HOW IS HOMOSEXUALITY UNLIKE SLAVERY?, and CAN CATHOLICS THINK? A reader sent me an email that may help clarify matters. My original response to him was totally lame, so I’m not even going to bother with it.

Reader email: In your blog today (03/27) you state: “If I say Church teachings A through E imply F, and everyone from St. Paul to John XXIII and onward says Church teachings A through E imply and require not-F, I start doubting my judgment, not theirs.”

But what about the Church’s moral teaching on say, slavery, for example, in which (to paraphrase) everyone from St. Paul to Leo XIII says Church teachings A through E imply and require F, and everyone from Leo XIII on says Church teachings A through E imply and require not-F?

In other words, how can one reconcile belief in the Magisterium with the reality that the content of the Magisterium’s teaching does in fact change over time?

I think Andrew Sullivan deserves credit for trying to think through this dilemma, rather than simply brushing it away with either a) simplistic moral relativism) or b) unquestioning loyalty to institutional positions.

My response: 1) This characterization of Church teaching on slavery is just false. Click here for an introductory look at the subject. There are definite signs of special pleading in the linked article, and it’s from 1912 so I don’t know how much subsequent research has changed some of its points, but it’s a start. And it makes clear that Leo XIII isn’t pulling a U-turn here.

2) What he was doing, and what has happened with many doctrines (a friend cited the example of the Church’s attempts to figure out whether the stock market was usury; quick answer: no), was developing doctrine–building on what had come before. The Church’s teaching on abortion is another good case. Aquinas, for example, did not hold the current life-begins-at-conception position. He wasn’t just basing this view on medieval biology, by the way; nonetheless, I think there are good arguments against his position and I’m glad the Church didn’t take it. The Magisterium’s teachings are added to over time. (I wonder if God doesn’t reveal certain things all at once because He wants us to do our own work!) The death penalty is another obvious example, which you can find ably discussed here. Or for another example, I believe that some people who had the opportunity to confess Christ in this life and did not do so are saved. It would relieve my mind greatly if the Magisterium affirmed my view; but so far, no dice. If the Magisterium did take my position, it would be developing doctrine, not reversing it.

When the Church states that intentionally destroying a blastocyst is immoral, that’s a development of doctrine. What Sullivan argues for is a reversal of doctrine. His stance on the Church’s authority to teach about homosexual acts is akin to this incredibly annoyingly-named organization‘s stance on the Church’s authority to teach about abortion.

3) Am I arguing for “unquestioning loyalty to institutional positions”? No. First, there are whole worlds of Catholic discussion on which the Church has taken no authoritative stance. Second, and more importantly, why are the only options “unquestioning loyalty” and “when I don’t understand a Church teaching, I’ll ditch it”? What ever happened to “faith seeking understanding”? The Church’s teaching can guide and stimulate philosophical exploration–it proposes surprising claims, and those claims have, in the past and today, spurred many thinkers to great insights that can be accepted even by non-Christians. (The two thinkers who stand out in my mind in this respect are St. Anselm–why are you reading this blog when you could be reading his treatise on the Incarnation, a.k.a. the Niftiest Bit of Theology I’ve Ever Read?–and the pope who will almost certainly be known to history as John Paul the Great. Anselm writes better though.) Without the authoritative, can’t-ignore-it-can’t-work-around-it teaching of the Church, I doubt that a sizable chunk of the greatest writing about wrongdoing, justice, mercy, personal identity, and the importance of the human body would ever have been conceived. This writing happened because great thinkers accepted Church teaching and sought to understand it.

Finally, one word on “dissent.” In order to accommodate his own dissenting stances, Sullivan sometimes writes as if any disagreement with any papal statement, application of an encyclical to U.S. politics, or random thing John Paul II jotted on a cocktail napkin is “dissent.” Please. If you can find an orthodox Catholic–i.e. someone who thinks dissent is a bad thing–who actually believes that Catholics shouldn’t take issue with the Pope when he’s wrong, please let me know, so I can smack his catechism teacher. If I could get Sullivan to stop saying one thing (and I bet I can’t!), it would be his claim that Rod Dreher “dissents” when he thinks the Pope’s statements on the Middle East are wack.

And now we’re out of this immensely long screed. Thank you for playing.