In a series of columns and blog entries at the New York Times website and in his recent Erasmus lecture, Ross Douthat has written of his desire to defend the Catholic Church from what he genuinely fears to be a papacy introducing unwarranted novelties into doctrine and practice. Although Douthat avoids explicit use of the "h" word -- "heresy" -- he does speak darkly of the "plot to change Catholicism."
I would like to engage Ross Douthat on the level of history, first by summarizing what I take to be his view. Like many conservative writers, he wants to see recent Catholic history as a struggle between two opposing camps that have their origins in the 1960's. On the one hand, there are the progressives, who understood the Second Vatican Council as calling for a continuing modernizing and updating of the Church. And on the other side, there are the conservatives, who wish to place a more restrictive interpretation on the Council. Douthat then recites that tired and familiar refrain about how everything bad that has happened to the Church since 1965 -- declining Mass attendance, the so-called crisis in marriage, and so forth -- is the fault of the liberals.
While I could take Douthat to task for his essentially caricatured, Manichean reading of the last half-century of Catholic history, I'd prefer to take the discussion to a deeper level.
Let's begin with the nature of historical investigation. What is it that historians do? Professional historians are not apologists. They do not aim to exalt or justify contemporary institutions or to scour the past for proof texts in order to score cheap points in some ephemeral polemic. Rather, historians have as their vocation the patient reconstruction of the past.
Such a reconstruction might be of a microscopically small slice of past events or it might be something larger. But whatever the parameters of the reconstruction, it begins with the premise that the past is a strange world, inhabited by people who do not share our passions or commitments, but their own. The great historian Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979), a conservative from another age, recognized this well when he denounced the failings of Whig history. The Whig historian was all about reading the past through the lens of the present. But the true historian must be concerned principally with the past for its own sake.
So, let's build on this premise. Douthat's particular worry seems to be about the admission of the divorced and remarried to Holy Communion even if their prior marriages have not been declared invalid by a Church tribunal. Such a step, conservatives like Douthat fear, places in jeopardy the very sacredness of marriage. On the other side, we have the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has argued that at least in some cases mercy must be shown to couples in these unions and that mercy demands their readmission to Holy Communion. Kasper is not especially innovative in making this argument. Forty years ago, another German theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, made similar claims.
A column is not the best venue for an extended analysis of historical method, but perhaps we can do an impressionistic account of the idea of mercy and forgiveness in the Church. Please, bear in mind that I am compressing into a few paragraphs a rich and dense history.
We should begin with the New Testament, which conferred on the Apostles the power to bind and loose sins. But how was this power interpreted by the early Church? If we turn to the Nicene Creed, promulgated in the year 325, we find a passage that affirms that Christians "confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins."
Even so, the Council of Nicaea, which promulgated the Creed, was not perfectly consistent. Canon eight of that Council's decrees, after all, permitted the readmission of baptized heretics into the Church. Even so, Constantine, the Emperor who had summoned the Council, felt it prudent to delay his own baptism until close to death, probably because he feared the duties of the imperial office might well imperil his immortal soul.
Further complicating matters, we find in various corners of the Mediterranean other forms of forgiveness and mercy being practiced, associated with the theologian Origen (ca. 184-254) and other eastern Christian writers and bishops. Forgiveness, as these Church leaders understood it, was premised on confession, sometimes to a priest,or a bishop or the community at large. Its content was limited to grave sins. Penance took the form of a long period of isolation, sometimes spanning many years, followed by reconciliation. A public shaming ritual was often associated with this practice, as the penitentes stood before the Church each week, beseeching the congregants. Once forgiven, the penitents were reminded that forgiveness could only happen once. Fall into grave sin a second time, and all might indeed be lost.
This practice might have made sense in a small-group setting that saw itself constituting a self-enclosed spiritual elite. It made much less sense, however, in early medieval Western Europe.
And it was left to the Irish, operating on the very edges of early medieval Christian society, to introduce radical new changes to penitential practice. The seventh-, eighth- and ninth-century Irish created a system for the forgiveness of sins now known as "tariff penance." Conditional forgiveness was immediate, followed by the performance of a severe but relatively brief penance, drawn from a list (i.e., tariff) of prescribed penances for that offense. Importantly, on this new model of forgiveness, penance was repeatable. The adulterer or the blasphemer might sin again and again, and be forgiven and reconciled after each offense.
One might churlishly point out that doubtlessly there were Douthats active in each of the epochs arguing that these radical transformations of previous practice granted forgiveness to those who, under the old standards, did not merit it. But I am not really interested in pressing that point.
More sophisticated conservatives typically find some a-historical hermeneutical device to escape the dilemmas a rigorously historical account presents, usually centered on the mysterious workings of Tradition, with a capital T. But in the process, these conservatives perform an always-fatal surgery that kills the true lessons of history -- namely, that the past is a strange place and that we must approach the men and women of the past with the same respect we show the living of today's world.
How, then, do we look to the processes of historical change in today's Church? We must accept that Church doctrine and practice are in continual flux and have been so from the beginning. The world changes, society changes and the Church adapts. A Catholic Church that once owned slaves now condemns slavery as a great and inherent evil.
Still, to say that doctrine and practice change in sometimes radical ways is not say that they are without root or foundation. Mercy, love, forgiveness, reconciliation, these principles constituted the fundamental message of Jesus and remain bedrock principles today, even as the means by which these principles are given effect shift from one generation to the next.
In confronting these historical truths, an equal dose of modesty and confidence would seem to be in order. We inhabit a small moment in time in a Church that has endured for 2,000 years and shall endure for many thousands more. The Church will not be shaken to the core if the divorced and remarried are admitted to Holy Communion. It would be nothing more than the practical working out of the Church's commitment to mercy. In its own way, it would be much less radical than the innovations I have discussed above.
Ross Douthat lacks historical imagination. He fears the future because he does not understand the past. Here's hoping for some evolution in thought!