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HIERARCHY OF TRUTHQUESTION:
ANSWER:CHRIST THE man is Christ the truth. Therefore, divinely revealed truth is eternal, unchanging and absolute. What must “evolve” is not Divine Revelation but rather human understanding. This is predicated on the good will of men and women in the Church. They see the maturity of their own spiritual growth and intellectual maturity in continuity with the thought of Catholic generations that preceded them. IN THIS sense, we can understand continuity as the “procession” of Sacred Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium in time. Neither Church leaders or theologians, least of all dissenters, are qualified to lead such a procession, for this responsibility Christ entrusted to “another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. [Jn 14:16-17] Nevertheless, as we shall see, the teaching authority of the pope in union with the college of bishops is very important. "YOUR REMEMBRANCE"THE SPIRIT of God is directed by Christ to lead and guide the Christian community in remembering “these things I have spoken to you”. Such remembering is not the task of merely of the first generation, first century or first historical age in the Christian era but rather all generations including the present. Contemporary Christians must explicitly heed the word of Christ:
“REMEMBRANCE” MEANS recollection. To “bring to your remembrance” is restrictive in the sense that it does not authorize Catholics of any generation to overturn the beliefs and practices of past generations of Catholics in the name of modernity. Nor may contemporary Catholics degrade the “deposit of faith” for the sake of succeeding generations who would find themselves in discontinuity with the “remembrance” of all that Jesus Christ taught and bereft of the Spirit’s true voice. EGOTISM AS OBSTACLEDISSENTERS ALMOST always share one characteristic—they dogmatize the content of their own minds. Such egotism becomes an obstacle between the dissenter and the Church. He can no longer objectively discern the order of God’s eternal law and consequently his right relationship to the truth. Dissent leads him to reject the community of faith in which he is situated. It leads him to judge God’s eternal law and to attack those who defend it. FIRST BELIEVEHUMAN UNDERSTANDING of Divine Truth evolves when the gospel is applied to the needs of the present generation in an authentic way. The truth of Jesus Christ is first and foremost intended for the salvation and care of souls. Subordinate to this mission would be its application to contemporaneous problems arising from cultural, sociological and political concerns. ST. AUGUSTINE (5th c.) expressed succinctly the relationship between belief and understanding: “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” [In Joann. Evang. Tractate, 26, 2] HIERARCHY OF TRUTHSTHE CHURCH'S present understanding of dogma (Gk. dokein) has its roots in the 18th c. and was formalized in the Vatican Council I. Vatican Council II speaks of a hierarchy of doctrinal truths:
TRUTH AS DOGMATHE VATICAN Council II fathers did not differentiate dogma or doctrine in their general reference to a “hierarchy of truths”. Rather they focused concern on the pastoral life of the Church and the normative means of catechetical application of Christian truth. BY WAY of illustration, the COUNCIL OF TRENT anticipated the subject of the “hierarchy of truths” with respect to what it termed doctrine—what we now would understand as dogma:
THE CONTEMPORARY CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH (1994) pays homage to this overview. REVEALED BY GODA DOGMA is considered infallible truth because it is revealed by God in the biblical and apostolic tradition of the Church (the Church considers the death of the last apostle to mark the end of Divine Revelation). Solemnly decreed and/or taught in the Church’s ordinary, universal magisterium, the faithful are obliged to believe it. HENCE, THE incarnation of Jesus Christ and the articles of the Nicene Creed are certainly explicit dogmatic teachings in that they meet the strict criteria outlined above. Implicit in Sacred Scripture and Tradition are the solemnly taught Marian dogmas of the Assumption and Immaculate Conception. CHURCH MATURESTHE CONSTANT teaching that taking an innocent life is always wrong is an example of dogma clearly and firmly developed in the ordinary exercise of magisterial teaching (catechetical) authority. (The virtue of justice defends the unborn from the sin of prideful moral or theological intellectualism and any monstrous inference that they are doctrinally vulnerable.) DOGMATIC PRONOUNCEMENTS concerning God are expressed, by necessity of human limitations, in analogous terms. Praxis (Gr. practice) shows that the believing Church matures in its understanding and proclamation of dogmas consistent with the sources of Divine Revelation. This progress is genuine as gradually dogmas are more clearly and profoundly grasped and effectively taught. "WHAT SEEMS RIGHT"IRONICALLY, DOGMA comes from what can be construed in Greek as meaning “opinion”, but the weight of law—“what seems right”—ascribed to it by the Church has its roots in the New Testament:
AS REGARDS dogma, the weight of evolutionary progress falls more heavily on the part of the believing Church to perfect its understanding of the fullness of the Divine Revelation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the magisterium:
DOCTRINE AS TEACHINGWITH RESPECT to doctrine, however, the burden of evolutionary progress under the Spirit’s guidance is shared more evenly by the magisterium and the lay faithful. A doctrine (Lat. doctrina “act of teaching”) is any truth taught by the Church and proposed as necessary for acceptance by the faithful. A DOCTRINE may be a formal proposition such as Transubstantiation, a theological proposition such as a saint’s canonization, or as a consequence of Natural Law such as the sinfulness of contraception. Interestingly, it is a doctrine that a dogma cannot undergo substantial, intrinsic changes because this would render God creaturely—mutable and contingent. SITZ IM LEBENPERHAPS WE could say that doctrine is truth expounded in response to the situation-in-life (Ger. sitz im leben) of the Christian community before the world passes away. Dogma is truth reflective of heaven’s eternity which is absolute and unchangeable: “And I saw no temple in the city for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” [Rev 21:33; cf. 1Cor 7:31b, 13:12-13] OF DOGMA and doctrine, nevertheless, there is a distinction with a difference: a dogma is always considered a doctrine, but not every doctrine is a dogma. Colloquially speaking, the more recent the explication and the more vociferous the debate, the greater likelihood that the truth being proposed is considered to be on the doctrinal level, as for example Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae (1986). ULTIMATE RECOGNITIOYET, THE more a proposition of faith is fought over and expounded successfully, the more closely it approaches dogma’s threshold, e.g. the movement to preserve papal authority in the midst of the decline of papal rule (19th c.) which culminated in the development of the doctrine of papal infallibility [Vatican Council I Pastor Aeternus 1869-1870] and nineteenth century Marion piety culminating in the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception [Ineffabilis Deus Dec 08, 1854] and the Assumption of Mary. [Pius XII Munificentissimus Deus Nov 01, 1950] INFALLIBILITY IS the magisterium’s ultimate recognitio for any doctrine. For some, the doctrine of infallibility (whether the pope acts alone or in union with the College of Bishops) is troubling for it appears in practice invasive of the realm of dogma even to possibly opening the very door that the Church has considered closed since the death of the last apostle. This is to ask whether the charism of infallibility could create extraordinary Divine Revelation from ordinary evolutionary doctrine. AMBIGUITIES INVOLVEDAS AN illustration of the some of the ambiguities involved in the hierarchy of truth, Pope John Paul II’s “Apostolic Letter on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) has been criticized as doctrine purporting to have the privileged certitude of dogma:
MANY THEOLOGIANS attest that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is the precisely the exercise of infallibility, that is to say, the Chair of Peter invoking the Spirit to act in union with the will of the supreme pontiffs and the College of Bishops as expressed throughout the history of the Church. CONVENTIONAL WISDOMI AM a theologian-as-priest lacking advanced degrees and scholarly inquiry with respect to scriptural, doctrinal and moral theology. I have certainly exhausted my small storehouse of spiritual goods on the subject of the relationship between dogma and doctrine. PERHAPS I should be content with the conventional wisdom that the “hierarchy of truths” proceeds in somewhat this order: fervor, devotion, practice, belief, teaching, doctrine and dogma. But in truth, the “hierarchy of truths” is greater than the sum of its parts. We are consoled by the wisdom of St. Paul who grappled constantly in the matters of distinctions and differences:
TRUST THE HOLY SPIRITTHE CLOSER a Catholic approaches dogma, to be sure, the more he or she had better be found on bended knee with hands folded in prayer and eyes to the ground. The closer a believer approaches dogma, the more he or she needs to trust the Holy Spirit’s guidance of Supreme Pontiff in union with the bishops of the Church:
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