In yesterday's post, I made the broad distinction between an approach to Catholic teaching which basically trusted in the Church's methodology and simply asked for an explanation of how that methodology worked, and an approach which sought a deeper, critical engagement with that methodology. In sum, I left the post with the question as to why, particularly in the modern West, even Catholics often seek firm justifications of Catholic methodology before using it in a way that they wouldn't, for example, subject secularized methodologies to a similar deep probing before using them.
But let's, for the sake of discussion, engage with that deeper probing of Catholic methodology in doing, say, social teaching or, more generally, moral theology. I think the first thing to say here are we shouldn't underestimate the nature of the task. Part of the process of secularization in modernity is to reduce religion to merely an aspect of life, rather like a hobby. It therefore becomes very easy to interpret the justification of Catholicism along the lines of a justification of stamp collecting: something you could imagine being done in a half hour lecture followed by polite questioning. But if you take seriously Catholicism's own self-understanding, the question of justification becomes less one of a particular, narrow aspect of life, but rather one of everything, not just of our supernatural end (our life after death with God) but also of our natural end (what it is to flourish during our earthly life). If you add to that the observation that, discussions even just about fairly narrow religious (or philosophical) questions have rumbled on throughout the ages with smart people on both sides, something of the size and incompletability of the task becomes obvious.
That said, I think there are two aspects of Catholic methodology that have been subject to particular probing during the course so far. First, there is the clarity of it. How easy is it to know what the 'Catholic view' really is? Secondly, there is the rightness of it. Given one knows what is being said, how is the truth of any particular claim to be assessed?
Let's take the clarity first. There is an ordinary, everyday level of teaching in the Catholic Church which is extremely easy to access. If you want to know what the Catholic view is about many things, you can look at officially published documents such as the Catechism or the Compendium of Social Doctrine, or even Papal teaching documents, and find out relatively quickly. It won't sort out every worry you might conceivably have (as was pointed out in the last session, some details of (eg) predestination have been deliberately left open by Papal teaching) but it will give clear answers on a great deal that other churches don't articulate. It is at this ordinary, everyday level that most Catholics live most of the time and all of us live some of the time. (The very fact that we can have a course on Catholic social teaching is evidence of the existence of a (relatively) coherent and well articulated body of teaching in this area.)
The existence of what might be called this pre-critical level of engagement with Catholic teaching is a consequence of what I take to be the fundamental claim of Catholicism: that Christ left a Church and not a book. If we all had to be theologians to achieve salvation, we'd be in serious trouble! So the first thing I'd note is that, on the everyday level of finding out what the Church teaches, there exists a body of teaching that it far clearer and more readily accessed than in most other mainstream religious bodies. But what of the rightness of that teaching? Assuming that we accept the existence of its clarity, what if we begin to worry about its rightness?
It is at this point that I think Catholic teaching displays another of its strengths: its intellectual depth. In essence, I think this is the point that Pope Benedict was making in his Regensburg lecture. If you wish to pursue critical engagement with Catholic teaching, that path both exists and is encouraged: it is possible to be critical catholically. So, for example, if I was prompted to move from that 'pre-critical' level of engagement with Catholic teaching that I have just described, I might move from the Catechism to the underlying teaching documents, and from the underlying teaching documents to the theology of the Doctors of the Church such as St Thomas Aquinas and then, perhaps, to the vast secondary literature that discusses him and the vast preceding philosophical and theological literature from which he emerged. (Given the role of grace and the virtues in our intellectual life, I would also be regularly praying and examining my conscience.)
Now there is no abstract guarantee what the results of such a critical process will be: as I have emphasized over the course, there is a strong emphasis on the pursuit of truth and love in freedom particularly in recent Catholic teaching. I do not know (and the Church does not claim to know) precisely what salvation looks like in every individual case. But there is sufficient clarity to suspect that some processes of critical engagement with the teaching are very hard to describe as Catholic. For example, someone who scoffed at the reality of Christ's presence in the Eucharist, who refused to ask Mary for guidance and protection, who abjured the intellectual inheritance of Aquinas in favour of Nietzsche, and who dismissed the authority of bishops to teach with any sort of authority might still claim to be Catholic, but it would be a claim that I would find very hard to understand let alone accept as plausible. Of course, many examples of 'dissenting' theologians are much less clear cut than that. Equally, some are much clearer: one simple (and helpful) question is often simply, 'Do you regard yourself as a Catholic?'
In sum, Catholic teaching and the process of Catholic critical engagement with that teaching is (relatively) clear. It is of course entirely open to someone to ask why we should be so interested in pursuing a particularly Catholic path rather than a path to truth simpliciter. Two responses to that. In the first place, that is an odd (even if not impossible) question for a Catholic to ask. At the least, I think I would be asking myself what it meant to identify as a Catholic and yet wonder what merit there was in thinking as a Catholic. Secondly, any non Catholic path of criticism will itself be making methodological assumptions which need to be subject to as much critical examination as Catholic claims. In many cases, the challenge to Catholicism in the West is from approaches which have been subject to far less critical examination than Catholicism itself.
In my next reflection on Wednesday's session, I'll turn to consider an approach which does directly challenge the content of Catholic social teaching and which was raised in the discussion: Marxism.
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