Peter CostelloThe Church Always in Need of Reform
by Gabriel Daly OSA
(Dominican Publications, €19.99)
Gabriel Daly is an eminent Irish theologian, now in his eighties and beset by the physical frailties of age. But his mind is as quick as ever it was, and his pen as sharp in debate as ever.
Unusually for a collection of theological essays, the book opens with an autobiographical chapter. Or rather, to borrow the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, a history of his religious opinion.
He recounts how back in the 1940s he was educated into the Thomism then seen as essential, even traditional. He tells how his world view was changed by Oxford – another link with Newman – where he had his intellectual horizons enlarged both his teachers, many of them many of great distinction, and by his engagement with rugby as a referee.
He is still something of a referee, but penalties are awarded in this book against many of those he sees as narrowing the outlook and the inscape of the Church (to borrow Hopkins’s term). All too often it seems many forget that the Church does not exist for itself, but for others.
Passage
His title is informed by a passage in the Decree on Ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council: “Christ summons the Church, as she goes on her pilgrim way, to that continual reformation of which she has always need, in so far as she is a human institution.”
This underlines that changes are needed, changes which theologians readily recognise today, but which were difficult for the generation before the 1960s to comprehend.
Though it not an image that occurs in his pages perhaps the Church is like a great and ancient tree. It is paradoxical that the same tree as seeded 20 centuries ago has over time grown and changed, and while remaining the same is quite different from what it was.
Growth and change are the signs of life. Not to change, not to grow, is a sign of decay, a prelude of dissolution.
This seems to be a truth of all God’s creation and of all human institutions. But Gabriel Daly sees everywhere a desire on the part of some to resist that ordained change and growth.
He speaks throughout this long and often detailed book of his respect for those who hold what are called “traditional views”, while well aware that they can impose their views on the freedom in Christ of others.
We should be able to disagree and yet respect each other. He speaks bleakly of the Congregation of the Faith. The Congregation was founded as an agency of the Vatican in 1542. Before that matters of doctrine were expounded by theologians in debate and settled by councils. They became a matter of universal agreement.
The Congregation belongs to the then emerging authoritarian bureaucratic state that came to flourish in the 17th Century in France and elsewhere. It is not, he suggests, inherent in the earlier nature of the Church.
Gabriel Daly writes with passion in many places. This is understandable. What is perhaps needed everywhere is a more mature and Christian view of others’ opinions, or indeed their beliefs. The Church, like the great tree alluded to above, has to grow and change; to do this every leaf and every root must be able to breathe.
“Faith cannot be shaped by the exercise of mere power,” he writes; “a fortiori neither can the theology that supports it. By all means let Vatican theologians express their opinions in the market place of ideas, where they can be examined, approved of, or disputed, where they can be examined, approved of or disputed by others who have an equal right to be heard. One can only hope that they may eventually come to appreciate the benefits of diversity in a pilgrim Church.”