A Note on Religious Assent and Dissent

THE U.S. BISHOPS' ACCEPTANCE IN 1999 of a (rather vague) plan for implementing Vatican directives meant to bring Catholic higher education closer to the Church returns to the forefront questions of what sorts of assent are owed various Church teachings and what forms of dissent from them are licit. ¹ This will also mean a return to the 1998 Apostolic Letter Ad Tuendam Fidem (ATF), with its Profession of Faith and its literally canonical specification, repeated from the 1989 Profession of Faith and purposely paralleling that in the Western and Eastern canons, of what appear to be three distinct kinds of doxastic stances, each suited to a different kind of Church teaching. ² The Letter's Profession of Faith contains three main sections--called "paragraphs" in the document, its accompanying commentary, and here, though the document's format does not strictly conform to that designation--each dealing with a category of Church teaching and enjoining a doxastic stance toward it.

The first paragraph calls for the believer to profess that "with firm faith [she] believe[s] each and everything that is contained in the Symbol of faith," that is, the Creed. It continues with her affirmation that "with firm faith [she] believe[s] everything contained in the Word of God, whether written or handed down in tradition, which the Church, either by solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed." The second paragraph calls for her "firmly [to] accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teachings on faith and morals." The third paragraph enjoins "religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings . . . enunciated when they [the Pope or the assembled bishops] exercise their authentic magisterium," whether or not therein they "intend to proclaim these teachings by a definitive act."

All this can pinch intellectually, restraining not so much free inquiry as the liberty of the inquirer's belief to alight and take flight according to its own inclination. It is not surprising that some academic theologians--whose profession, calling, and oftentimes avocation is questioning, exploring, and learning Church teaching--have expressed concern and sought some intellectual "wiggle room." Of course, inquiry into why a doctrine is true, how it is best understood, and how it implies certain other claims is not the same as, and does not include, inquiry into whether it is true, nor whether it is comprehensible at all, nor whether it supports the other claims. So, the pinch need not be so tight on those who know their business and its limits. Nevertheless, we can expect attempts to employ the Letter's, Profession's, and Canons' tripartite structure to carve out room for dissent in regard to moral teaching and the ordinary magisterium. My efforts here are meant to cast doubt on one such search for space for theological dissent, first, by suggesting an alternative way of understanding the differences among the types of assent required and, second, by suggesting that theological dissent even on matters of moral doctrine--where, since the highly publicized early dissent from Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, it has been especially obdurate, widespread, and persistent--should make little practical difference in the dissident's life except when the dissent is of fairly extreme forms. I will briefly treat, in turn, assent and its forms, and dissent. My aim is not to settle any theological issue, since that would be presumptuous and beyond my training, knowledge, or competence. Rather, I mean only to offer considerations pertinent to the work of those who do pursue theological inquiry, and to make some suggestions, informed by my own philosophical reflections.

Assent

The variety of verb expressions used in ATF may suggest, as does my own language above in speaking of "several doxastic stances," that the document holds Catholics to lesser belief in some teachings than...