Book Review

When old certainties give way

A Church That Can and Cannot Change

John Noonan has written more on the historical development of particular moral teachings in the Catholic Church than any other person, but more important than the quantity of his work is its quality.

More than half of this book traces the development and finally the change in the teaching on slavery from the Hebrew Bible to the present. The other half contains three sections setting out in summary form three issues that Noonan has already dealt with in great detail and depth – usury, religious freedom, and the indissolubility of marriage. A final section reflects on how such change or development occurs in Catholic moral teaching in light of the four issues discussed.

Noonan’s careful and nuanced historical studies are very valuable in themselves, but they take on much greater importance today in light of the unwillingness of the papal Magisterium to admit the possibility of change in its moral teachings. Noonan’s masterful 1965 work on the historical development of the Church’s teaching on contraception led many theologians and others to conclude that change on this issue was both possible and necessary. But Pope Paul VI claimed he could not change the teaching because the Church and the hierarchical Magisterium had taught it for so long.

Pope John Paul II has continued to condemn artificial contraception within marriage and has never recognised the possibility that papal teaching on moral issues might be wrong. The hierarchical Magisterium con-tinues to insist that artificial contraception and some other concrete acts are intrinsically evil and against nature – two formulas that seem to deny any possibility of change.

But as Noonan points out, the teachings reviewed here also claimed to be intrinsically evil and against nature. Usury was intrinsically evil because it went against the nature of money. In addition, an explicit statement of Jesus (Luke 6:35) condemned interest-taking (perhaps, however, this interpretation was based on a mistranslation). So taught a series of popes; so taught three general councils of the Church; so taught all the bishops. Everywhere and at all times usury, the making of profit from a loan, was condemned as sin. Catholic theologians finally accepted usury at the end of the sixteenth century, but it was not until the eighteenth century that popes did.

Pope Gregory XVI, following a very long tradition, taught in an 1832 encyclical that freedom of conscience in society was “absurd and erroneous” or rather “folly” (deliramentum). John Paul II today teaches it is “intrinsically evil” to coerce rational human beings. The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church strongly condemns divorce as a grave offence against the natural law. But historical developments have been chipping away at the intrinsic evil of divorce. Catholic canon law accepts the Pauline privilege (based on an interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7) according to which a marriage between two unbaptised persons can be dissolved if one person converts to the Catholic faith and the other partner refuses to peacefully cohabit.

Then the canonists developed what is called the Petrine privilege. The pope has the power to dissolve a marriage between a baptised and an unbaptised person in favour of the faith. Noonan points out some tensions over the theory and practice of this Petrine privilege in the 1983 Code of Canon Law. In light of this theory and practice, the only truly indissoluble marriages at the present time are consummated marriages between two baptised persons. Consequently, the vast majority of marriages in the world today are not indissoluble despite what the 1992 Catechism says.

In this book, for the first time, Noonan deals with the historical development of the teaching on slavery. He recognises it is impossible in one book to present all the evidence of the Church’s acceptance of slavery as an institution but provides a set of illustrations of this pernicious practice. Slavery is the unknown sin because it was practised for so long without any sense of its sinfulness. Yes, the Catholic Church did not wholly deny the humanity of slaves; slaves could attain eternal happiness and were even declared to be saints; Christians themselves were freed from slavery to sin to become God’s slaves. But still, the Church accepted the institution until the nineteenth century.

Jesuits and the Ursuline nuns in the United States had slaves. Only in 1839, at the instigation of a British government, did Pope Gregory XVI condemn the slave trade. Slavery as an institution was still defended by prominent American churchmen even after the papal condemnation of the slave trade. At the end of the nineteenth century when Pope Leo XIII finally spoke out against the institution of slavery, he triumphantly claimed that from the beginning the Catholic Church had sought to eliminate slavery completely.

Noonan closes his account by quoting John Paul II’s condemnation of slavery as intrinsically evil. This contrasts with the very first chapter of the book that describes Cardinal Newman refusing to say slavery was intrinsically evil precisely because it was accepted in Scripture and in the life and teaching of the Church for a very long time.

The closing section on the development of moral teaching in light of the four issues is only 30 pages and cannot go into great depth on how change or development in moral teaching takes place. But the reader finds many nuggets here. In these four cases, the change in church teaching comes from change in the broader human experience. Noonan rightly insists that these four cases involve mistakes in teaching and true changes, not just harmonious development. In one page he gives three analogies to support the position that the Church will not lose respect if it admits its mistakes.

How does such change come about? Noonan proposes four tools by which development can and has occurred – analogy, balance, logic, and experience. But there is only one rule for moral development and that is the rule of faith that calls us to abound in our love of God and neighbour. I was hoping that Noonan might supply us with further criteria to analyse and judge moral development in the Church. He, however, insists that history is messy and therefore there can be no all-embracing rules for effecting moral change in the Church.

The book’s title is not entirely accurate. Little is said about the difference between what can and what cannot change. Noonan’s approach is historical, not theological. From a more theological perspective, two points seem to follow logically from this historical analysis. First, the hierarchical Magisterium has to learn the moral truth before it teaches it. Second, on complex, specific moral issues, the hierarchical Magisterium cannot claim an absolute certitude for its teaching.

Noonan has ploughed some of this ground in previous writings, but this well-written and meticulously researched book makes a very significant contribution today. In light of the Church’s own history, the hierarchical Magisterium needs to change some of the ways in which it carries out its role and function as a teacher of morality.

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