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One Jesuit asked about criticism of the pope’s leadership by some senior American Catholics, many of whom complain Francis is not outspoken enough on abortion, and too compassionate towards homosexuals and divorced adults.
“You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude,” Francis replied.
“I would like to remind those people that ‘indietrismo’ [which means to be backward-looking] is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith and morals,” he explained.
Citing slavery as an example, he said “some pontiffs before me tolerated it, but things are different today.”
“When you go backward, you form something closed, disconnected from the roots of the Church and you lose the sap of revelation,” he continued, adding that “you can lose the true tradition, and turn to ideologies for support.”
Pope Francis uses the metaphor of a tree to conceptualize the growth and evolution of doctrine and understanding.
Quote:In other words, doctrine also progresses, expands and consolidates with time and becomes firmer, but is always progressing. Change develops from the roots upward, growing in accord with these criteria.
[Snip]
So you change, you change, but with the criteria just mentioned. I like to use the “upward” image… Always on this path, starting from the root with sap that flows up and up, and that is why change is necessary.
[Snip]
Here, our understanding of the human person changes with time, and our consciousness also deepens. The other sciences and their evolution also help the church in this Growth in understanding. The view of Church doctrine as monolithic is erroneous.
Sounds like another way of saying conservative American Catholics need to get with the times. This isn’t the first time the Pope and American Catholics have expressed their negative views of the other. A common criticism of the Pope I hear is that he doesn’t understand (or like) Americans and how free we are with expressing political opinion, or as he calls it, ideology.
With the metaphor of the tree, I can see some truth to it. Our church has certainly grown and evolved since it began. But, it also sounds like justification for the Pope to interpret doctrine through the lens of his worldview. But then again, don’t we all do that ourselves to some extent?
PazamaManX wrote:
With the metaphor of the tree, I can see some truth to it. Our church has certainly grown and evolved since it began. But, it also sounds like justification for the Pope to interpret doctrine through the lens of his worldview. But then again, don’t we all do that ourselves to some extent?
Yeah, I look for avenues for change within our own church and I find it interesting to compare and contrast how our two churches handle change.
I think that our church has a problem in that it has grown and evolved since it began but we like to pretend that it hasn’t so we keep trying to uphold and defend teachings that have long since been abandoned.
In our own church, I feel like the concept of a “continuing restoration” fulfills a similar purpose to the tree metaphor that Pope Francis has used. In a continuing restoration: 1) some things (cough::cough:: polygamy) might be restored momentarily just to check the box that we did it in this last dispensation of fulfillment of all things 2) Also that the purpose of “restoring the church to its perfect form” has not yet been achieved. Advances that the church may make in the future can be viewed as steps toward this “perfect” goal. For example, it would be perfectly reasonable to understand that racism from BY and others created the priesthood and temple ban and this limited our progress towards our ultimate perfection. However, over time and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, we were finally able to do away with that limiting “tradition of our fathers” and take a step closer to the future, perfect, and complete restoration.
I think for this to really take hold there would need to be some greater acknowledgement that senior church leaders sometimes/often “see through a glass darkly” and try their best within their human, social, and time bound limitations.
Roy wrote:
I think that our church has a problem in that it has grown and evolved since it began but we like to pretend that it hasn’t so we keep trying to uphold and defend teachings that have long since been abandoned.
I’ll refer to x, y, and z below. Think of them as three different teachings about the same subject.
When a doctrine changes in our church it’s often done so quietly. We stop teaching x and shift towards teaching y. Correlation takes care to ensure official channels don’t repeat x ever again.
If leaders truly want to change to y they need to spend more time openly highlighting the fact that we’re changing from x to y. No one in church has any problem at all correcting people that teach z, but teaching x or y go unchallenged. It’s very difficult to challenge x in church because there’s no authoritative source to point to where someone has said, “it’s not x anymore, it’s y.”
So you end up with x and y in the church until science advances one funeral at a time long enough to have a generation that now believes y and will claim x was never taught.
There’s quite a lot of faith in church in the god that is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Maybe leaders are concerned with shaking the faith of people that are firmly in that camp. Maybe leaders fear any change might erode their authority or the authority of the church founders.
It’s a very ironic problem to have for a church that has continued revelation as one of their main selling points. We’re proud of how change sets us apart from other churches and ashamed enough about change where we don’t like to talk about it.
nibbler wrote:
Roy wrote:
I think that our church has a problem in that it has grown and evolved since it began but we like to pretend that it hasn’t so we keep trying to uphold and defend teachings that have long since been abandoned.
I’ll refer to x, y, and z below. Think of them as three different teachings about the same subject.
When a doctrine changes in our church it’s often done so quietly. We stop teaching x and shift towards teaching y. Correlation takes care to ensure official channels don’t repeat x ever again.
If leaders truly want to change to y they need to spend more time openly highlighting the fact that we’re changing from x to y. No one in church has any problem at all correcting people that teach z, but teaching x or y go unchallenged. It’s very difficult to challenge x in church because there’s no authoritative source to point to where someone has said, “it’s not x anymore, it’s y.”
I can relate to this. One of the ways that I personally interact with the world (and fully understanding my view is the the minority view) is through words. I keep looking for the “official doctrines” and “official teachings” to fully match what individuals do and how they live their lives
What I am learning is that church teachings (and life teachings to a degree) are taught as “doctrine” and “the law” are actually treated by the people who are living those doctrines and laws as “aspirations”. An example is that as a teenager I was overly zealous in babysitting and parenting my siblings (for reasons)
primarilybecause “that was the law – Honor your father and your mother”. My parents had a lot of kids and were overwhelmed, so I fought (them and a lot of other people) to “let me follow the law of Honoring Your Parents” – because that was “the law”. In reality, the leaders were teaching that because it was part of the Old Testament and helped raise less self-centered kids out of tune with their parents. nibbler wrote:
So you end up with x and y in the church until science advances one funeral at a time long enough to have a generation that now believes y and will claim x was never taught.There’s quite a lot of faith in church in the god that is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Maybe leaders are concerned with shaking the faith of people that are firmly in that camp. Maybe leaders fear any change might erode their authority or the authority of the church founders.
It’s a very ironic problem to have for a church that has continued revelation as one of their main selling points. We’re proud of how change sets us apart from other churches and ashamed enough about change where we don’t like to talk about it.
I agree with the irony.
As part of my faith transition, I am processing the tension between constancy (the “same yesterday, today, and forever”) and adaptation (“living in the world and performing gender in line with values and abilities instead of gender”).
I still feel sheepish and stupid the number of times that I took “the law” as “literal truth – direct from God” when at best it was “less defined aspirations”.
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