The new head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said in his first major statement concerning his new job that he saw it as ?helping the Church see how beautiful and wonderful God?s love is?. If that becomes the tone with which the CDF approaches its work in future then Pope Benedict XVI?s appointment of Archbishop William J. Levada, who is standing down as Archbishop of San Francisco, will look truly inspired. The Pope himself, whom Archbishop Levada succeeds in this position, used to emphasise the CDF?s disciplinary rather than its evangelistic role, though he would not deny that one served the other. It is possible that any new Prefect?s best intentions do not long survive contact with the reality of the CDF?s brief, which inevitably includes the distasteful business of disciplining clergy who have gone astray.

The Pope has chosen someone with a background interestingly different from his own, chief pastor of one of the world?s most free-thinking (and free-living and -loving) cities. As an American, furthermore, he should have an instinctive feel for natural justice and due process, and no doubt an awareness that one of the major criticisms of the CDF is its perceived deficiency in that area. Theologians regularly emerge from contact with it both enraged and hurt by the way they were treated, with a profound sense of unfairness. In the literal sense, that causes scandal, for it weakens the value of the Church?s witness to justice elsewhere. The CDF?s mistake has been to understand itself as dealing only with a theologian?s opinions and hence not with the theologian as a person with rights. But for opinions read convictions, and to put someone?s convictions on trial comes very close to putting the individual on trial. That is certainly how it feels to the accused.

The CDF would silence many of its critics if it learnt to slacken the reins, and not to regard every new or unusual theological idea as automatically suspect ? or ?relativistic?, ...