The Magisterium and Me.... and Newman

There are a number of things about this conversation about "conservative" and "progressive" Catholics that make me feel as though, by blogging on MOJ, I am participating in an enterprise that is very alien to me.  Many of them were nicely expressed by Amy and Susan. 

In addition, though, I want to share two thoughts.  First, I think a "conversation" such as this demonstrates some very real limits of communication by blogging. I sincerely wonder whether it is possible to have a productive exchange about a topic like this without being us being physically present to each other, so that we can see each other's expressions, hear each other's voices, even interrupt each other if necessary to stop someone from going too far when he gets carried away with a rhetorical flourish that would be more difficult to pull off face to face.  So much of what we need to do in conversations like this is listen, hear, and respond.  So much of what we might want to say is communicated not just by our words, but our demeanor, our expressions, our tones of voice, and the way our bodies react to what we are hearing.  The love that we have to show to one another in keeping a conversation like this civil is not accessible in words printed on a computer screen.  Personally, I am very uncomfortable getting engaged in this debate on this forum, for those reasons.  (So I should just delete this post, right, instead of continuing.  I know....)

Second, I think that any attempt to categorize people as "progressive" or "conservative" Catholics, based either on politics or on adherence to the Magisterium, reflects a simplistic notion of Catholic doctrine.  Whatever the "Magisterium" is, it is simply not something that is reducible to the concerns on the forefront of the minds of a group of Americans in 2009.   Whether defined narrowly as those things on which the Church has arguably spoken "infallibly" [a very, very narrow definition, indeed, but one that probably ought to at least include the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which has not been proposed as sorting criteria in this discussions on MOJ], or more broadly, under whatever of the many varying definitions various Catholics have proposed over the years, the teachings of the Church are always limited, at the very least, by the fact that they represent man's attempt to express in the blunt tools of man's language, and man's capacity to use language, something that transcends our abilities to even understand fully -- divine revelation.

Those of you familiar with the work of John Henry Newman will recognize the influence of his writing (particularly, The Essay on the Development of Doctrine) on the preceeding paragraph.   I'm going to end with a Newman quote,  from Apologia pro Vita Sua ,  in which he uses vividly evocative language to express the constant tension between what I think Steve must mean by the "Magisterium" (Newman here uses the term "Infallibilty", but he understands it in the broadest sense of the Church's teachings) and the efforts of laypeople like us (and even theologians) to understand the Church's teachings and apply them.  It's a messy, dynamic, process, that defies being captured at any one particular point in history.  It's also a process that I might venture to suggest probably places every single one of us sometimes in Steve's "progressive" pile, and sometimes in his "conservative" pile, at different times and with respect to different Church teachings.

Every exercise of Infallibility is brought out into act by an intense and varied operation of the Reason, both as its ally and as its opponent, and provokes again, when it has done its work, a re-action of Reason against it; and, as in a civil polity the State exists and endures by means of rivalry and collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide; -- it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power, -- into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and molding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purpose.