"This will not help faith to thrive"

[From the May 14th issue of The Tablet:  The International Catholic Weekly, published in London.]

14/05/2005

This will not help faith to thrive

Editorial 

The internationally renowned Jesuit magazine, America, bears the name of a country that has traditionally regarded freedom of speech as one of its core values. The resignation of its editor-in-chief, Fr Thomas Reese SJ, as a result of prolonged pressure from the hierarchy, dramatises the way American Catholicism is being pulled between two cultural norms. One stresses the importance of open and honest debate and the other expects deference to church authority and those who wield it. These norms are inevitably in tension, but they are not, with goodwill on all sides, mutually incompatible.

Yet they are being made to seem so in the United States, where goodwill between Catholics of different opinions seems an increasingly scarce commodity. For nearly seven years Fr Reese provided a forum for the expression of various points of view on matters of great concern to the life of the Catholic Church in the United States , some of which were highly controversial. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, both on its own behalf and in apparent response to pressure from some American bishops, began to ask the Jesuit authorities in America to rein him in. His province defended him but came to see the battle with Rome as “unwinnable”. The CDF, under its then Prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger, was demanding either a new editor or a board of censors with power to overrule the editor in the name of the American bishops. Fr Reese was clearly a thorn in the CDF’s side. He was both accessible to the media and progressive, at a time when an increasingly conservative and intransigent hierarchy wanted to see the Church in America steered to the right.

His resignation rescues the Jesuits from a dilemma, and may be intended also to illustrate the attitude to free speech in the Church taken by the man who is now Pope Benedict XVI. According to Jesuit sources, the CDF never made clear precisely what it took exception to in the articles in America which it challenged. So it was not possible to mount a theological defence. This suggests the CDF’s real worry was that the articles’ cumulative impact conveyed a strong implication that the senior pastors of the Church in the United States, supported by Rome, were leading it in the wrong direction; and that the Society of Jesus, which owns and publishes America, tacitly shared that critique. It is worth recording that in England and Wales, where the bishops continue to enjoy the confidence of the great majority of Catholics, such a complaint is far more often heard coming from the right than from the centre or left. But nor is there any question of silencing such criticisms.

The underlying issue is of concern throughout the Church: that debate and discussion are necessary parts of the process by which the Catholic faith develops. The action of the CDF against Fr Reese is bound to have a chilling effect, drawing the permissible limits of criticism and dissent ever more narrowly. This is a risk-averse philosophy which is of no benefit to the faith and intelligence of the Catholic laity in particular, and betrays a certain lack of confidence in the Holy Spirit. It is not disloyalty but honesty to acknowledge that there are usually two sides to an argument. As Cardinal Newman said in his seminal essay “On Consulting the Faithful on Matters of Doctrine”, to cut the laity off from participation in the Church’s thinking “in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition."
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Michael P.