John Henry Newman called the Catholic Church “the oracle of God.” The phrase is audacious: When we think of an oracle, after all, the god-haunted groves of Delphi come more readily to mind than do the homey parishes we attend on Sundays. Few would deny the audacity of the Church’s claim to speak for God, but many take for granted that this claim is defunct. They say the Church has acquired some long-needed humility and shed her pretensions to absolute truth. The Mother and Teacher of mankind has become like a little child and now longs only to listen.
If Newman’s concept of the Church as an oracle seems less humane than the more familiar concept of “the people of God,” it nevertheless reflects ecclesial truths that are today often ignored. While Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church devotes an entire chapter to the idea of the Church as the “people of God,” it also holds forth on the duty of the people to obey the Magisterium (Lumen Gentium 12). Furthermore, this chapter is followed by one on the hierarchical nature of the Church. Too often people understand the phrase “people of God” in a merely democratic sense, as in the phrase “we the people” in the U.S. Constitution We are the people of God, however, to the extent that we obey his word.
When some Catholics insist that “the Church” should listen more and talk less, they are referring not to themselves but to the Pope and the bishops. Why has the idea of the hierarchical Church as a child who listens rather than a Mother who teaches become so popular? Those who espouse this idea would no doubt attribute it to Vatican II. They would remind us that the Council’s chief purposes were to throw open the windows of the Church and to invite the world to a dialogue.
But history teaches that ecumenical councils, far from establishing immediate order, are usually followed by periods of confusion. Opening the windows—however necessary and Spirit-inspired a measure—has let in not only the fresh air of renewal but also the smog of secularism. And while one can argue that the Church was right in initiating a dialogue with the world, this dialogue seems to have changed at times into a monologue in which the Church takes dictation from the world.
The confusion that follows ecumenical councils is neither necessary nor permanent. Since we believe that the Holy Spirit dwells within the Church, we cannot at the same time believe that the Church’s mission is at any time fundamentally obscure. As Pope John Paul II leads the Church into the third millennium, inaugurating what he calls a new springtime of evangelization, there are signs that confusion regarding the Church’s relationship with the world is receding and that the clarity of the Church’s faith is reasserting itself. The continued success of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the increase in vocations to the priesthood and religious life, the growing interest of young married couples in Natural Family Planning—these spiritual phenomena speak volumes about the disillusionment of a growing number of today’s Catholics with attempts to silence the Oracle of God.
Not that dissenters to Church teaching will go quietly into that good night. They will warn us that we must be tolerant and will raise the Inquisition as a shibboleth of intolerance. They will trot out the beleaguered ghost of Galileo as a reminder of the evils of closed-mindedness. They will tout pluralism as an upstart goddess whose beauty outshines the withered visage of old Mother Church.
Such views do in fact contain grains of truth. But so do all heresies. Let us then heed the warnings insofar as they are valid and see through them insofar as they are not. First, no one in the Catholic Church today is attempting to revive the Inquisition. Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Liberty says that while we are obligated to seek the truth and adhere to it once we find it, no man may be “forced to act against his convictions nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his convictions in religious matters in private or in public” (Dignitatis humanae 2).
At the same time, Vatican II declares that the Church is “by the will of Christ the teacher of truth” (DH 14). When in the same passage the Council Fathers refer to the teaching of the Church as “sacred and certain,” they are echoing Newman’s notion of the Oracle of God. The Council’s teaching is balanced in a way that the dissenters’ alarmist warnings are not. Dissenters have used one extreme—intolerance—to justify another—relativism.
No, we cannot go back to the days of the Inquisition. But we can and must go back to the example of Jesus, who always spoke the truth, sometimes bluntly and on at least one occasion with a whip of cords in his otherwise gentle hand to drive home the point about not desecrating his Father’s house. Was Jesus close-minded? Dissenters vilify Cardinal Ratzinger not because he is a latter-day Torquemada but because he reminds us that “there is no religion without a bond.”
The Church’s fidelity to its own doctrine serves the interests of its children and of society at large. If the Oracle of God were to allow people to shout it down, two things would likely happen. First, the gates of hell, although not prevailing against the Church itself, would no doubt prevail against many of its erring children. Second, society in general would be weakened, because the Church would no longer be a prophet with the strength and vision to challenge that society when it goes astray.
Because of its union with Christ, the Church is larger than the world. Yet some would reduce it to a mere microcosm of society. Since society is itself collapsing under the weight of its own secularity, the last thing it needs is a Church that mirrors its own weaknesses.
Pluralism, properly understood and balanced by other values such as order and unity, can exist within the Church as well as within society. The Church is diverse in many ways: It embraces people of all cultures. It elevates the positive elements found in such cultures. It encourages myriad ways of serving God through its many religious orders. It recognizes and promotes all the gifts that the Holy Spirit rains upon the people of God. There may be different styles of theology, and theologians may differ on questions that the Church declares open. But the Church must not be pluralistic in the sense that it tolerates doctrinal dissent.
No theology that fails to spring from faith, proceed with faith, and culminate in faith can rightly be called Catholic theology. And no theologian who sets himself above the Church’s official teachers can rightly be called a Catholic theologian. Aquinas and Bonaventure had different theologies, but they shared the same faith. Aquinas wasn’t sure about the Immaculate Conception, but the Church had not yet spoken definitively on that issue. Had the “Dumb Ox” been living on earth in 1854, when Pope Pius IX solemnly defined the dogma, he would have undoubtedly accepted it on faith.
The phrase “immune from error” sounds naïve in postmodern ears and evokes a litany of the Church’s imagined errors down the centuries. Invariably these turn out either not to be errors at all or, if real errors were involved, the teaching in question was not advanced in a definitive manner. No one would deny that there have been times in history when the Church’s human voices threatened to muffle its divine voice. But it is a strange spectacle when children of the Church pay more heed to its occasional errors than to its constant truths.
Why this odd preference? Why did Adam and Eve prefer a piece of fruit to paradise? Why did the Jews of the Exodus pine for the stewpots of Egypt even as the Promised Land loomed before them? Why did the crowds chant, “Give us Barabbas!” and then, turning to Christ, “Crucify Him!”? Why do so many Catholics surround themselves with teachers who tickle their ears (see 2 Tim. 4:3) and remain deaf to the Oracle of God? Clearly, the human race boasts a long and glorious history of bad judgment.
So we silence the Oracle of God not because it is unreliable but because it is accurate. When the Church says “No” to birth control, to abortion, to sex outside marriage, we ignore the voice of God and cling to the vices of men. What would our society be like today if the Oracle of God had been heeded consistently by mankind over the past 35 years? Or, if that question sounds impossibly utopian, what would our society be like if the Oracle of God had been heeded consistently by the majority of Catholics over the same period? When the Church says that God is three Persons in one nature, that Jesus is one person who has two natures, that all this is relevant because our destiny lies in what C. S. Lewis called “the happy land of the Trinity,” we put our fingers in our ears like stubborn children and follow false teachers along safer paths.
What is the solution? We need to close our mouths and open our hearts. We need to sit still before the Oracle of God and listen to what the Spirit is telling us. If we do this, both Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholic dissenters will accuse us of worshiping the Church. But we cannot heed all voices. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Indeed, the very fact that orthodox Catholics come under fire from both the religious right and the religious left at the same time is revealing.
However embattled we may become with those who slander the Oracle of God, we must strive always to win them over. Fundamentalists believe, against Cyprian, that they can have God as their Father without having the Church as their Mother. We must show them with charity what their own tenuous doctrines of sola scriptura and sola fide already manifest—namely, that Father God and Mother Church cannot be separated any more than can Scripture and Tradition or faith and good works.
Dissenting Catholics believe that they can have the Church as their Mother without obeying that Mother as a teacher. We must demonstrate with the holiness of our own lives and the cogency of our arguments that the Church is a Mother whom we never outgrow, a Mother whose beauty and wisdom increase with age, a Mother who deserves our reverence and obedience and not our arrogance and condescension.
There is a paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that should be posted in large letters in every parish in America: “Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh” (675).
Listening to one’s own voice or the voice of society instead of the voice of God is easy to do, since, as Elijah discovered, God speaks in “a still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). But the consequences of doing so, as the Catechism indicates, are literally apocalyptic. Orthodox Catholics, like the remnant of 7,000 that God promised to Elijah, need not make this still, small voice any louder. There is enough noise in the world as it is. But if we reveal in our words and in our lives the goodness, the truth, and the beauty of the Oracle of God, the world will grow, slowly but surely, as silent as heaven during the half-hour before the seven trumpets sound (Rev. 8:1).
A day will come when the still, small voice will sound like thunder. Be it with joy or with terror, each of us on that day must hear it. Until then we had best attend to God’s holy Oracle.