MOJ and Theological Diversity

As veteran MOJ-readers know, MOJ-bloggers are a theologically diverse group.  We often disagree among ourselves--sometimes quite strongly--about one or another issue.  When I read the following paragraph this morning (in a Commonweal editorial), I thought of MOJ's diversity and what a strength it is.

Yet “faithful Catholics” do in fact disagree about church teaching regarding contraception, the ordination of women, and the nature of the papacy, among other things. History, especially the history of the Second Vatican Council, tells us that disagreement is often the work of the Holy Spirit. “Perhaps one of the lessons we have learnt since the cruel way in which the Modernists were treated a century ago,” writes Fergus Kerr in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Blackwell), “is that we have to live with some quite deep divisions and intractable rifts within the Catholic Church, over morals and liturgy especially.” R. Scott Appleby’s article on the hundredth anniversary of the condemnation of the American Modernists (page 12), is a useful reminder of why open and respectful disagreement is always better than its suppression.

To read the rest of the editorial, click here.