by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Catholic World Report
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, former archbishop of Milan, died this past week, God rest his soul, and an Italian newspaper published a final interview in which Martini said the Church is "200 years out of date" One can speculate what he meant by that—probably some sort of accommodation to “modern” life. The Church, I suspect, was “out-of-date” the day it was founded, if "out-of-date" refers to something that is not just like everything else about us. The early Church found certain things in the Roman and Greek worlds it could accept and others it could not.
The Church has long taught that no new revelation can be expected after the death of the last Apostle. This is a sober thought in a world that longs for something “new” but refuses to look at the “newness” of the “good news.”
Basically, we were given everything we needed to know—or, better, that God wanted us to know—from the Church’s beginning. The task of the Church was primarily to keep in existence, essentially unchanged, the content of what was given over to her for safe-keeping. Logically, this understanding would make the Church a couple of thousand years out-of-date. The Church exists to tell us of our personal supernatural destiny and how it is to be achieved, in Christ, in whatever society or culture that it encounters. The Church is a “body,” the Body of Christ. Its members belong to one another because they achieve the same end by the proper means, if they will.
Catholics do have a notion of the “development” of doctrine, which means the Church does not change and that the ways it expresses itself might become clearer, provided nothing substantial about what has been handed on is undermined or discarded. The Church, though including finite human persons, does not exist as the result of a human initiative and planning.
Comments