Considerations on the Cardinal’s Considerations

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has produced Venite ad me, subtitled “Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change.” The document is supposedly the response of the Dicastery to appeals by both Pope Francis and Pope Leo confronting the decline of the Catholic Faith, especially in countries traditionally “Catholic.”

There are some strange notes in the document, which is the usual anthology of quotations from papal discourses and encyclicals. “One final clarification concerns the document’s genre: it is a set of Considerations, not a Doctrinal Note.” Its purpose is to “stimulate ecclesial reflection.” “A variety of points of view” are examined, “without, however, claiming to settle the matter.” Unlike other documents coming from the Dicastery, the “Considerations are not marked by…terminological precision and systematic treatment.”

It is as if the umpire chose to give tips about batting without getting too “technical.” His job is to get technical. The Dicastery is supposed to be a referee, not a player in the game. The deliberate exclusion of terminological precision and systematic treatment is strange.

I was reminded of what G. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy about criticisms of doctrinal specificity:

Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.

Venite ad me is true to its avoidance of precision in several statements that raise the eyebrow. For instance, there is a riff about Jesus “showing a special predilection for all those who expect almost [you have to love the qualifying ‘almost’] nothing from anyone…perhaps not even from the God of the Covenant of the Fathers” (no. 17). When the Syrophoenician woman insists on pleading with Jesus for the cure of her daughter, he says to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you desire” (Mt 15:28). This does not look like a predilection for someone who expects nothing from God.

The document seems to discount the specifically soteriological: He brings the “light of a divine love that seeks to reconnect each person with their own troubled existence, with others in their community, and ultimately with God himself—with a view to a fraternity marked by justice and peace.” Where does the eternal salvation aspect fit into this vision? When Jesus said to the Good Thief, “this day you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23:43), I don’t think he was only reconnecting [love the re-connecting] the man with his own troubled existence, or at least not primarily.

Another problem has to do with precision, but it is a precision that I find dubious. The document is emphatic in saying, “The Church does not engage in proselytism” (quoting Pope Benedict XVI). The word proselyte is found in the Bible and means stranger. It referred to those outside the community who became part of the people of God. It has been given a negative connotation but really is about converting. This last is now a word that is discouraged by the liturgists. A priest came from a workshop telling me that people of other denominations who want to become Catholics should never be called “converts.” Venite ad me says that the way the Church finds new members is by the power of “attraction.” This seems to discount evangelization. St. Paul didn’t bring Christ to people by his charm, but by his preaching.

The document has a pastoral aspect in that it includes some sharing of personal experiences. One section quotes a Jesuit priest Aimé Duval about his experience of prayer in his family while growing up. He was impressed by his father’s kneeling in prayer and by his admonition not to say the prayers rapidly. It is a poignant touch, but the document presumes that we know that Aimé Duval was a priest-singer who composed his own songs and sold millions of records. My impression is that he was like Jacques Brel but with a collar. The document says his memories of family prayer came “in the context of recounting his troubled personal and religious journey.” Turns out that Father Duval wrote a memoir about his drinking problem and was very active in Alcoholics Anonymous, details the document didn’t bother to inform us about.

A precision that I don’t understand is about what is called the concept of “epochal change.” Pope Francis made the phrase famous in some remarks to the Roman Curia in which he asserted, “What we are experiencing is not simply an epoch of changes, but an epochal change. We find ourselves living at a time when change is no longer linear, but epochal.” This seems like one of those catch phrases, like “a synodal Church,” which means something beyond the words themselves.

“Epochal change” is “not linear.” To me the meaning is not obvious, and yet “epochal change concerns the establishment of a new relationship between faith—and thus its transmission—and cultures.” That new relationship is not defined in the document although “one characteristic feature of the epochal change…that is, those countries in which the Christian faith has held a dominant sociological significance—concerns the crisis in the intergenerational transmission of the Christian faith.”

Handing on the faith has always involved “intergenerational transmission.” The word “cultures” above also calls for attention. There is no mention of the decline of faith as a broad cultural phenomenon. At least since Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach” in 1867, there has been a consciousness of a loss of faith in the world. “The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

The falling away of many from Catholic families, and the catastrophic decline in the sacraments, not only baptism, but also marriage and priestly ordination, make me think of Jesus’ question, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8). The document does not seem to see the forest for the trees. “Epochal change,” with its hint that the Church has not kept up with change, is not the story; the failure of faith is what it is all about.

The loud, melancholy roar of the sea of faith is not about evangelization techniques or catechesis principally but about relativism, a concept barely touched on in Venite ad me, and epistemology. Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” has echoed down the centuries, but never as loudly as in Western culture today. People doubt everything, not just the words of some of the Church’s leaders.

There is little philosophic reflection in the document, nothing of Thomistic vision and little engagement with how the present situation was already diagnosed before Pope Francis came to the chair of Peter.

I think of philosophers like Leszek Kolakowski who saw the intellectual antagonism of faith and what we associate with the Enlightenment ideals and especially of H. Richard Niebuhr who spoke about Christ and Culture in terms of five categories: Christ Against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ Above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ the Transformer of Culture. Niebuhr was critical of the first four, which seems to indicate an endorsement of the fifth. One does not expect Niebuhrian analysis from the Vatican, but at least some indication that a confrontation with the culture beyond the individual has something to do with the state we are in.

The testimonies at the end of the document are interesting in their variety, but really do nothing to elucidate the problem of faith in our time. They are pastoral pericopes, not religious philosophy. Venite ad me is more preaching (and that overlong) than teaching.

There is something else off-putting about the thing. It seems to try to give the essence of the magisterium of Pope Francis (a rather mixed bag), who is cited 43 times in a document of 144 paragraphs. Is this a term paper dedicated to Cardinal Fernández’s patrons? It is obviously the work of a group. I imagine a little beehive of scribes who love to make prose of a mosaic of citations which some of them have written. Each one is happy his ceramic pieces are pasted on the mural but not concerned about the way the piece of writing has wandered from its supposed purpose.

But “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov 29:18).