TOWARD A

CATHOLIC  CONSTITUTION

LEONARD SWIDLER

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. THE COPERNICAN TURN OF VATICAN II

II. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD THIS WORLD

1. Historical Background

2. Liberation Theologies

III. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD DIALOGUE

1. Catholic Commitment to Dialogue

2. A Radically New Age

3. The Age of Global Dialogue

4. Conclusion

IV. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD HISTORY: A NEW FREEDOM

1. The Nature of Historical Knowledge

2. Impact on the Church of the New Sense of History

V. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD FREEDOM

1. Freedom and Unfreedom

2. Freedom and Responsibility

VI. THE VATICAN II ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY AND FREEDOM

1. Responsibilities of the Historian and the Catholic

2. Special Catholic Temptations

3. Special Catholic Tasks

4. Freedom and Its Lack in Catholic History

VII. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE

1. Relationship Between Religious Freedom and Religious Dialogue

2. Vatican Council I

3. Anti-Dialogue: The Shouting Down of Archbishop Strossmayer

4. Pro-Dialogue: Vatican Council II

5. Religious Freedom Within the Catholic Church

6. Inner-Church Reform, Freedom, and Dialogue Interrelated

VIII. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND CATHOLIC CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS

1. From Illicit Religion to Union of Church and State

2. "Liberal Catholicism" and Papal Reaction

3. Pope Pius IX and His "Syllabus of Errors"

4. "Thesis-Hypothesis"

5. The Liberals Continue the Struggle

IX. DOCTRINAL AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM IN THE CHURCH

1. Scripture-Tradition-Magisterium

2. Emergence of the Magisterium

3. Papal Teaching Not Developed, But Reversed

4. Ecumenical Councils Not Developed But Reversed

5. A Problem for Catholics: Doctrine and History

6. A Distinction Between the Contingent and Continuous

7. No "Universal Pope" in Catholic History

8. Evolution and Revolution

X. THE TURN TOWARD INNER-CHURCH REFORM

1. Historical Development of Catholic Church Authority Structures

2. Vatican II and Subsequent Interpretations of Collegiality

XI. CHURCH REFORM: VATICAN II AND AFTERMATH

1. Mandate for Church Renewal

2. First Slowing of Reform

3. Pope John Paul II and Restorationism

4. Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church-ARCC

5. Restorationism Continues

XII. THE MATURATION OF AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

XIII. EUROPEAN CHURCH RENEWAL MOVEMENTS

XIV. A "CALL FOR A CATHOLIC CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION"

XV. DEMOCRACY IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

1. Church Structures in Early Christianity

2. Election of Leaders

3. Participatory Decision-making

4. Limited Term of Office

5. Separation of Powers

6. Dialogue-The Means to Mutual Understanding and Creative Decisions

7. Summary

XVI. SUGGESTIONS OF INTERMEDIATE STEPS TO BE TAKEN

A. Structures for Decision-making and Due Process

B. The Status of Women

XVII. SUGGESTIONS FOR THE CATHOLIC CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

A. Considerations of a Catholic Constitutional Convention Committee

B. Suggestions Concerning a Catholic Constitution

XVIII. CONCLUSION

XIX. A PROPOSED CATHOLIC CONSTITUTION

XX. APPENDIX: SAMPLE PARISH AND DIOCESE CONSTITUTIONS

TOWARD A CATHOLIC CONSTITUTION

INTRODUCTION

A Constitution for the Catholic Church?  An oxymoron!?  No, not only is there no inherent contradiction in the idea of a Constitution for the Catholic Church, there have in fact been many elements of a Constitution in the history of the Catholic Church. Further, there are even substantial portions of a written Constitution which are now part of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. However, that written partial Constitution is not complete, nor is it as democratic or responsibility-sharing as many of the past governance structures of the Catholic Church. Flowing from the vision projected and the energies released at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) is a movement toward the completion of the task of writing, adopting and living a Constitution in the Catholic Church that is both in the spirit of Jesus’ Gospel of liberation and love and adaptive of the most mature governance principles available at the edge of the Third Millennium.

After a period of deep depression in the 1980s, concern for Catholic Church renewal and needed structural reform in the spirit of Vatican II is beginning once again to swell on the grass-roots level both in North America and Europe. This is not a revolutionary wave like the one which poured forth from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, nor is it an enthusiastic wave like the one which sprang from the dam-burst-like release after Vatican Council II. It is a much more sober, chastened swell which on the one hand has no illusions that the situation in the Church will be quickly and radically transformed, but on the other hand so treasures values in Catholicism that energies are being re-committed to making those values truly available to a society living now at the edge of the Third Millennium, and beyond. Moreover, those energies are today being expended in increasingly "savvy" and coordinated ways.

In these pages I will sketch briefly a picture of the  revolutionary "Five Copernican Turns" which took place at Vatican II and its immediate aftermath, the subsequent slump into restorationism and resignation, then the current re-energized church-renewal movement, focussing on how it developed, what it looks like now, and what it is trying to accomplish. Concerning the latter I will also be at some pains to provide the justifications offered by its participants. My final section will deal with the effort to "re-democratize" the Church-for the ancient Church was for many a "limited democracy”-climaxing in the call for a “Catholic Constitutional Convention” to usher in the Third Millennium after the birth of Jesus.

I. THE COPERNICAN TURN OF VATICAN II

The 1960s were a momentous turning-point decade for the world: 1) American Catholics broke out of their ghetto in the election of President Kennedy; 2) the American civil rights movement began a transformation of the Western psyche; 3) the anti-war, environmentalist, anti-Establishment and related movements in the West brought the transformation to a fever pitch; 4) through Vatican Council II the Catholic Church leapt into modernity, and edged even beyond.

The Copernican turn that occurred in the Catholic Church at Vatican II took place in five major ways:

(1) The Turn Toward This World

Until very recently the term “salvation” was understood exclusively to mean going to heaven after death; its root meaning from salus, of a “full, healthy life,” was largely lost in Christianity after the third century¹. Marx was not far from the mark when he claimed that Christianity (and religion in general) was mainly concerned about “pie in the sky bye and bye.”  But that focus shifted radically with Vatican II, especially as reflected in the document “The Church in the Modern World,” which in effect, though without the name, launched Liberation Theology.

(2) The Turn Toward Dialogue

Far too often religion has held men and women back from their neighbor in their deepest dimension, their religious dimension, because their religion was different. There are still many Catholics and Protestants who hate each other, many Christians who hate Jews, many Christians and Jews who hate Muslims—religiously. When this happens, religion, including Christianity, becomes an enslaving force; religion-Christianity-becomes the anti-Christ, for the truth of Christ should make women and men free and open to all men and women, to all reality, to all paths to God.

At Vatican II Catholics were taught-especially in the “Constitution on the Church,” the “Declaration on Religious Liberty,” the “Decree on Ecumenism” and the “Declaration on the Relationship with Non-Christian Religions”-that to be authentically Christian, Christians must cease being enslaved by their tribal forms of Christianity; they must stop their fratricidal hate; they need to recall their Jewish roots and the fact that the Jewish people today are still God’s chosen people, for God’s promises are never revoked; they need to turn from their imperialistic convert-making among Muslims, Hindus, and other religious peoples and turn toward bearing witness to Jesus Christ by their lives and words, toward helping the Muslims be better Muslims and the Hindus better Hindus. This will make Christians love their own liberating tradi­tions not less, but more, for these traditions will then be even more fully Christian.

Nowhere was this proclaimed more forcefully than in the Vatican Document Humanae personae dignitatem:

Doctrinal discussion requires recognizing the truth everywhere, even if truth demolishes one so that one is forced to reconsider one’s own position, in theory and in practice, at least in part....in discussion the truth will prevail by no other means than by the truth itself. Therefore the liberty of the participants must be ensured by law and reverenced in practice.²

(3) The Turn Toward the Historical/Dynamic

For centuries the thinking of official Catholicism was dominated by a static understanding of reality; it resisted not only the democratic and human rights movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also the growing historical, dynamic way of understanding the world, including religious thought.

That changed dramatically with Vatican II where the historical, dynamic view of reality and doctrine was officially fully embraced (unfortunately the present leadership largely resists this, and the other, Copernican turns of the Council).³

(4) The Turn Toward Freedom

The image Catholicism projected at the end of the 1950s was of a giant monolith, a community of hundreds of millions who held obedience in both action and thought as the highest virtue. If the pope said, “have babies,” Catholics had babies; if he said, “don’t associate with Protestants and Jews,” Catholics avoided them like the plague; if he said, “believe in papal infallibility, in Marian dogmas,” they believed. For a hundred years-but really not much more than that!-Catholics were treated like children in the Church, acted like children, and thought of themselves as children.

With the Second Vatican Council, however, this very unfree image, and reality, was utterly transformed. Suddenly it seemed humanity, including Catholics, became aware of their “coming of age,” hence, their freedom and responsibility. This was clearly expressed in many places, but perhaps nowhere clearer than in the “Declaration on Religious Liberty.”

(5) The Turn Toward Inner-Church Reform

Since the sixteenth century, inside the Catholic Church even the word “reform” was forbidden, to say nothing of the reality (there were periods of notable exception,⁴ but they were largely obliterated-even from our church history textbooks!). At the beginning of the twentieth century Pope Pius X, leapfrogging back to his prior predecessor, Pope Pius IX launched the heresy-hunting Inquisition of Anti-Modernism, crushing all creative thought in Catholicism for decades. In the middle of the twentieth century, leading theologians were again censured and silenced (e.g., Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John Courtney Murray, Karl Rahner).

But Pope Saint John XXIII (so canonized by the traditional method of popular acclamation by the ASSOCIATION FOR THE RIGHTS OF CATHOLICS IN THE CHURCH-ARCC) burst those binding chains and called the Second Vatican Council. He spoke about “throwing open the windows of the Vatican” to let in fresh thought, about “Aggiornamento,” bringing the Church “up to date.”

Indeed, the Vatican II documents even used that neuralgic word “reformation”: “Christ summons the Church, as she goes her pilgrim way, to that continual reformation of which she always has need”; “ALL [Catholics] are led to..., wherever necessary, undertake with vigor the task of renewal and reform,” and insisted that ALL Catholics’ “primary duty is to make an honest and careful appraisal of whatever needs to be renewed and achieved in the Catholic household itself” (Decree on Ecumenism).

II. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD THIS WORLD

1. Historical Background

As noted, with Vatican II there was a decided Copernican “turn toward this world,” a renewing of the effort to overcome the destructive dualism that has plagued Christianity (and many other religions) from the very first century. During the Middle Ages the Church was very much involved in this world, with bishops and abbots being secular as well as spiritual princes. However, in many ways even the concern for the neighbor’s physical wellbeing of the medieval feudal world which the Church helped construct began to turn inward as that feudal world gave way to modernity.

Even during the feudal period, however, efforts to help disadvantaged human beings were pretty much done on a remedial individualistic basis. “Charitable” institutions were founded -actually in quite extraordinary richness. The situation began to change drastically, however, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in England in the late eighteenth century and elsewhere in Europe and America starting in the nineteenth century: the old guild and feudal systems no longer functioned for the increasing millions caught in the transfer of populations to the cities. Whereas most people had died quite young and a much smaller population lived in relative social and geographical stability before the nineteenth century, suddenly a massive and exploding population problem burst upon the world for which either civil society nor religion was prepared. Individual acts of charity and charitable institutions were increasingly swamped in the growing flood of social misery that rose as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wore on.

 At the same time the structures of society and their workings were being studied. Plans on how to shape and re-shape those structures were laid and tested, adjusted and re-tested. Such awareness, planning and action also took place within Western religions. One need only remember the large number of Jews involved in the history of socialism (starting with Marx) and the labor movement, including Jewish social-justice orga­nizations from the Jüdischer Bund to Israeli Kibbutzim. Christian socialism started in England with people like Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) and in Germany with people like Bishop Wilhelm von Ketteler (1811-1877); in France religious social justice work was led by activists like Count Albert de Mun (1841-1914), Count René de la Tour du Pin (1834-1925) and Marc Sagnier (1873-1950); in America there were Terence Powderley (1849-1924) and the Knights of Labor, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) and his highly influential “Social Gospel” message. Even the popes moved in this direction: Leo XIII issued the first papal social encyclical Rerum novarum in 1893, followed by Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno in 1933, John XXIII’s Pacem in terris (1963) and Paul VI’s Populorum progressio (1968).

The most recent developments include European Political Theology, Latin American Liberation Theology, North American Black Theology and Feminist Theology and Korean Minjung or People’s Theology. Around the globe Christian churches spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on social justice issues, a significant portion of which is aimed at changing the structures of society to benefit more people. The notion is spreading among Christians that the mission of the Church is to preach the Good News of the Gospel to all humanity, not just quantita­tively in terms of individual persons, but also qualitatively in terms of every portion of the human beings-and the human patterns one lives in are an essential part of one’s humanity.

2. Liberation Theologies

Paul Knitter has persuasively pointed out that there are four contemporary critical areas in desperate need of global liberation (1. physical suffering, 2. socio-economic oppression, 3. nuclear holocaust and 4. ecological catastrophe) which must be addressed by all religions (and ideologies) if they are to have any credibility in any sphere in the future. In fact, as he pointed out, the major religions of the world are, to a greater or lesser extent, beginning to address those issues, and partly consequently are also entering into cooperation on them. Without a doubt, the growing awareness of these global threats provides a basis, indeed, an impulse, even a compulsion, for the religions and ideologies to enter into dialogue and cooperation.

Thus, it is increasingly clear that their are patterns of injustice that need to be changed, that the structures of unjust dominance must be unmasked and dismantled wherever they are to be found, and that demands a constant searching within and without. But, at the same time, there is also an increasing awareness that it is not possible for the “haves” in a material sense to eliminate the material poverty of the “have-nots” simply by “external” changes, such as by modifying the social structures, or heavier taxes, or lowering their own material standard of living. Some, or perhaps even all of these and more, are seen to be doubtless necessary, but not sufficient.

Liberation Theology has spoken movingly of a “preferential option for the poor.”  Nevertheless, it is not mainly in the direction of “giving up things” on the part of the “haves” that the “poor,” and  other “non-persons,” will be liberated, but rather in the direction of doing more, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We have learned in the last two centuries that material wealth is not limited, static; it is essentially linked with “spiritual wealth,” with mental creativity, which is dynamic, unending. It is essentially, though not only, this latter, spiritual wealth, that needs to be expanded, shared; the former, material wealth, will then follow. This lesson is being learned today, the hard way, by former Marxist countries, such as Hungary: “Our existing socialism had to realise that structural changes either in the economy or in the very society itself do not involve automatic changes in the mentality of the people.”⁵

I would like to suggest that the “Other” toward whom our “altruistic” ethical action should reach might be named not the poor, but simply, the oppressed, the unfree, in any dimension-and who is completely free?  Logic, of course, also directs that those in greatest need should receive the greatest attention, but it likewise directs that each person should contribute according to her/his gifts, and in a preeminent, though not exclusive, way to those before them now in need, whether that need be material, spiritual, social, esthetic, or whatever: producing good material things both for the well-to-do as well as the poor, teaching both the poor as well as the well-to-do, making democracy work better both for the well-to-do as well as the poor, creating beauty both for the poor as well as the well-to-do.

In the U.S., for example, the material poverty of the 30 million “poor” must be eradicated, but at the same time the various spiritual poverties of the 220 million “well-to-do” must likewise be diminished. This “preferential option for the unfree” in no way rules out the “preferential option for the poor.”  Rather, it includes it-in eminent fashion-but expands it.

It seems to me that the question of timing is also all-important. Both Christianity (as well as other religions) and Marxism have in practice far too often sacrificed the present generation to both the past and the future. Because of its age, Christianity has been much more guilty than Marxism of sacrificing the present to the past, but both have been equally guilty of sacrificing the present to the future:  Christians have often been taught to accept their lot as God’s will, not to try to change the social structure of things but to look forward to a future reward. Populations in Marxist countries have often been told that they ought not try to change the economic order of things but to give up “consumer goods,” so future generations could benefit from their development of “heavy industry”-leading to their economic and political collapse for neither consumer goods nor heavy industry were adequately developed.

Here again, former Marxist Hungary has been learning this lesson the hard way-but it is learning it!:

What is more, individual persons are not only citizens to be governed, but also autonomous living beings with specific needs and rights. Their basic needs and rights cannot be neglected for a long period without considerable damage even to society, and in consequence to the state....The socialist system in Hungary aimed to achieve social justice....But in the recent past the fact had to be faced and acknowledged that a new type of poverty emerged:...in the financial sense...in a moral and human sense...”⁶

Each person, each society must find the delicate balance whereby the past is properly appreciated and reverenced, the future responsibly cared for, and the present lived as fully and intensely as possible, now.

Without diminishing in the least the burning need for the “haves” of this world, largely, though by no means only, Christians and Jews-or in short, the “First World”-to move out from its amour propre to a commitment to socio-economic liberation, I believe it is also important for all to remember that until very modern times life for the vast majority (that is, in the magnitude of 90%!) of the people of the world was, as Thomas Hobbes said, “short, nasty and brutish.”  It is only with the advances of the West in science, medicine, economics and social/political structures that there could even be a Third World as differentiated from the First World. In many ways much of the “Second World,” that is, the Communist World, was really Third World in its economic and socio/political underdevelopment, which it too is now admitting and beginning to try to overcome. Until modern times the whole world was what we today call Third World.

Hence, it doesn’t make sense to accuse the present First World of having created the Third World. What does make sense is to call the First World to move from its, appropriate, indeed necessary, prior love of self to its appropriate, indeed necessary, continuance of the act of love to the Other. For, not only can I not love my neighbor if I do not love myself, I also cannot truly love myself if I do not also love my neighbor. In fact, I become an “I” only in encounter with the Other. In the social, economic, political spheres that means that the First World must strive to “do onto others as it would have them do unto it,” that is, cease policies and practices that worsen or continue the underdevelopment of the Third World, but rather, facilitate an ever more human social, economic, political reality for it, and thereby also for itself.

Perhaps another way to express the needed integration of the several essential elements of the Catholic “turn toward this world” can be found in the changeling child of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions. Surprising as it may be to many Catholics, the slogan of the French Revolution really encapsulates the essence of Catholicism and the fundamental Good News of Jesus: Liberté, fraternité, égalité. The essence of the love of neighbor is freely (liberté) to treat all men and women as brothers and sisters (fraternité-today we would eliminate the sexist language and probably say solidarité), especially the powerless of society (égalité).

III. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD DIALOGUE

1. Catholic Commitment to Dialogue

Unfortunately, for centuries, especially since the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church was largely trapped in a kind of solipsism, talking only to itself, and shaking its finger at the rest of the world. When, e.g., a committee of Protestant churchmen shortly after World War I visited Pope Benedict XV to invite the Catholic Church to join in launching the Ecumenical Movement to work for Church reunion, he told them that he was happy they were finally concerned about Church unity, but that he already had the solution to the problem of Christian division: “Come home to mama!”  The Vatican’s forbidding of Catholic participation in dialogue was subsequently constantly repeated (e.g., 1928 “Mortalium animos,” 1948 “Monitum,” 1949 “Instructio,” 1954 barring of Catholics at the Evanston, Illinois World Council of Churches World Assembly).

Again, Saint John XXIII and Vatican II changed all that navel-staring radically. Ecumenism was now not only not forbidden, but “pertains to the whole Church, faithful and clergy alike. It extends to everyone” (Decree on Ecumenism). Pope Paul VI issued his first encyclical (Ecclesiam suam, 1964), specifically on dialogue:

Dialogue is demanded nowadays.... It is demanded by the dynamic course of action which is changing the face of modern society. It is demanded by the pluralism of society and by the maturity man has reached in this day and age. Be he religious or not, his secular education has enabled him to think and speak and conduct a dialogue with dignity.

This turn toward dialogue naturally was directed toward the first obvious dialogue partners for Catholics: Fellow Christians, Protestants and Orthodox. But this turn from an inward gazing outward had its own inner dynamic: why stop at talking with Protestants and Orthodox; why not continue on to dialogue with Jews, and then Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., and even non-believers?  And so it is now happening in an explosion of interreligious/interideological dialogue of exponentially increasing magnitude. One need only look at the flood of books now appearing in the field.

Moreover, this dimension of the Copernican turn is at least as radical in its creative transformation of Catholic, Christian, self-understanding as the other three, and hence profoundly affects all aspects of Christian life. For example, since in this new Age of Dialogue we Christians understand that our Jewish or Muslim neighbors can be “saved” without becoming Christian, our relationship to them ceases being one of “convert-making,” and becomes dialogue and cooperation.

2. A Radically New Age

Those scholars who earlier in the twentieth century with a great show of scholarship and historical/sociological analysis predicted the impending demise of Western Civilization were “dead wrong.”  After World War I, in 1922, Oswald Spengler wrote his widely acclaimed book, The Decline of the West⁷. After the beginning of World War II Pitirim A. Sorokin published in 1941 his likewise popular book, The Crisis of Our Age⁸. Given the massive, world-wide scale of the unprecedented destruction and horror of the world’s first global war, 1914-18, and the even vastly greater terror of the second global conflict, 1939-45, the pessimistic predictions of these scholars and the great following they found are not ununderstandable.

In fact, however, those vast world conflagrations were manifestations of the dark side of the unique breakthrough in the history of humankind in the modern development of Christendom-become-Western Civilization, now becoming Global Civilization. Never before had there been world wars; likewise, never before had there been world political organizations (League of Nations, United Nations). Never before did humanity possess the real possibility of destroying all human life-whether through nuclear or ecological catastrophe. These unique negative realities/potentialities were possible, however, only because of the correspondingly unique accomplishments of Christendom-Western-Global Civilization-the like of which the world has never before seen. On the negative side, from now on it will always be true that humankind could self-destruct. Still, there are solid empirical grounds for reasonable hope that the inherent, infinity-directed life force of humankind will nevertheless prevail over the parallel death force.

The prophets of doom were correct, however, in their understanding that humanity is entering into a radically new age. Earlier in this century the nay-sayers usually spoke of the doom of only Western Civilization (e.g., Spengler, Sorokin), but after the advent of nuclear power and the Cold War, the new generation of pessimists-as said, not without warrant: corruptio optimae pessima-warned of global disaster. This emerging awareness of global disaster is a clear, albeit negative, sign that something profoundly, radically new is entering onto the stage of human history.

There have, of course, also recently been a number of more positive signs that we humans are entering a radically new age. In the 1960s there was much talk of “The Age of Aquarius,” and there still is today the continuing fad of “New Age” consciousness. Some may be put off from the idea of an emerging radically new age because they perceive such talk to be simply that of fringe groups. I would argue, however, that the presence of “the crazies” around the edge of any idea or movement, far from being a sign of the invalidity of that idea or movement, is on the contrary a confirmation precisely of its validity, at least in its core concern. I would further argue that if people are involved with a movement which does not eventually develop its “crazies,” its extremists, the movement is not touching the core of humankind’s concerns-they should get out of the movement, they are wasting their time!

Moreover, there have likewise recently been a number of very serious scholarly analyses pointing to the emergence of a radically new age in human history. One is the concept of the “Paradigm-Shift,” particularly as expounded by Hans Küng⁹. The second is the notion of the “Second Axial Period,” as articulated by Ewert Cousins¹⁰. Including these two, but setting them in a still larger context, I see the movement of humankind out of a multi-millennia long “Age of Monologue” into the newly inbreaking “Age of Dialogue,” indeed, an inbreaking “Age of Global Dialogue.”¹¹

Of course there is a great deal of continuity in human life throughout the shift from one major “Paradigm” to another, from one “Period” to another, from one “Age” to another. Nevertheless, even more striking than this continuity is the ensuing break, albeit largely on a different level than the continuity. This relationship of continuity and break in human history is analogous to the transition of water from solid to fluid to gas with the increase in temperature. With water there is throughout on the chemical level the continuity of H²O. However, for those who have to deal with the water, it makes a fantastic difference whether the H²O is ice, water, or steam!  In the case of the major changes in humankind, the physical base remains largely the same, but on the level of consciousness the change is massive. And here too it makes a fantastic difference whether we are dealing with humans whose consciousness is formed within one paradigm or within another, whose consciousness is Pre-Axial, Axial-I or Axial-II, whose consciousness is Monologic or Dialogic.

3. The Age of Global Dialogue

Ewert Cousins has basically affirmed everything Hans Küng has described as the newly emerging contemporary paradigm-shift (largely in terms of from the static to the dynamic), but he sees the present shift as much more profound than simply another in a series of major paradigm-shifts of human history. He sees the current transformation as a shift of the magnitude of the First Axial Period which will similarly reshape human consciousness. I too want to basically affirm what Küng sees as the emerging contemporary Major Paradigm-Shift, as well as with Cousins that this shift is so profound as to match in magnitude the transformation of human consciousness of the Axial Period, so that it should be referred to as a Second Axial Period.

More than that, however, I am persuaded that what humankind is entering into now is not just the latest in a long series of major paradigm-shifts, as Hans Küng has so carefully and clearly analyzed. I am also persuaded that it is even more than the massive move into the consciousness transforming Second Axial Period, as Ewert Cousins has so thoroughly demonstrated. Beyond these two radical shifts, though of course including both of them, humankind is emerging out of the “from-the beginning-till-now” millennia-long “Age of Monologue” into the newly dawning “Age of Dialogue.”

The turn toward dialogue is, in my judgment, the most fundamental, the most radical and utterly transformative of the key elements of the newly emerging paradigm, which Hans Küng has so penetratingly outlined, and which Ewert Cousins also perceptively discerns as one of the central constituents of the Second Axial Age. However, that shift from monologue to dialogue constitutes such a radical reversal in human consciousness, is so utterly new in the history of humankind from the beginning, that it must be designated as literally “revolutionary,” that is, it turns everything absolutely around.

Up until almost the present just about all were convinced that they alone had the absolute truth. Because all were certain that they had the truth-otherwise they wouldn’t have held that position-therefore others who thought differently necessarily held falsehood. But with the growing understanding that all perceptions of, and statements about, reality were-even if true-necessarily limited (the opposite of “ab-solute,” that is, literally “un-limited”), the permission, and even the necessity, for dialogue with those who thought differently from us became increasingly apparent.

Thus dialogue-which is a conversation with those who think differently, the primary purpose of which is for me to learn from the other-is a whole new way of thinking in human history.

At the heart of this new dialogic way of thinking is the basic insight that I learn not by being merely passively open or receptive to, but by being in dialogue with, extra­mental reality. I not only “hear” or receive reality, but I also-and, I think, first of all-”speak” to reality. I ask it questions, I stimulate it to speak back to me, to answer my questions. In the pro­cess I give reality the specific categories and language in which to respond to me. The “answers” that I receive back from reality will always be in the language, the thought categories, of the questions I put to it. It can “speak” to me, can really communicate with my mind, only in a language and categories that I understand.

When the speaking, the responding, grow less and less understandable to me, if the answers I receive are sometimes confused and unsatis­fying, then I probably need to learn to speak a more appropriate language when I put questions to reality. If, for example, I ask the question, “How far is yellow?” of course I will receive an non-sense answer. Or if I ask questions about living things in mechanical categories, I will receive confusing and unsatisfying answers. Thus, I will receive con­fusing and unsatisfying answers to questions about human sexuality if I use categories that are solely physical-biological; witness the absur­dity of the answer that birth control is forbidden by the natural law-the question falsely assumes that the nature of humanity is merely physical-biological. This dialogic view of truth, like the five other shifts in modern epistemology described above, is relational, as its very name, dia-logos (literally, “word-across”), indicates.

With the new and irreversible understanding of the meaning of truth resulting from modern epistemological advances, culminating in the insight of a dialogic view of truth, the modern critical thinker has undergone a radical Copernican turn. Recall that just as the vigorously resisted shift in astronomy from geocentrism to heliocentrism revolutionized that science, the paradigm or model shift in the understanding of truth statements has revolutionized all the humanities, including theology-ideology. The macro-paradigm with which critical thinkers operate today (or the “horizon” within which they operate, to use Bernard Lonergan’s term) is charac­terized by historical, social, linguistic, hermeneutical, praxis and dialogic-relational-consciousness. This paradigm shift is far advanced among thinkers and doers; but as in the case of Copernicus, and even more dramatically of Galileo, there of course are still many resisters in positions of great institutional power.

Our perception, and hence description, of reality is like our view of an object in the center of a circle of viewers. My view and descrip­tion of the object, or reality, may well be true, but it will not include what someone on the other side of the circle perceives and describes, which also may well be true. So, neither of our perceptions and descriptions of reality can be total, complete-”absolute” in that sense-or “objective” in the sense of not in any way being dependent on a “subject” or viewer. At the same time, however, it is also obvious that there is an “objective,” doubtless “true” aspect to each perception and description, even though each is relational to the perceiver-“subject.”

4. Conclusion

To sum up and reiterate: In the latter part of the twentieth century humankind is undergoing a Macro-Paradigm-Shift (Hans Küng). More than that, at this time humankind is moving into a transformative shift in consciousness of the magnitude of the Axial Period (800-200 B.C.E.) so that we must speak of the emerging of the Second Axial Period (Ewert Cousins). Even more profound, however, now at the edge of the Third Millennium humankind is slipping out of the shadowy Age of Monologue, where it has been since its beginning, into the dawn of the Age of Dialogue (Leonard Swidler). Into this new Age of Dialogue Küng’s Macro-Paradigm-Shift and Cousins’ Second Axial Period are sublated (aufgehoben, in Hegel’s terminology), that is, taken up and transformed. Moreover, as Ewert Cousins has already detailed, humankind’s consciousness is becoming increasingly global. Hence, our dialogue partners necessarily must also be increasingly global. In this new Age of Dialogue dialogue on a global basis is now not only a possibility, it is a necessity. As I noted in a title of a recent book-humankind is faced with ultimately with two choices: Dialogue or Death!¹²

IV. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD HISTORY: A NEW FREEDOM

One of the most powerful forces within Western civilization in the last century and a half has been the burgeoning sense of history, the growing awareness of change, dynamism, evolution, in all of reality and, most particularly, in humanity—individually and communally. The impact of this new sense of history only recently began to be felt within the Catholic Church, but the delayed impact rapidly effected wondrous changes, including the setting free of manifold forces of Church renewal. Hence, to understand adequately the dynamics of freedom at work in the Catholic Church today, one must analyze the bases of the turn toward, of this new sense of, history and its relationship to the Church.

1. The Nature of Historical Knowledge

History is a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the past of at least part of a human community. As the knowledge of history spreads in a community, it becomes a sort of communal self-awareness; and it is this human self-awareness, already on an individual level, that marks humans off from all other earthly creatures. This self-awareness of each individual person includes, not only a consciousness of her/his own unique being, but also an ever-expanding knowledge of things that are not him/herself. In fact, the knowledge of the two—the self and the other—are bound together by an indissoluble and proportionately developing dialogue.

The more I learn to know the world about me, both in the sense of piling up fact on fact, and in the sense of penetrating somewhat the very structure of a thing, of grasping its reality, both in its essentiality and its particularity, the more I learn to know myself. This occurs partly by analogy with what I have learned of the other; having grasped something of the reality of the other, l may suddenly become aware of the existence of something similar in me. It also occurs partly by direct differentiation from the other: in a negative, but not therefore unimportant, way my knowledge of myself grows by learning more about what I am not. And finally, it occurs when in the very act of knowing the other I at the same time perceive myself knowing, how I am knowing, and, therefore, to some extent, how I am not knowing.

But all of this “growing” knowledge on the part of the human being does not happen simply in a moment-to-moment fashion. People have memories whereby they are able to accumulate the knowledge garnered from each moment. The memory, however, is a faculty which not only produces a quantified build up of information, but also a qualified change in the ability to perceive the reality of the other. One of the startling discoveries of the relatively young discipline of psychology has been to see just how much the “recollection” of past events restructures our human apparatus for perceiving the reality that is the other and our self. This is true even though, and perhaps especially, if the recollection has faded from our conscious memory into our unconscious. A second great discovery was the realization that the simple act of recovering the past knowledge from the unconscious realm places the individual in a position to evaluate and integrate it into a more coherent structure of perceiving, assimilating, and reacting to current reality. This is one among many areas the words of Jesus, “The truth will make you free,” apply with unsuspected apt­ness.

Everyone, of course, lives in a community, or rather many communities, and these communities also provide some kind of collective memories—one does not have to be a nineteenth­-century romantic or an avid devotee of Carl Jung to affirm such a notion; one need simply be a sensitive observer. Since the Church is one of the communities the Christian does live in—in many ways one of the most humanly important communities—it also has a communal memory. It manifests itself in an almost limitless variety of ways: doctrines, functional relationships of offices, liturgies, alleged recollections of the past, postures toward all other aspects of life. The Church’s memory embraces all of life because the Church is, or should be, a totally comprehensive community; there can be no portion of reality toward which it does not take a stance. This comprehensiveness, of course, in no way necessarily implies an exclusivity, but if the Church is functioning rightly it will provide a vital integrating overview of all reality for its members.

At almost the same time psychology was uncovering the profound importance to the individual of memory, conscious and unconscious, in the perceiving of current reality, and the liberating force of the act of transferring knowledge from the unconscious to the conscious memory, history was making somewhat similar findings for communities. History in the eighteenth century was often thought to be merely a recounting of the past so as to find examples of the universal qualities of humanity—what was not of universal character was not looked upon as really human, and hence was often distorted and even more often ignored or not even seen. But in the nineteenth century a passion developed for the particular, for the unique, and in the very growth of this knowledge men and women became aware of growth and finally perceived how this growth metamorphosed their perception of reality; that is, the nineteenth-century positivist view of history—the purist searching for “how it really was,” wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—gave way to an ever growing awareness of just how much the history a person writes is formed by what s/he brings to this study of the documents.

2. Impact on the Church of the New Sense of History

It is rather dramatically apparent how this sense of history, this awareness of growth in all things, has influenced the Church in its liturgy. The very act of learning how we arrived at the various rigid forms of the liturgy was sufficient to release us from an unwarranted bondage to these forms. The past experiences could then be evaluated for what they really were and placed in proper perspective and integrated into all the rest of the Church’s experience—proper to the Church’s current needs, that is. The Church, like all vital communities, must be constantly “updated,” “aggiornamento-ized” to fulfill its proper function. Good history has here deabsolutized historical reality, e.g., the Latin silent canon did not pre-exist in some pseudo-Platonic world of ideas and wait until the ninth century to incarnate itself forever thereafter. It developed out of a specific set of concrete, temporal circumstances, and must be evaluated accordingly.

In the area of doctrine the Vatican II “coming of age” of the Church began to produce even more spectacular results. First of all, the Catholic community began to acquire a new awareness of how important it is to know the whole history of a dogmatic formula in order to interpret it accurately. Where before an analytic, scholastic approach was often used exclusively, the problems of theology now are placed first in historical perspective, with the result that many of the old impasses dissolve. Instead of merely taking a dogmatic formula and analyzing it, as it were, on the table in front of them, contemporary Catholic theologians—who are also half historians—study the original documents bearing on the problem.

a) Contextualization Example

A timely example might be the final phrase that was added at the last moment to the statement of Vatican Council I (1869-70) which sweepingly argued that papal statements were irreformable of themselves and not by consent of the Church, ex sese non ex consensu ecclesiae. Such a statement might easily be construed to indicate that the Pope can, merely by fulfilling the prerequisites outlined in the rest of Vatican I’s decree, issue an irreformable decree quite apart from the consensus, that is, the general mind, or faith, of the Church. However, when one becomes aware of the long history of Gallicanism¹³ and its influence even into the nineteenth century, and adds to that the awareness of the tendency to associate Gallicanism with the French Revolution—and all the agony for the institutional Church it entailed—it is not difficult to understand how many bishops would have been so intent upon crushing out every possible ember of Gallicanism, which included the tenet that decrees of the Pope could enjoy infallibility and, hence, irreformability, only if the body of bishops indicated their consent (ex consensu episcoporum).

It is apparent from the speeches and writings of the minority bishops at Vatican I that one of their major concerns was to see that the final formulary did not give the impression that the Pope could somehow be isolated from the rest of the Church in his role as infallible teacher. Except for a handful of extremists like Cardinal Manning of England (a vigorous opponent of his fellow convert from Anglicanism, the theologically liberal John Henry Newman, later made Cardinal), the members of the majority seemed to answer the resisting minority: “Yes, yes, we agree that the Pope is not to be isolated from the Church in his infallible teaching, but that is clear enough; what we must make certain of is that the old virus of Gallicanism, now veiled in the democratic notion that the consent of the bishops must be somehow obtained before the Pope can make an infallible statement, be absolutely stamped out.”  

Hence, one can make a case for arguing that the phrase non ex consensu ecclesiae was intended to eliminate the requirement that the consent of the bishops be obtained (ex consensu episcoporum), as in a poll; it did not intend at all to say that the Pope could speak infallibly outside the consensus of the Church. Such a “historical,” “contextual” understanding of this statement in fact opened up many more avenues of development than the former non-historical interpretation. (However, as will be discussed below, the very notion of infallibility was even more radically questioned by further historical analysis of the teaching going back to the Middle Ages.)

It should also be pointed out that just as the individual attains a greater knowledge of himself, by an ever fuller differentiation of himself from the other—and this, paradoxically, enables one to identify oneself with the other in love much more profoundly because a possible veiled egoism is thereby eliminated—so also does a community, in this instance, the Church. Theologians, often having sympathetically immersed themselves in history, are today much more deeply aware that dogmatic formularies have functioned largely as delimiting factors. Dogmatic definitions state that outside of certain areas the truth of specific mysteries of the faith is not to be found (literally, de-finis); which of the many possible understandings of the formulary is the true one the formulary itself, of course, cannot say—only the actual life of the Church can provide the key to this. One student of Catholic theology has stated this notion very well:

To use a metaphor, what a dogma does is to draw a line across an indefinitely wide expanse of possible affirmations. On the one side are the affirmations which it excludes, which, if it is well-formulated, it clearly and unambiguously says are false. On the other side, is an indefinitely large number of mutually incompatible religious meanings and theological interpretations which it admits as possibly true, but only one of which is actually true. It would be nonsense to demand of a dogma that it designate which one of its possible interpretations is the true one. It is no more possible to do this than to square a circle...

The positive theological meaning and concrete religious significance of a dogmatic formulation must be viewed as coming from outside, from the Bible the worship and the life of the Christian community, and the general cultural and intellectual context. The primary function of a dogma must therefore be to exclude error; its role, not only as a matter of historical fact but in the very nature of the case, must be primarily negative and defensive.¹⁴

b) Development of Doctrine

But perhaps most deep-going of all the changes the modern sense of history is beginning to work in the Church and its doctrine is the growing acceptance that doctrine grows or develops in a much more profound way than was previously thought. Development of doctrine is not just a mak­ing explicit, by way of logical deduction, of what was previously implicit. It certainly is not a simple, always progressive, “or­ganic” growth as from the acorn into the oak tree—to use Newman’s image—for there have been some obvious reversals, such as in the teaching on religious freedom in the last one hundred and fifty years. Nor is it sufficient to say that the substance of the doctrine remains the same in each age, but the formulation of it can be changed and perhaps improved, as good Pope John stated in such quiet revolutionary fashion. What is de­manded as the community of the Church attains a greater knowledge of itself and the other (in dialogic fashion) is not just a reformulation of the mysteries of the faith, but also a reconceptualization.

As the community becomes more fully human (the element of hope grows ever stronger here, for as we scale the mountain of our potentialities, the heights become evermore dizzying and could lead to an evermore disastrous fall), it is naturally going to require a proportionately greater degree of freedom in conceptualizing and expressing the mysteries of the faith. This by no means implies a complete sort of relativism; there are a number of definite constants: the revelation as found in the Scriptures and the Apostolic Church (Scriptura); Tradition (Traditio), which will provide us with a sort of series of proportionalities (for example, what transubstantiation was to the mystery of the Real Presence in the Middle Ages, “transsignification” and other attempts at reconceptualization are trying to be today); the living Church-the People of God with the hierarchy within it, not above it-under the guidance of the Holy Spirit (Magisterium Latum, the Magisterium broadly understood).

c) Historical Creativity

These, of course, are not the building blocks of a mechanistic kind of system which can produce the eternal verities in concepts and formularies eternally valid for all people, times, and places. They are more like the living tissues which in vital organic interaction can transcend themselves.

Here we fumble with the latest gift of the new sense of history; the past leads to the present but it also implies the future, which contains the radically unknown; for history shows us that because of human freedom the present is not limited to an unfolding of the potential of the past. Human freedom, despite all its restrictions, places in our hands the power of creativity. This has always been potentially available, but now that the new sense of history has made the Christian more profoundly aware of it, its opera­tion on the communal level of the Church will be the more profound.

V. VATICAN II AND THE TURN TOWARD FREEDOM

1. Freedom and Unfreedom

If one were asked to put the most central, burning issue of the decade of Vatican II, the 1960s, into one word, that word would be “freedom.”  In fact, for the last two hundred years it has been the central word in one or other of its variant forms from “liberté” of the French Revolution, or “Give me liberty or give me death” of the American Revolution, to “Uhuru” in post-colonial Africa of the 1960s. Moreover, there is no sign that the passionate search for freedom is about to abate, for within the last decades the intensity of the search has both increased and broadened.

The 1950s were the days of “McCarthyism,” of the “Organization Men,” of conformity and complacency, when the aim of college and career for men was to sink themselves ever more deeply into the folds of a giant American Linus blanket; for women the aim was to retreat into the pseudo-sanctuary of the unfulfilling fulfillment of the “feminine mystique.”

But that era ended with the demise of the 1950s, and a new era was inaugurated in a preeminent way by two men named John— John F. Kennedy and John XXIII. One treated the secular as sacred, the things of humankind as pertaining to God; the other treated the sacred as secular, the things of God as pertaining to humankind. They thereby freed the objects of their own primary concern to be what they were supposed to be. John F. Kennedy treated his human tasks as a sacred trust and thereby helped lift politics, human life, out of self-centeredness to a service of others: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  John XXIII embraced the world (as he symbolically did in his response to a life convict who asked him if God could ever forgive a murderer-Pope John threw his arms around him). He em­braced the world, with all its joys and miseries, as God’s gift to and task for humanity. Each with his own approach, these two men saw that only by freeing the secular from a cramped sort of selfish secularism and the sacred from a twisted sort of Manicheistic sacralism could the secular and the sacred really be fully secular and sacred, that is, when they were seen to be the same reality viewed from two different aspects.

Not ac­cidentally, both men, one for the secular world and one for the Church, were also deeply committed to openness to and con­cern for others, to freedom and responsibility, for they saw that contemporary men and women can no longer continue to exist in a closed ghetto unconcerned about their neighbor, that they will not live without freedom, and therefore they cannot live long without responsibility. These two men symbolized and partly inspired the new concerns of the sixties: freedom and responsibility, which also are two aspects of a single reality—human life.

In the decade of the sixties the cry of freedom for American Blacks was raised; there were sit-ins, marches, dem­onstrations, and even violence, under the banner of freedom for Blacks. Also in that decade the cry of freedom for the poor from their grinding degradation was raised, but the “war on poverty” was no more than engaged when its outcome was threatened by the escalating war in Vietnam. That war in turn called forth another cry of freedom by many Americans from what they said was the myth of America’s infallible righteousness. In the years since the beginning of Vatican II the cry of freedom in the Catholic Church was also raised—freedom for Catholics from restrictive ecclesiastical traditions to fulfill their true Gospel-centered tradition of service to God’s world. American Catholics lived in the “land of the free” and were nurtured in a religious tradition which stated that “the truth will make you free.”  They maintained that they are free, or that they had a right to be free.

For some philosophers freedom is humanity’s greatest gift. For others, freedom is that to which humanity is condemned. It is well to reflect briefly on what this freedom is that everyone is talking about, that everyone is yearning and striving for.

To be free is to be unbound, to be unrestricted. But when one speaks of human freedom, one must ask what the human person is freed from, what the human being is freed for, and what the consequences of freedom and unfreedom are. It is logical to consider the last-named first, since that is where the human person, as an infant, starts, in a state of unfreedom. The theological word for unfreedom is sin. What is meant by that is not so much sins in the plural, but sin in the singular, not so much sinful acts as the sinful state out of which those acts naturally and regularly flow. The focus, then, is not so much on acts which are “wrong,” a common definition of sins, but on the state in which a person is, whereby his/her actions tend to be “wrong.” This wrongness, this state of sin, basically is a lack of freedom from self-centeredness. Put positively, sin is being bound to, being restricted by, one’s self. It may be asked why being self-centered is wrong, is sinful. One answer is this: experience teaches that it is the peculiar nature of the human person to be potentially open to all other beings. Indeed, this capacity is in some ways infinite, that is, unlimited. In many ways a woman or man can be united to other beings even to the point of being identified with them. This is what happens in love, when, e.g., a woman identifies with her beloved, her alter ego. It is the nature of humans to be able to move beyond themselves, to embrace an ever-expanding universe of persons, of beings, of all reality, even the ultimate source of all reality. Thus, to remain within the closed case of one’s self is to act contrary to one’s very structure; in more traditional terms, it is to violate the “natural law.” It is like a seed refusing to break out of itself and put forth the plant. Such a seed is “bad seed.”In scriptural terms, in the Jewish and Christian “law,” all men and women are to love their neighbor as themselves. The fact is that if people do not love, are not open to, their neighbor, they do not even really love themselves, for they are shut up within themselves in the pain of utter loneliness.

Once this human unfreedom or state of sin is recognized as being locked inside the case of one’s self, then the way is clear to seeing what it is the human person has to be freed from. To be really humanly free, humans must be liberated from any and everything that restricts their openness to, their knowledge of, their love of, themselves and the other. The things that restrict a person’s openness and freedom are far too numerous to begin to list all of them, but it is well to look briefly at a few of those that have special significance today.

By way of prolegomenon, it should be noted that almost everything that expands a person’s universe by knowledge and love can also in turn serve as a restriction, as a somewhat larger or more heavily gilded cage. Only the attainment of an open and dynamic view of life can transform each new experience from being something like the bars of a prison into the cables of a bridge to an expanding reality.

A dominant force in the lives of many is the religious tradition in which they were reared. If a religion (in brief: “an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly”) is what it should be, it will help free women and men from the tyranny of the mountain of meaningless moments and experiences that life can appear to be. It can, in a preeminent fashion, help to open men and women to their neighbor, to all reality, and to its Source. It can give them an explanation of the meaning of life, help them to bring some sort of order into, to make sense out of, the day-to-day and year-to-year events.

A religion can, however, and often has been, a very restrictive, unfree influence in women and men’s lives. But when religion becomes restrictive, it is in reality inhuman, and, therefore, irreligious.

Far too often the religions or churches men have been brought up in have weighed them down with a myriad of religious, ecclesiastical traditions that may, or may not, have had some meaning at one time, but which have long since lost any significance. Of course, the challenging of constrictive traditions does not mean that all traditions are to be eliminated: for, even if that were possible, humanity would then be thrown into a state of anarchy, of lawlessness—and there is nothing more destructive of freedom than lawlessness. Religious traditions should not be peremptorily abrogated, but, where possible, be preserved and updated, be made effective and meaningful.

2. Freedom and Responsibility

It is now proper to consider what men and women are freed for by turning to the other aspect of human reality adjoining free­dom, namely, responsibility. If people choose one action rather than another, then they must answer for their choice. They must respond to the question: “Who made this choice? Who is respons-ible?”  Those who are free, who are open and turned toward the other, are also those who will answer for their actions. Those who run and leave others to answer for their actions, those who are irresponsible, are not open and turned toward the other, but are turned in on themselves, are self-centered, are unfree.

Therefore, if people yearn to be free, if they yearn to be open to self, other persons, all reality, and its Source, God, as they learn to know more fully self, others and God, they must also answer to their knowledge of them. She must be responsible to them. As much as possible and in an ever broadening and deepening fashion, they must unite and identify with them; they must respond to their needs. In fact, they must make the other’s needs their needs. This is the message Jesus preached by his life: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or without a job or discriminated against or killed unjustly?”  “What you have done to one of these the least of my brothers or sisters, you have done to me.” (Mt 25:40)  “My friends....God is love....and anyone who says `I love God,’ and hates his sister or brother, is a liar, since whoever does not love the brother or sister who can be seen, cannot love God who has never been seen.” (1 John 4:8, 20)

The development of this concern for others, that is, of the capacity of the individual to make free decisions in a responsible fashion, in other words, the development of maturity, is one of the ultimate goals of every educative process, whether it be in the family, school, or other institution. Such responsible decisions require a certain knowledge concerning the area of decision and a willingness to accept the consequences of the decision. They also of necessity include the ability to make the decisions and carry them out; that is, responsible decisions presume freedom. If a person is not free to make a choice, s/he cannot be held responsible for the consequences. If there is no freedom, there is no responsibility, since the irresponsible person is trapped within his/her own self. Hence, the process of education must also include a proportioned involvement of freedom. This parallel development can be seen in a very simple way in the curricula of the various educational systems; the first years of study in general, and of a particular discipline, are rather stringently prescribed, whereas with the development of a certain amount of maturity students are allowed more freedom of choice in following their own interests in specialization. The same pattern, of course, can be seen in the well run family. where with a very small child there is almost no freedom of choice—nor is s/he held responsible for her/his actions—but a real effort is made, as the child grows to give her/him proportionately greater freedom, for s/he is able to accept greater responsibility.

The Church  is similar to the parent and teacher. In fact, the Church is often referred to as “Holy Mother Church,” and one of the most vital functions of the Church is to fulfill its mission to proclaim the Gospel, to be a teacher of the nations, to exercise “magisterium.”  If this is true, then at least one of the major goals of the Church must also be that of the parent and the teacher—the development of maturity in those for whom it has concern. In many ways the Church in the past has worked vigorously toward this goal. For example, it fostered learning and the spread of learning in the Middle Ages when no other institution could. However, in recent centuries, as the masses of men and women have advanced in learning, and commensurate ma­turity, the Church has often tended not to allow them their proportional freedom. It has tended to continue to treat most women and men like children who cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions, and therefore cannot be given the necessary freedom. However, such a situation cannot continue in­definitely. Mature adults will either find a way to act freely and responsibly within the institution or in their eventual frustration and embitterment will attempt to withdraw from the institution or even destroy it.

Fortunately, with Vatican II Catholics began to find ways for increasing numbers of the faithful to act as free,  responsible adults in the Church.

VI. THE VATICAN II ATTITUDE TOWARD HISTORY AND FREEDOM

1. Responsibilities of the Historian and the Catholic

Because we humans are most profoundly the product of our past, we must study that past very carefully so that we may know ourselves more precisely. This is doubly mandatory for Christians since Christianity is a historical religion. Yet if the history of humankind could be summed up in one or two words, they would be, as Lord Acton indicated, freedom and unfreedom. Hence it is very important today, as the new sense of history and freedom dawn on us both as humans and as Christian humans, to analyze carefully what our understanding of and attitude toward history and freedom has been.

In studying our own past, we must approach the task as diligently, critically, and sympathetically as possible, taking care to be as objective as we can. However, at times we must also take on another task when reviewing our past, a task that is incumbent upon us not specifically as students of the past, as historians, but rather as human persons, namely, making a judgment about the object studied. Again, this obligation will be doubled when a Christian and the study of the Christian past is involved.

After an event or an institution has been studied in true historicist fashion—that is, after it has been discerned with meticulous objectivity, using all the sources possible, and leaving no evidence aside because it does not seem to fit an a priori schema, and after the subject has been evaluated in terms of the principles of its time and not ours—there will, I believe, be occasions when a judgment should be made by the Christian on the “Christian-ness” of an institution; and obviously no one is in a better position to render such a judgment than the intelligent Christian who has carefully studied the institution in question. Some would side with Herbert Butterfield¹⁵ and say that the student of the past should never make moral judgments—except in the historicist fashion; some would agree with Isaiah Berlin and maintain that women and men studying their past cannot avoid making moral judgments<