The following notes come from
Erick Ybarra, The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between
Catholics and Orthodox (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road, 2022)
According to the New Testament,
the Apostolic Tradition was “once for all delivered to the saints.” Both
Orthodox and Catholics agree that the divine Revelation which came through
Jesus Christ and his holy Apostles was “deposited” into the Church. The task of
the Church is to guard that deposit by disseminating its original content
without any addition, subtraction, or any alternation at all. . . . there is no
substantial change of the Revelation, but a change nonetheless, a change which
only makes the revelatory data more of what it is by a fuller realization of
itself through time. (pp. 90, 91)
To get a thoroughly accurate
picture of how the Catholic Church has thought about the nature of doctrinal
development, I rely heavenly on the treatment given by Dr. Lawrence Feingold,
who explains the Catholic position on doctrinal development most succinctly,
while referring to the most relevant ecclesial documents. If there was ever a
question of whether the idea of doctrinal development was at least
semi-official Catholic teaching, the following references should put the
question to rest. In his address at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Pope
St. John XXIII made it clear that the doctrine was once delivered by Christ
and the Apostles is unchangeable. He said:
This certain and immutable
doctrine, faithfully assented to, needs to be investigated and proclaimed
as our time demands. One thing is the deposit of faith, that is, the truths
contained in the venerable doctrine; another thing is the way by which they
are proclaimed, while always preserving the same sense and judgment.
For Catholics, therefore, the
deposit of faith is immutable and must be assented to. But as one can see,
there is a distinction to be drawn from doctrine and the manner in which it is
made known. There is immutability in doctrine while mutability in expression.
This duality of immutability of doctrine and mutability of expression is
communicated in the opening of the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic
constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius:
For the doctrine of faith as
revealed by God has not been presented to men as a philosophical system to
be perfected by human ingenuity; it was presented as a divine trust given
to the bride of Christ to be faithfully kept and infallibly interpreted.
IT also follows that any meaning of the sacred dogmas that has once been declared
by holy Mother Church, must always be retained; and there must never
be any deviation from that meaning on the specious grounds of a more
profound understanding. “Therefore, let there be growth . . . and all possibly
progress in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom whether in single individuals
or in the whole body, in each man as well as in the entire Church, according to
the stage of their development; but only within proper limits, that is, in the same
doctrine, in the same meaning, and in the same purport.
The Congregation of the Doctrine
of Faith (CDF) follows exactly this explanation in a document ratified by Pope
S.t Paul VI in 1973:
As for the meaning of dogmatic
formulas, this remains ever true and constant in the Church, even when it is expressed
with greater clarity or more developed. The faithful therefore must shun
the opinion, first, that dogmatic formulas (or some category of them) cannot
signify truth in a determinate way, but can only offer changeable approximations
to it, which to a certain extent distort or alter it; secondly, that these
formulas signify the truth only in an indeterminate way, this truth being like
a goal that is constantly being sought by means of such approximations.
Those who hold such an opinion do not avoid dogmatic relativism and they
corrupt the concept of the church’s infallibility relative to the truth to be
taught or held in a determinate way. (Mysterium ecclesiae, Declaration
in Defence of the Catholic Doctrine on the Church against Certain Errors of the
Present Day [June 24, 1973])
The same document harkens back in
the speech given by Pope St. John XXIII above and ways: “What is new and what
he recommends in view of the needs of the times pertains only to the modes
of studying, expounding and presenting that doctrine while keeping its permanent
meaning.” And, in description of what is actually changing in doctrinal
development, it states: “Moreover, it sometimes happens that some dogmatic
truth is first expressed incompletely (but not falsely), and at a later date,
when considered in a broader context of faith or human knowledge, it receives a
fuller and more perfect expression.” It is therefore unmistakable that a
Catholic perspective on doctrinal development is ruled by the immutability
of doctrine all the while having the mutable capacity to grow in its
expression, adding clarify or explication from what is implicated. (pp.
92-95)
The idea here is not that the
Church learns brand new things which the Apostles would have cocked their heads
sideways to. Rather, the same divine Helper, the Holy Spirit, which animated
the Apostles and led them “into all truth,” continues to live in the Church and
lead the Church into the same. To say that we are limited to simply repeating
what the Scripture says without allowing it to cause more growth in the
apprehension of divine content, is to deny that the Holy Spirit can empower
clarifying resolutions when the doctrine debates arise. On top of that, we must
admit that not every possible theological question related to faith and morals
was confronted by the Apostles or the early Fathers. On this point, the
Apostles are not surpassed in knowledge, as if a greater knowledge borne by us
stands between us and them. rather, it is simply time which stands between us
and them. It was the successors to the Apostles who were faced with fresh, new,
and unforeseen questions that were never before posed. (p. 101)
Theoretically speaking, if the
Apostles during their missionary days in Jerusalem were put in a time machine
forward to the Council of Nicaea (787), which dogmatized the legitimacy of icon-veneration,
they would probably have to ponder the arguments as if they were new questions
to them. I do not for a second think that they would have come to a different
conclusion, but they may not have had all the intellectual minutia right off
the bat. (p. 101)
The assumption behind this
assumption behind this objection is that in order for something to be shown
true, it must be universally accepted, but huge sections of the Nicene Creed
were not universal accepted until doctrine more fully developed. This should
suffice to show that a lack of universal acceptance at one point in time does
not present a particular belief from rising to the level of unquestionably certain
belief later on. Such is the nature of doctrinal development. (p. 154)
Returning to the matter of a criteria
for the ecumenicity of councils, just how and why ecumenical councils came to
be regarded as “infallible” is another phenomenon which underwent historical,
qualitative, and conceptual evolution. This does not entail an introduction of
the foreign or novel ideas into the conversation of the Church. Rather, the Church
looks back upon the Tradition to pull out implications whose principles are
already inherent in such Tradition. (p. 170)
Was the Tome of Leo Infallible?
One question that has been variously
answered throughout history is whether the Tome of Leo was a papal ex cathedra
teaching and whether the eastern bishops received it as such. This is a
difficult question to answer, and much of the substance of the papal dogmas do
not hinge on a positive or negative answer. Whether the Tome was, ipso facto,
infallible by the divine intervention of God seems to have little relevance to
the disputes between Orthodox and Catholics. The more relevant question is
whether the Church Fathers understood a pope’s official teaching to be ipso
facto, infallible.
It should also be borne in mind
that this question of the precise nature of papal decrees was a matter of theological
development, much like how the contemporary Orthodox Church is still trying to
figure out the institutional primacy in Orthodoxy as well as the mechanics of a
successful pan-Orthodox Council. (p. 320)
The two stories of Pope Vigilius
and Pope Honorius makes for an especially important growth in doctrinal
development with regard to the papacy. How are we to understand the tradition
which says the First See of government known among men, there are exceptions to
the primary rules. The exception, in fact, is what proves the rule. (p.
533)
. . . the ex cathedra
condition appears to be a logically supported development from the idea of the
Apostolic See as the final judge, but it is a development nonetheless. It would
be very difficult to say that the Byzantines at the Sixth Ecumenical Council employed
this ex cathedra conditioning to explain the existence of the heretical
Pope Honorius. While they accepted St. Agatho’s letter, which included a claim
of Christ’s promise to protect the Apostolic See from error while at the same
time accusing Pope Honorius of heresy, there is no an explicit explanation for
how these two unseemly facts are conjoined in the minds of the bishops at the
council.
Fr. John Chapman, therefore, slightly
exceeds the evidence provided by the Sixth Ecumenical Council when he states
that “no council has by acts and word more fully recognized the authority and infallibility
of Rome than the sixth council which condemned—rightly condemned—Pope Honorius”
(The First Eight General Councils and Papal Infallibility [London:
Catholic Truth Society, 1906], 67). He can only say this by assuming that the
churchmen at the time were conscious of a strict distinction within papal
teaching, namely, between ex cathedra and ordinary fallible
decrees that we saw articulated in the fourteenth century Carmelite Guido
Terreni. Although it seems to be assumed by Pope St. Leo II, it is only by the
time of Hadrian II (869) that we have an explicit record of how it was resolved
that the Petrine supremacy stands firm even if an occupant of Peter’s Chair
fails in doctrine. That would lead to further developments in the second millennium
. . . (p. 544)
The Catholic Church’s dogmatization
of the papacy over the centuries leading up to the First Vatican Council is,
admittedly, a complex development which can appear to include certain novelties,
but that substance of the Petrinological DNA, mixed with the scriptural and patristic
gloss on the authority of the keys, is only further elucidated in order to
speak to the Church’s confrontation with the unfolding drama of time and
history. The resources with which to maintain outward and visible unity for the
Church of Christ has been maintained by, among other things, the insistence of
the divinely appointed position of the head of the Church. (p. 682)
