 50th
anniversary celebration has begun. There is no media drumbeat yet, but
you notice it in the air. The 50th anniversary of
Vatican II will uncork the most effervescent
superlatives that can be devised in its eulogistic judgments. Not a
shadow of the sober attitude that had been requested, as a moment of
reflection and
analysis for a more critically in-depth evaluation of the conciliar
event. They have already started the free-wheeling
statements and repetitions of what has been said and repeated for 50
years: Vatican II is the culminating point of Tradition and the very
synthesis thereof. International conferences on the largest and most
significant of all Ecumenical Councils are already scheduled; others,
of greater or lesser importance, will be organized along the way. And
the commentary on the subject is becoming more plentiful from day to
day. L’Osservatore Romano, obviously, is doing its part and is
harping especially on the adherence owed to the Magisterium (Italian
edition, December 2, 2011, p. 6):
Vatican II is an
act of the Magisterium, therefore…. The argument advanced is that
every act of the Magisterium is to be accepted as coming from the
Pastors who, by reason of apostolic succession, speak with the
charism of truth (DV [Dignitatis Humanae] 8), with the
authority of Christ (LG [Lumen Gentium] 25), in the light of
the Holy Ghost (ibid.).
Aside from the fact
that this just proves the magisterial authority of Vatican II with the
documents of Vatican II, which at one time was called petitio
principii [begging the question], it seems evident that this way
of proceeding starts from the premise that the Magisterium is
absolute, a subject independent of everything and everyone, except
apostolic succession and the help of the Holy Ghost. Now although
apostolic succession guarantees the legitimacy of Holy Orders, it
appears difficult to establish a criterion that guarantees the
intervention of the Holy Ghost, within the parameters being discussed
here.
One thing,
nevertheless, is indisputable: nothing in the world, the container
of created things, has the gift of absoluteness. Everything is in
flux, in a circuit of reciprocal interdependencies, and therefore
everything is contingent, everything has a beginning and will have an
end: “Mutantur enim,” the great Augustine used to say, “ergo
creata sunt.” [“For they change, and therefore they are created.”]
The Church is no exception, not her Tradition, not her Magisterium. It
is a matter of sublime realities at the top of the scale of all
creaturely values, endowed with dizzying qualities, but always
penultimate realities. The eschaton, the final reality, is
God and Him alone. Commentators often resort to language that turns
this factual datum on its head and attributes to those sublime
realities an importance and a significance above and beyond their
limitations; in other words, they absolutize them. The result is that
this deprives them of their ontological status and makes them into an
unreal presupposition; in that same process they also lose the sublime
greatness of their penultimate reality.
Immersed in the
Trinitarian moment of her design, the Church exists and operates in
time as the sacrament of salvation. The theandric character that
makes her a mysterious continuation of Christ is not disputed, nor her
constitutive properties (unity, holiness, catholicity, and
apostolicity), nor her structure and service, but all this is still
within a this-worldly reality that is enabled to mediate the divine
presence sacramentally, but always as a reality of this world, which
by definition, therefore, excludes the absolute.
At any rate, she is
identified in her Tradition, from which she draws continuity with
herself, to which she owes her life’s breath, from which she derives
the certainty that her yesterday always becomes today so as to prepare
for her tomorrow. Tradition, therefore, gives her the interior
movement that impels her toward the future, while safeguarding her
present and past. But not even Tradition is an absolute: it began with
the Church and will end with her. God alone remains.
The Church
exercises real quality control over Tradition:
a discernment that distinguishes what is authentic from what is not.
She does so with an instrument that never lacks “the charism of
truth”, provided that she does not let the temptation of the
absolute lead her astray. This instrument is the Magisterium, the
office-holders of which are the pope, as the successor of the first
pope, the apostle St. Peter, in the See of Rome, and the bishops as
successors of the Twelve in their ministry or service to the Church,
or in a local expression thereof. It is superfluous to recall the
usual distinctions—the Magisterium, whether of an Ecumenical Council
or of the pope, is solemn when one or the other defines truths
pertaining to faith and morals; it is ordinary if it is of the
pope in his specific activity or of the bishops as a whole and in
communion with the pope. It is much more important to define more
precisely the limits within which the Magisterium is guaranteed to
have “the charism of truth”.
It must be said first of all that the
Magisterium is not a super-Church that
imposes judgments and guidelines on the Church itself; nor is it a
privileged caste above the people of God, a sort of powerful
authority that you have to obey and that’s that. It is a service,
a diakonia. But also a task to be carried out, a munus,
specifically the munus docendi [teaching office] that cannot
and must not place itself above the Church from which and through
which it comes into existence and operates. From the subjective point
of view, it coincides with the teaching Church, the pope and
the bishops united with the pope, insofar as she officially proposes
the Faith. From the operative point of view, it is the instrument with
which this function is carried out.
Too often, however,
the instrument is regarded as a value in itself, and appeals
are made to it in order to nip any discussion in the bud, as though
this instrument were above the Church and as though it were not
confronted with the enormous mass of Tradition that it must receive,
interpret and hand on in its integrity and fidelity. And this is
exactly where its limits become evident, which safeguard it from the
danger of elephantiasis and from the absolutist temptation.
There is no reason
to dwell on the first of these limits, apostolic succession. It should
not be difficult for anyone to prove, case by case, the legitimacy and
hence the continuous succession in the ownership of the charism
belonging to the Apostles. On the other hand, a word must be said
about the second, the help of the Holy Ghost. The hasty reasoning
prevalent today goes more or less as follows: Christ promised the
Apostles, and hence their successors (in other words the teaching
Church), that He would send them the Holy Ghost to help them exercise
the munus docendi in truth; error is therefore averted from the
outset. Yes, Christ did make such a promise, but He also indicated the
conditions for its fulfillment. However, a serious distortion can be
glimpsed precisely in the manner in which appeals are made to this
promise: either the words of Christ are not reported, or else when
they are cited a different meaning is given to them. Let us see what
this is about.
The promise is
recorded above all in two passages from the fourth Gospel: John 14:16,
26 and 16:13-14. Even in the first passage, one of the aforementioned
limits resounds with the utmost clarity: indeed, Jesus does not stop
at the promise of “the Spirit of the truth”—note the
underlined words, a translation required by the Greek definite article
της, which previously and further on continues to be translated of,
as though truth were an optional attribute of the Holy Ghost, whereas
He personifies it—but declares in advance His function: He will recall
to mind all that He, Jesus, had taught before. It is a matter,
therefore, of help in preserving revealed truth, not of combining it
with other or different truths, or truths that are
presumed to be revealed.
The second of these
two Johannine passages, confirming the first, goes into detail and
makes further clarifications: the Holy Ghost, indeed, “will guide
you into all the truth”, even the truth about which Jesus is
silent now because it is above and beyond the capacity of His
disciples (16:12). In doing this, the Spirit “will not speak on His
own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak… He will take what
is mine and declare it to you.” Therefore there will be no further
revelations. The one revelation concludes with the men to whom Jesus
is now speaking. His words are presented with an unambiguous meaning
that pertains to the teaching imparted by Him and only to that
teaching. This is not cryptic or code language; it is as clear as day.
An objection could be raised about the prospect of apparent novelty in
relation to what Jesus does not say now but the Holy Ghost will
announce later; but the restriction of His help to an action of
guidance toward the possession of all the truth revealed by Christ
excludes substantial novelties. If novelties do emerge, it will be a
matter of new senses and not of new truths; hence the very appropriate
expression “eodem sensu eademque sententia” [“in the same
sense and with the same meaning”] of St. Vincent of Lerins. In
short, the pretense of attributing to the help of the Holy Ghost every
rustling of a leaf, in other words, every novelty, and in particular
those that measure the Church by the standards of the prevailing
culture and of the so-called dignity of the human person, is not only
an overturning of the very structure of the Church, but also a big X
crossing out the two Scripture passages mentioned above.
And that is not
all. The limit of a magisterial intervention is in its technical
formulation as well. In order for it to be truly magisterial, whether
or not it defines a dogma, the intervention must resort to a formula
that is henceforth rendered valid, which makes clear, without any
uncertainty whatsoever, the intention to speak as “Pastor and
Teacher of all Christians in a matter of Faith and Morals, by virtue
of our apostolic Authority,” if the pope is the one speaking; or
makes clear with equal certainty, for example in the case of an
Ecumenical Council, through the customary formulas of dogmatic
assertion, the intention of the Council Fathers to connect the
Christian Faith with Divine Revelation and its uninterrupted
transmission. In the absence of such conditions, one can speak about
the Magisterium only in a broad sense: not every written or spoken
word of the pope is necessarily magisterial; and the same should be
said for Ecumenical Councils, quite a few of which either spoke not at
all about dogma or else not exclusively; sometimes they grafted the
dogma onto a context of internal diatribes and personal or partisan
disputes, which rendered absurd their magisterial claim within said
context. Even today we get a distinctly negative impression from an
Ecumenical Council of indisputable dogmatic and Christological
importance like the Council of Chalcedon, which spent most of its time
in a shameful struggle over personalities and who takes precedence,
over deposing some and rehabilitating others; dogma is not found in
that Chalcedon. Nor is it dogma when the pope, speaking as a private
person [in the book-length interview Light of the World],
declares that “Paul did not see the
Church as an institution, as organization, but as a living organism,
in which everyone works for the other and with the other, being united
on the basis of Christ.” Exactly
the opposite is true, and it is well known that the first
institutional form was structured by Paul as a pyramid precisely in
order to foster the living organism: the apostle at the top, then the
episkopoi-presbyteroi, the hegoumenoi, the
proistamenoi, the nouthetountes and diakonoi
[bishops, priests, leaders, superiors, advisors and deacons]. These
distinctions among responsibilities and offices are not yet defined
exactly, but they are already distinctions within an institutionalized
organism. In this case too, it should be quite clear, the Christian’s
attitude is one of respect and, at least in principle, also of
adherence. If however the conscience of an individual believer finds
it impossible to approve of a statement such as the one presented
above, this does not involve rebellion against the pope or the denial
of his magisterial authority: it only means that that statement is not
magisterial.
Now, in conclusion,
our discussion returns to Vatican II, so as to make, if possible, a
definitive statement about whether or not it is part of Tradition and
about its magisterial quality. There is no question about the latter,
and those laudatores [eulogizers] who for a good 50 years have
tirelessly upheld the magisterial identity of Vatican II have been
wasting their time and ours: no one denies it. Given their
uncritically exuberant statements, however, a problem arises as to the
quality: what sort of Magisterium are we talking about? The article in
L’Osservatore Romano to which I referred at the outset speaks
about doctrinal Magisterium: and who has ever denied it? Even a purely
pastoral statement can be doctrinal, in the sense of pertaining to a
given doctrine. If someone were to say doctrinal in the sense
of dogmatic, however, he would be wrong: no dogma is proclaimed
by Vatican II. If it has some dogmatic value also, it does so
indirectly in passages where it refers back to previously defined
dogmas. Its Magisterium, in short, as has been said over and over
again to anyone who has ears to hear it, is a solemn and
supreme Magisterium.
More problematic is
its continuity with Tradition, not because it did not declare such a
continuity, but because, especially in those key points where it was
necessary for this continuity to be evident, the declaration has
remained unproven.
Published by
Disputationes Theologicae
English translation of Italian original by Michael J. Miller |
