In his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, St. John Henry Newman sought to address a serious concern among the Protestant Christians of his day. Namely, if you look back through the Church’s history, there are places where the Church of one age taught something different from the Church of a previous age. This historical fact called into question the belief that the Church of the 12th, 16th, or 19th century was, in fact, the Church that Christ established. When faced with this historical reality, Protestants, according to Newman, felt forced, “to fall back upon the Bible as the sole source of Revelation, and upon their own personal private judgment as the sole expounder of its doctrine.” In response to this concern, Newman expressed a way of viewing Christian doctrine as a living organism that grows and develops, an idea that was later embraced by the Second Vatican Council. However, the concern that Newman was addressing is still alive today, and comes from within the Catholic Church.

When comparing the Church’s teachings before Vatican II with what was taught at the Council—or even when comparing some of Pope Francis’s teachings with those of his immediate predecessors—there are some clear differences. This historical observation can easily lead Catholics to view tradition as fluid, changing on a whim with the tides of modern culture. Or it can lead to the conclusion that the current teaching is a rupture from Tradition that needs to be corrected somehow. However, neither of these positions reflects the Church’s own understanding of Tradition and development, which is both more nuanced and more compelling.

This article will draw from the teachings of Second Vatican Council and of the post-conciliar popes to explain how the Church herself understands development. It will also look at the history of the Church’s teaching about slavery and wrestle with its implications. Finally, with this foundation established, it will look ahead to the Synod on Synodality and the prospect of future developments. In the end, this article will demonstrate that doctrinal development is dynamic and, at times, surprising, because the Truth is not a static set of ideas, but a Living Person.

Combination of continuity and discontinuity

In a 1976 letter to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), Pope St. Paul VI said to the traditionalist prelate, “the concept of ‘tradition’ that you invoke is distorted.” Paul VI explained that Lefebvre understood Tradition as “a rigid and dead notion, a fact of a certain static sort” which “blocks the life of this active organism which is the Church.” Tradition, according to the pope, “is inseparable from the living magisterium of the Church.” This clarification that Paul VI offered Lefebvre is essential for understanding the doctrinal developments that came from Vatican II. It is also essential for the many Catholics today who believe that the Church’s teaching is unchanging and who, in turn, feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Church teaching could change in the future.

Those who believe that doctrine never changes often invoke Pope Benedict XVI’s teaching that we need to reject a “hermeneutic of discontinuity” with Tradition and instead embrace a “hermeneutic of continuity.” The trouble is that this is not what Pope Benedict taught.

The late pontiff’s teaching about contrasting hermeneutics came from a Christmas address he gave to the Roman Curia in 2005. There, he criticized a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” that sees the post-conciliar Church as disconnected from the prior nineteen centuries of Tradition. Furthermore, this hermeneutic pits the “spirit of the Council” against the “texts of the Council,” prioritizing the former as truly representing the will of the Council.

Pope Benedict contrasted this “hermeneutic of discontinuity,” not with the “hermeneutic of continuity,” but with a “hermeneutic of reform.” In doing so, he references Pope St. John XXIII’s 1962 speech that opened the Second Vatican Council. Quoting John XXIII, Benedict said: “The substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.”

This distinction between the “substance” of doctrine and “the way in which it is presented” is crucial. The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, picks up this distinction in a key passage about the development of doctrine: “This tradition which comes from the Apostles developed in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. For there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down” (Dei Verbum 8).

Here the Council Fathers draw a distinction between the “realities” of Divine Revelation and the Church’s understanding and expression of those realities. This is key: Pope Benedict—in that same Christmas address—said that “true reform” occurs when there is a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels” (emphasis mine). In other words, an authentic understanding of Tradition does not insist on rigid continuity but rather embraces continuity in the unchanging substance of doctrine and allows for discontinuity in the way that substance is understood and expressed. Benedict used the Council’s teaching about religious liberty as an illustration of true reform, going so far as to say that this development was a correction of some historical teachings. By affirming religious liberty, Benedict said the Council “recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church” and was “in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself.”

Benedict acknowledged that there can be “apparent discontinuity” between contemporary magisterial teaching and historical teachings. However, rather than seeing this discontinuity as a rupture or a denial of Tradition, he believes that the discontinuity of understanding and expression ultimately led to a deeper preservation of the substance of Divine Revelation.

Right away, it is clear that the idea that Church teaching never changes is not shared by Pope Benedict or the Council itself. The Church can, and has, corrected some historical decisions of the Magisterium. However, in matters of doctrine, any contradiction or reversal with the past is only a discontinuity of expression, not a discontinuity of substance. That being said, the discontinuity of expression can look like a dramatic change in substance. St. John Henry Newman uses the example of a butterfly to illustrate this point. A butterfly looks entirely different from the caterpillar it used to be, but the dramatic differences do not change the fact that they are, at the deepest level, the same creature. Pope Benedict pointed to the Council’s teaching about religious liberty as an example of this kind of dramatic change, where the Church chose to “define in a new way” how Catholics ought to relate to other religions. The Church’s teachings about slavery, usury, and the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics are all further examples of where the Church teaching today looks, in many ways, like a reversal from what it taught in the past.

This understanding of reform is explicitly reaffirmed by Pope Francis in his response to the dubia submitted by five cardinals, including Cardinal Burke, in the lead-up to the 2023 meeting for the Synod on Synodality. The cardinals questioned the pope about whether Revelation “should be reinterpreted according to the cultural changes of our time” or if Revelation “is binding forever, immutable, and therefore not to be contradicted.” If you apply Pope Benedict’s understanding of reform to this question, the answer is obvious: the substance of Revelation is immutable, but the Church’s understanding and expression of Revelation can change. And that is precisely how Francis responded:

“Therefore, while it is true that the Divine Revelation is immutable and always binding, the Church must be humble and recognize that she never exhausts its unfathomable richness and needs to grow in her understanding. Consequently, she also matures in her understanding of what she has herself affirmed in her Magisterium. Cultural changes and new challenges in history do not modify Revelation but can stimulate us to express certain aspects of its overflowing richness better, which always offers more. It is inevitable that this can lead to a better expression of some past statements of the Magisterium, and indeed, this has been the case throughout history.”

Constantly moving forward

 All of this raises the questions: How does the Church’s understanding of Revelation grow? How does doctrine develop and who develops it? Again, Dei Verbum is the key text. In the same section quoted previously, the Dogmatic Constitution affirmed that Tradition develops with and through the whole Church: from the prayers and lives of laypeople, to the study of theologians, and, ultimately, the teaching authority of the pope and bishops in communion with him. In other words, as Pope Paul VI said to Archbishop Lefebvre, Tradition “is inseparable from the living magisterium of the Church.” It is ultimately the Magisterium, and only the Magisterium, that definitively resolves any apparent contradictions because the “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church” (DV 10).

Further, Dei Verbum states that “the Church constantly moves forward” until “the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her” (DV 8). Rather than seeing what is ancient as the greatest understanding of Revelation, the Council Fathers understood that as time progresses, the Church “moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth.” In a general sense, we have a greater understanding of Revelation now than we did in the 1500s, 1200s, or 400s. Here, the organic images of rivers and trees that St. John Henry Newman used can be helpful. A river is greater and more powerful at its mouth than in the small mountain spring that is its source. Likewise, a mighty oak tree is grander and stronger than a sapling. Pope Francis captures this growth in understanding, even to the point of correcting past teachings, in his response to the dubia:

“On the one hand, it is true that the Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but it is also true that both the texts of the Scripture and the testimonies of Tradition require interpretation in order to distinguish their perennial substance from cultural conditioning. This is evident, for example, in biblical texts (such as Exodus 21:20-21) and in some magisterial interventions that tolerated slavery (Cf. Pope Nicholas V, Bull Dum diversas, 1452).^[1] This is not a minor issue given its intimate connection with the perennial truth of the inalienable dignity of the human person. These texts need interpretation. The same applies to certain considerations in the New Testament regarding women (1 Corinthians 11:3-10; 1 Timothy 2:11-14) and other texts of Scripture and testimonies of Tradition that cannot be materially repeated today.”

In other words, the living Magisterium is our interpreter of historical texts, not the other way around. We cannot appropriately use our understanding of past texts to judge the living Magisterium, otherwise, we end up severely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the Catholic faith. We cannot genuinely understand historical texts apart from the Church’s current teachings. The living Magisterium, working in dialogue with the faithful, is our only sure guide and interpreter of Scripture, Tradition, and historical documents, sifting through what is of perennial substance and what is the result of cultural conditioning (cf. DV 8). There is also danger in accepting an historic teaching as binding if it has not been repeated in generations because “frequent repetition” of a doctrine is one of the ways for us to know the importance of a magisterial teaching (Lumen Gentium 25).

This danger becomes clear if we try to imagine a catechist telling a new convert to Catholicism that “none of those who are outside of the Catholic Church” including “Jews, heretics, and schismatics” can be saved and all of them are damned to Hell (Council of Florence, 1442 AD); or a pastor telling his congregation that receiving any interest on a loan is gravely evil (Vix Pervenit, 1745 AD) but that slavery “considered in itself and all alone, is by no means repugnant to the natural and divine law” (Instruction of the Holy Office, June 20, 1866). Finally, imagine a Catholic school principal writing a bulletin article asserting that Catholic parents are forbidden to send their kids to public school without the permission of their bishop (Divini Illius Magistri, 1929AD). We must avoid reading past magisterial documents the way that fundamentalists read Scripture.

Hermeneutic of traditionalism: relativism and fundamentalism

In light of Pope Benedict’s “contrasting hermeneutics” framework, I would like to identify a third hermeneutic: the hermeneutic of traditionalism. This hermeneutic proposes that contemporary magisterial teachings must be understood and interpreted through the lens of historical teachings. This is a tempting hermeneutic because it appears solid and faithful. However, it is ultimately a type of subjective relativism and religious fundamentalism.

This hermeneutic of traditionalism presumes that individual Catholics have the ability and authority to interpret Tradition, which is what Newman said of Protestants who relied “upon their own personal private judgment” to interpret Scripture. In other words, this position posits that individuals can correctly interpret the Church’s historical teachings and judge whether or not the “living teaching office of the Church” has contradicted Tradition based on that interpretation. This hermeneutic is flawed because it makes the individual member of the faithful, and not the living Magisterium (the pope and the bishops in communion with him), the authentic interpreter of Tradition.

This distorted understanding of Tradition is also a kind of religious fundamentalism. It betrays a desperate need to have unchanging certainty in religious beliefs. Like the Protestant Christians who felt like their entire faith was threatened by the theory of evolution, within this Catholic fundamentalism is the fear that even the slightest deviation from historical teachings threatens the legitimacy of the entire Church.

Further, this hermeneutic of traditionalism is also related to the hermeneutic of discontinuity. Namely, it is defined by the idea that there is a Truth (i.e., Tradition) that can be abstracted from the actual texts of the Magisterium. As with the hermeneutic of discontinuity, the traditionalist hermeneutic holds that for the sake of faithfulness to the Truth, it may be necessary not to follow the teachings of the Magisterium. Ultimately, as Pope Benedict warned in his 2005 address, a hermeneutic of discontinuity “risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church” because it asserts that the texts of the Council and post-conciliar teachings are not entirely faithful to the Truth of the Catholic faith.

Those advancing the hermeneutic of discontinuity and the hermeneutic of traditionalism also use similar arguments in order to undermine the authority of the living Magisterium. Reactions to the teachings of Pope Paul VI illustrate this. The pontiff’s 1968 encyclical prohibiting contraception, Humanae Vitae, was not well received by many of the faithful. Many Catholics readily asserted that our assent is only really required for the pope’s infallible teachings, and because Humanae Vitae was not an ex cathedra teaching, it was more like “optional advice” rather than authoritative teaching. It was also popular to emphasize the messy process that went into drafting the encyclical. Paul VI famously rejected the conclusions reached by the majority of the papal commission that had been established to advise him about the morality of birth control and instead reaffirmed the minority position, that the Church’s prohibition on contraception should remain in place. Catholics who argue against Humanae Vitae often focus on these details (“how the sausage was made”) in order to undermine the final product.

The same type of argument is regularly used by those who adhere to the hermeneutic of traditionalism against Paul VI’s liturgical reforms, post-conciliar teachings, and even the Second Vatican Council itself. For example, prominent traditionalists have been arguing for decades that any non-infallible teaching can be questioned if it appears to contradict historical teachings. Especially since the release of Traditionis Custodes, some Catholics have argued that because the development of the reformed liturgy after the Council was messy (i.e., the legend that Eucharistic Prayer II was composed on a restaurant napkin), its legitimacy is questionable and obviously inferior to the liturgy that came before it, despite the fact that the reforms were promulgated by the Magisterium. In other words, the opposition against both Humanae Vitae and the reformed liturgy boils down to the same argument: The pope broke with the Spirit of the Council and therefore his teaching is illegitimate / The pope broke with the Unchanging Tradition and therefore his teaching is illegitimate.

Not just traditionalists

It is important to note that this hermeneutic of traditionalism with its distorted concept of Tradition extends far beyond members of the SSPX or Catholics who describe themselves as “traditionalists.” In fact, many Catholics who attend the reformed liturgy and say they support the teachings of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI—many of whom even criticize “Rad Trads” for their excesses—have fallen prey to this false hermeneutic. They do this whenever they presume that any deviation between a teaching of Pope Francis and the teachings of his predecessors is a rupture with the substance of a doctrine and not a true reform with a mix of continuity and discontinuity.

One example of this fundamentalist understanding of Tradition comes from Cardinal Burke and his assertion that Pope Francis’s teaching about the possibility of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics is a rupture from prior teachings. In fact, the cardinal expresses a distilled version of the hermeneutic of traditionalism in his 2019 interview with Ross Douthat. In reference to Amoris Laetitia, Burke said, “I haven’t changed. I’m still teaching the same things I always taught and they’re not my ideas. But now suddenly this is perceived as being contrary to the Roman pontiff.” The idea that one could not possibly be in schism because their beliefs have not changed rests on the premise that Church teaching cannot change.

Examples of this hermeneutic of traditionalism can also be seen in the criticism directed at Francis’s prohibition of the death penalty. Like the Second Vatican Council’s teaching about religious freedom, Francis’s magisterial teaching about capital punishment includes a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels.” Some of the current pontiff’s teachings are indeed changes from those of his predecessors, but they are not ruptures. Francis is reaching back to deeper truths.

In 2018, the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued a “Letter to the Bishops” explaining the pope’s revision to the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty which said, “The new revision of number 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved by Pope Francis, situates itself in continuity with the preceding Magisterium while bringing forth a coherent development of Catholic doctrine” and “expresses an authentic development of doctrine that is not in contradiction with the prior teachings of the Magisterium” (7-8). In Fratelli Tutti, Francis said, “I sometimes wonder why…it took so long for the Church unequivocally to condemn slavery and various forms of violence. Today, with our developed spirituality and theology, we have no excuses” (Fratelli Tutti 86). Then he goes on to cite Scripture, Church Fathers, and past popes to demonstrate that his unequivocal condemnation of the death penalty is a reaching back to the deeper revelation that every human being has infinite dignity (cf. FT 264-265).

A historical case study^[2]

In 1840, Bishop John England—the first bishop of Charleston, South Carolina—wrote a series of letters to John Forsyth, the US Secretary of State at the time. Forsyth had been publicly claiming that Pope Gregory XVI had condemned slavery in his 1839 Papal Bull In Supremo Apostolatus. Bishop England felt the need to correct the Secretary of State because Pope Gregory had not in fact condemned slavery itself, only the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In the course of his letters, Bishop England drew from Scripture, Tradition, the natural law, and multiple historical examples of the Church tolerating and engaging in slavery to argue that slavery itself was not immoral and that the pope has no authority to teach otherwise.

As surprising as this may be for Catholics to hear now, Bishop England’s analysis of the Church’s teaching on slavery was not off base. Slavery was widely practiced by the patriarchs in the Old Testament, was never condemned by Jesus, and St. Paul famously tells slaves to “be obedient to your human masters with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ” (Eph 6:5).

The Didache repeats this exhortation of obedience and many Church Fathers—including St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, and St. Gregory of Nazianzus (the latter two personally owned slaves)—did not view slavery as incompatible with Christianity. Pope Gregory the Great defended slavery and also owned slaves, including children. At least four ecumenical councils explicitly permitted slavery and St.Thomas Aquinas taught that slavery was not against the natural law. Christians advocating for the total abolition of slavery were in the extreme minority throughout the patristic and medieval eras.

Slavery was still present in the Church as it moved into the Renaissance. For example, in 1452, as European countries were beginning to explore and colonize Africa, Pope Nicholas V promulgated the Papal Bull, Dum Diversas granting the King of Portugal explicit permission to “invade, conquer, fight, subjugate the Saracens and pagans, and other infidels” and to “lead their persons in perpetual servitude.” This effectively gave the Portuguese full license to enslave Africans.

Then in the next century, Pope Paul III, even though he explicitly allowed Christians in Rome to purchase slaves, condemned the enslavement of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas by the Spanish. At this time, theologians, canonists, and popes were not arguing about whether or not slavery was evil, but in what circumstances it was or was not allowed. It was not until Pope Gregory XVI’s papal bull in 1839—after tens of millions of Africans were enslaved—that the Church publicly condemned the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

So, in 1840, Bishop John England was on solid doctrinal ground when he said that slavery itself was not immoral. In fact, in 1866, twenty-six years after the bishop’s letters, the Holy Office (now called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) taught, with the approval of Pope Pius IX, that slavery “considered in itself and all alone, is by no means repugnant to the natural and divine law.”

Then, in 1888, despite the weight of Scriptural justification and 1800 years of Church teaching and engagement in slavery, Pope Leo XIII taught, “the condition of slavery, in which a considerable part of the great human family has been sunk in squalor and affliction now for many centuries, is deeply to be deplored; for the system is one which is wholly opposed to that which was originally ordained by God and by nature” (In Plurimis 3). Pope Leo repeated his condemnation of slavery in his 1890 encyclical Catholicae Ecclesiae. The Church has repeatedly condemned slavery since then. Most notably, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council said slavery “insults human dignity” (GS 27) and then in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II taught that slavery is intrinsically evil.

There are a few things worth noting about the history of the Church’s teaching on slavery. First, an action that was repeatedly encouraged and allowed by the Magisterium and explicitly taught as not “repugnant to the natural and divine law” is now understood as intrinsically evil. The more developed “butterfly” of Pope John Paul II’s teaching about the dignity of the human person looks nothing like the “caterpillar” of Pope Pius IX’s understanding of human dignity. This development ultimately led to nothing less than a reversal of the Church’s teaching about the morality of slavery. History demonstrates the possibility of dramatic change in magisterial teaching.

Second, while Pope Francis explained that his development of the Church’s teaching regarding the death penalty centers primarily on the Church’s greater understanding and awareness of the dignity of every human life, Pope Leo XIII did not provide an explanation for his development concerning slavery. While his teaching emphasized Christ as the great liberator and the fraternity of all people, Pope Leo also engaged in a revisionist history to justify his development, claiming the Church has always desired to end slavery, even erroneously stating that “the Roman Pontiffs, who have always acted, as history truly relates, as the protectors of the weak and helpers of the oppressed, have done their best for slaves” (In Plurimis 13).

Looking back on those historical teachings through the Church’s present teaching, we could say that Pope Leo XIII’s development regarding slavery was also the result of the Church growing in her understanding of human dignity. We can conclude now that the “perennial substance” (to borrow Pope Francis’s terminology) of the Bible’s passages about slavery does not include slavery itself and the many examples and justifications of slavery in the Scripture and Tradition are products of cultural conditioning. By condemning slavery, Pope Leo XIII recovered a deeper “patrimony of the Church” and was “in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself” (to borrow Pope Benedict XVI’s terminology).

Third, it is easy to hear echoes of Archbishop Lefebvre and Cardinal Burke in Bishop England’s letters. Specifically, regarding the pope’s ability to condemn slavery, Bishop England wrote:

“The Pope is the divinely constituted and authorized witness of the doctrine and morality of the unchanging church, and not a despot who can alter that teaching at his mere will; whilst the church herself claims no power either to add to the deposit of faith, or to change the principles of that morality for whose promulgation she is divinely commissioned.”

This exact argument, almost verbatim, has been repeated by critics of Pope Francis’s magisterial teaching. In fact, in a 2014 interview, Cardinal Burke said, “The pope is not free to change the church’s teachings with regard to the immorality of homosexual acts or the insolubility of marriage or any other doctrine of the faith” (emphasis mine). It is clear by now that the assertion that the living Magisterium has no authority to change the Church’s teaching reflects neither history nor the Magisterium’s understanding of its own authority.

Finally, the dramatic change in the Church’s teaching on slavery raises some challenging questions about the role of the faithful when we believe that a teaching needs to change. Can 15th century Catholic abolitionists be seen as unfaithful to the Church’s teaching when they were being faithful to what the Church would eventually teach in the 19th century? If the Church’s teaching can dramatically change, then it follows that unfaithfulness in one era could be faithfulness in the next. What does that mean for Catholics who are opposed to some of the Church’s moral teachings now?

There are not easy answers to these questions. Navigating what this means for us personally will require a well formed conscience and an active and personal relationship with a God who we know is good. Is it a coincidence that St. John Henry Newman, the theologian who the Fathers of Vatican II drew on to understand development of doctrine, is also who they referenced for their teaching on conscience? While the relationship between personal conscience and Church authority is beyond the scope of this article, perhaps, as each of us navigates this tension, we ought to recall Newman’s saying, “I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

The Synod on Synodality

Understanding all of this is essential for a better understanding of the Synod on Synodality. Catholic news organizations and social media are abuzz with discussions about what this synod will address, including controversial topics like homosexuality, ordaining women, restructuring the Church, and more. Though the Synod’s Instrumentum Laboris itself does not mention most of these contentious issues, it is clear that some Catholics hope for rupture from the past and others are fearful of any change at all.

Through the synod, Pope Francis has brought together a diversity of voices, including some of these progressive and traditionalist voices, and asked them to pray, listen, and share with each other their ideas, experiences, and what the Holy Spirit has put on their hearts. Eventually, the group will provide their recommendations to the pope. Will the pope reform any of these hot button teachings? We do not know. But we do know that whatever the pope teaches at the end of this process will be safeguarded by the Holy Spirit and will be in continuity with the unchanging substance of Revelation, even if it appears different from the teachings that have come before. For, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Divine assistance is also given…in a particular way, to the bishop of Rome” whenever he proposes “a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 892). This is true even for magisterial teachings that are not definitively or infallibly taught (CCC 892).

Under Pope Benedict, the then-CDF published a document addressing the “hermeneutic of continuity.” The CDF specifically pointed to the Catechism, as well as the many synods and post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortations, as providing “a precious commentary – a true hermeneutic of continuity of the teachings of Vatican II.” These sources are “privileged instances of efforts to ensure a correct hermeneutical interpretation of the Second Vatican Council at the level of the universal Church.” In other words, if you want to better understand the Council, pay particular attention to the teachings that result from this synod. With trust that the synod will not lead to a rupture with the unchanging substance of Revelation, there is the freedom to feel excited about the ways that the Holy Spirit will, like a growing oak tree, make our understanding of God greater and stronger through this process.

Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to give us greater faith in God’s goodness and more trust that the living Magisterium will lead the Church to a deeper and richer understanding of the Truth about God and the infinite dignity of every human person. Without this trust we wander into a distorted understanding of Tradition that ultimately leads to a subjective relativism. The path away from the hermeneutic of traditionalism is the same path Pope Benedict presented in response to the hermeneutic of discontinuity, the same path that Pope Paul VI offered to Archbishop Lefebvre: a hermeneutic of reform rooted deeply in fidelity to the Holy Spirit working through “the contemplation and study made by believers” and the teaching “of those who have received through Episcopal succession the sure gift of truth” (DV 8).

In a 2012 address, Pope Benedict said that Christians “do not possess the truth,” rather, “the truth possesses us.” Our faith is not a house of cards that could fall at any time. We do not need to feel threatened by questions and developments. We do not need to fear venturing into the “open sea of truth,” because “Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge.” In the end, the Truth is not a set of “right ideas” about Christ, but Christ Himself. Real reform is rooted in His taking us by the hand, walking with us through history, helping us understand more and more who He is, and in doing so, revealing to us more of what is truth about ourselves.

 Notes

^[1] As will be discussed later, the Magisterium not only tolerated slavery as Francis indicates, but explicitly allowed it.

^[2] This section draws largely from All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church by Fr. Christopher Kellerman, SJ. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2022).

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Image: “Pope St Gregory sends St Augustine” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Lawrence OP