The Challenge of Authority
Catholic Social Teaching in a Time of Shadow
By Sally Vance-Trembath
Senior Lecturer
Department of Religious Studies
Every tradition requires narrators. Crafted wisdom depends upon equally crafted translation. After his conversion, Ignatius seems to have been on a relentless mission to better understand God’s intentions. He readily embraced the Christian tradition’s descriptions about God’s character and presence. However, he applied his genius to figuring out the most effective, flexible, enduring, and repeatable way of integrating God’s intentions into his own thinking and behavior. Because his own intense experience of God was through the doorway of his imagination, he inspected, explored, and analyzed that doorway so others might become more alert to this most robust connection with God. Indeed, Ignatius provides us with a most luminous explication of the claim from the Hebrew Bible that “God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26).
Ignatius went on to summarize his insights (at the request of his “companions”) in his Spiritual Exercises. Like the Catholic social teaching tradition, this spiritual guide has become a significant text in the Catholic tradition. Ignatius continues to be recognized as a virtuoso among the numerous other spiritual guides in our tradition. Not so with the primary authorities for Catholic social teaching. Papal teaching no longer enjoys the degree of trust that the Exercises retain. Our students stand ready to engage Ignatius’ method in classroom through his emphasis on the search for knowledge and excellence. They embrace his method in athletic training and competition as well as in retreat programs and service projects. I find that he remains trustworthy. At least once a year I hear a student or a parent remark that they might not trust the Catholic Church anymore but they are committed to Jesuit education. What is a theologian who studies the Church to make of this situation? In the manner of Ignatius, let’s turn to an image; this one from literature.
We find ourselves like Gandalf and his hobbit companions: living during a time of shadow. Institutions and authorities have failed us. We may even feel abandoned. At the very least we are reluctant to trust Catholic authority figures. And for many of our students, the Catholic tradition is suspect or even an outdated relic. And the Catholic social tradition is strongly tied to the “father” of all Catholic authority figures: the pope. Papal authority has been especially dented by the institutional failures and abuses of this shadow season.
Indeed, your favorite pope can be read as a code these days. There are some Catholics who are rather vocal in their disapproval of Pope Francis. Pope John Paul II developed and privileged the emphasis on solidarity. That said, many Catholic women left the Church during his pontificate, and his treatment and selection of bishops has had enduring negative consequences. If you go further back to Pope Paul VI who wrote the encyclical condemning “artificial” contraception while allowing “natural” contraception instead, you will remember another wave of practicing Catholics who left over that teaching. Go one more step back in time, to Pius XII, the pope of World War II up to 1958, and you will find the full flowering of the pope as monarchical ruler. Pius famously said, if you have any question about Catholic teaching, look to me. He understood himself as the primary teacher and interpreter of
Catholic thought. With such different styles, what are we to make of papal teaching? It is no wonder Catholic social teaching seems underappreciated as saturated with papal teaching as it is.
Irene Bronner, A Little Light, 2022
I am highlighting the role of the pope because that goes directly to engaging Catholic social teaching. Across the centuries there have been two primary papal styles. During the first millennium, the style was not monarchical, it was collegial (a bit like a player-coach). The pope was one of the bishops who sometimes exercised authority in order to provide unity and stability and focused on his own local community: the Church in Rome. But as the bishop of Rome became more and more powerful as did the Roman emperor, a second style emerged. The monarchical papacy was established in 1073 by Gregory VII. Prior to that, the exercise of power by the pope was occasional and episodic. During the first thousand years of the institutional Catholic Church, the emphasis was on unity in the diversity of local bishops. Unless there was a specific need, the local bishop stabilized and led the local church. With Gregory VII the Church became an excessively centralized institution. And the papal office followed the pattern of kings and emperors. The monarchical papacy is one wave of seeping shadow that hovers over the Catholic teaching tradition. There is a direct line between it and the current distrust of authority. When I introduce the papacy to students, I frame the material with a formative moment from my own experience with authority.
When I was in eighth grade, we read To Kill a Mockingbird. The brilliant Sisters of Humility who staffed my Catholic school used that text across the curriculum, before “across the curriculum” was a thing. We explored it during religion class, history, English, even math! I loved that book. I loved it so much that I requested a hard copy for my birthday, which fell at the end of the school year. When my mother went to the one bookstore in town to order it, the man behind the counter thought she was kidding. It took more than a month for the book to arrive. While my mother and four siblings were all readers, it was my older brother, Alex, who was, and still is, the most avid reader. When I opened the package, my older sister teased me: “You have read that book so many times; what will be different about this copy? There are copies all over the house!”
Later that day when I was tucked in on the couch reading it, Alex sat down next to me. He was in his first year of college. The walls of his room were covered with drawings and clippings from magazines. The Who, The Beatles, and Cream, along with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, poured from his bedroom at all hours. I had written a book report for the Brotherhood Book Club competition and he had proofread it for me that spring. What he said to me on that couch is a tiny piece of tradition: “You love Scout. I know that.” I just looked at him. I still love my brother, but back then I flat out adored him.
I wanted to be like him. He went on, “I like her too; I like the way she describes her town and what happened there. She is what they call a ‘trustworthy narrator.’”
“What does that mean? There are narrators that I can’t trust? How would I know?” My 14-year-old mind was very disturbed and shaken by such an idea.
“To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel. Novels are a pretty recent invention, especially the narrator. When you go to college be sure to take a course on the novel. You will like it.” Then he handed me Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe.
“Here, you can keep this copy.”
What!!!??? I thought to myself. Novels are an invention? Scout isn’t just describing what happened? Harper Lee could have chosen a different narrator? Bob Ewell? Mr. Cunningham? What???
My brother introduced me to a new category of tradition that day: the novel as an invented art form. I think my brain actually vibrated. People could do such things? I knew Shakespeare had been developing and changing theater, because I went with my mother to the local park board summer productions. But the idea of invention was actually alarming.
Alex also validated my own participation in the tradition of reading. I had wanted that hard copy because I knew that in some way I would never be “done” reading that book. Alex knew how that felt. He gave me a way to think about why I loved that book so much. Now I wanted to learn about the people who invented the novel. Alex introduced me to the importance of the author; before Alex, the story was everything. By bringing in the author’s intentions, the author’s creativity, Alex welcomed me into the world of literature as a body of thought. And a body of thought, while it involves all kinds of details and data, requires a method—method is the oxygen for complex thinking and imagining. Ignatius saw this with brilliant clarity.
Method matters. The method that shapes papal teaching matters. Leo XIII who was pope from 1878 to 1903 inaugurated Catholic social teaching. He was a monarchical, imperial pope. By the time Leo came along Catholicism was very unified in its liturgy and spiritual practices. Catholic prayer forms and their capacity to transmit identity were global marketing campaigns long before Santa Clara had a business school.
Leo knew about power. But he also was the first pope to attempt engagement and reconciliation with the modern world. During a time of retrenchment, he decided that openness, with an embrace and respect for the intellectual life and for scholarship was the better approach. He transformed the rarely used “encyclical” form. With his Rerum Novarum, he initiated the now very regular practice of papal encyclicals regarding social matters.
Now, let me pull that method thread again. Pope Leo XIII did indeed usher in the important work of engaging wider society directly. But he was still a bit of an “unreliable narrator” in that his was a monarchical papacy. One of the methodological features of that style is the use of deductive reasoning to formulate teaching. So even though he does begin the process of looking at the actual human situation during the industrial revolution, his primary analysis still used previously formulated ideas about human identity. That analysis was structured around philosophical terms that presupposed “the natural law” theory of the person and society. Those “natural law” categories contain features that are not compatible with modern insights such as developmental psychology and recognition of the influence and power of social and cultural institutions.
So Rerum Novarum was a start and a very important one. To Kill a Mockingbird prepared me for the rich challenge of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and eventually for the works of Toni Morrison. The method of the novel developed and expanded and engaged stories in more and more humane ways—ways that rejected predetermined ideas about human personhood. So did the method of Catholic social teaching.
There is a pope who approaches the trustworthy stature of St. Ignatius: John XXIII. Pope John was a very reliable narrator with regard to just about every nook and cranny of Catholic teaching, practice, and even governance. He changed the method for Catholic social teaching by both his own individual style and his own writings that are a part of the tradition. But his imprint is most significantly on display in the monumental Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, otherwise known as Gaudium et spes (Joy and hope). Gaudium et spes is monumental for several reasons, not the least of which is it is NOT an encyclical. It is a much “higher” level of teaching than an encyclical. A document of an ecumenical Council of the Church is the highest form of teaching in Catholicism. Teaching at that level supersedes all other teachings.
Beginning with Pope John XXIII, the Church shifted back to the previous style of the papacy. “In a period of less than five years he almost single- handedly transformed the Catholic Church from a clericalist, monarchical, unecumenical, and theologically rigid body to a community of radical equality in Christ—laity, religious, and clergy alike— open to dialogue and collaboration with other Christian and non-Christian communities, with nonbelievers, and with the world at large.”1
Pope John was the greatest pope of them all, full stop. He was pope from 1958 to 1963, and he called the Second Vatican Council. With the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Catholic social teaching fully engaged the modern world. Gaudium et spes grounds its analysis in human experience. Its method is solidly inductive. That is, it begins by exploring the actual, concrete human situation with attention to those persons most directly involved in the situation. It does not begin with previously formulated ideas and “deduce” solutions from those ideas. Instead, it searches many and varied sources of critical reflection and established wisdom, with particular attention to the values in the Hebrew Bible and in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The new method that emerges in 1965 begins to shape Catholic social teaching in ways that are much more compatible with the modern world. Its inductive method is much better suited for fielding the challenging issues of our time because we have come to see that by beginning with a clear-eyed look at the actual situation, we will see things we have not seen before; we will hear voices we have not heard before. Its inductive method is more trustworthy and much more friendly to contemporary ways of generating and evaluating knowledge. Our students’ education depends upon the inductive method. They are at home in it.
So as we rebuild our trust in the institutional structures of the Church, what is Pope Francis’ method? Pope Francis follows the model of John XXIII. It surely makes sense to assume his formation in Ignatian spirituality matters here. We can trust him; he is a reliable narrator in our Catholic social tradition.
Sally Vance-Trembath was born and raised in Iowa. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame. She has worked in Catholic education all her professional life and has been particularly interested in the relationships among the Church, Catholic universities and the wider society. During the Archbishop Hunthausen investigation by the Vatican, she served on his Pastoral Council. That experience was seminal in the formation of her work on the ecclesiology of Vatican II. Her first publication was in Theological Studies entitled “John Paul II’s Ut Unum Sint and the Conversation with Women” in 1999. She has been teaching at SCU since 2006.
Notes
1 McBrien, Richard P., Lives of the Popes (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1997), p. 367.