Why Doctrine and Pastoral Practice

are Indivisible
JAMES KALB
There has been a great deal of talk in the Church lately about a supposed
opposition between rules and reality, theology and life, doctrine and pastoral
considerations. Some of the talk has gone to extremes, suggesting that rules,
doctrine, and organized thought matter little in comparison with the pastoral
needs of the immediate situation.
Such talk, like other extreme positions, can sometimes be useful to make a point,
but made habitual the approach would destroy order and rationality by
substituting the Deed for the Word. Within the Church it would lead to a
combination of willfulness and tyranny, since those in authority and those on the
spot could do whatever seemed good to them at the moment, while in relation to
the world at large it would deprive the Church of her specific mission, which has
to do with things that rise above immediate goals, and reduce her to a
humanitarian NGO with unusual rituals and a quirky way of talking about things.

The Church’s pastoral approach and ways of thinking should of course be based
on reality, but what reality? Are we speaking of the reality of people’s situations
as they interpret them, or perhaps of secular trends or sociological studies? Or
are we rather speaking of the realities with which the Church has always been
most concerned, for example the reality of what men and women are, of what
marriage is, and ultimately of the Most Real Being?

With respect to marriage, for example, it seems that the key point is not rules
proposed by Pharisaical doctors of the law, but the reality marriage brings into
being, the physical, social, and spiritual union of man and woman, which is the
basis of the family and therefore as real, permanent, and undeniable as the
relation between parent and child or brother and sister. To detract from that
reality would not only promote falsehood but attack the position and dignity of
ordinary people in their family connections. For the rulers of the Church to do so
would be a betrayal that would help the wealthy and powerful reduce the people
to an aggregate of production and consumption units, with no connections
among themselves that need be respected. Why would that be pastoral?

Still, talk that sometimes suggests practical antinomianism, like most talk among
experienced people in responsible positions, points to genuine issues. There is
always a gap between the formal teachings of the Church and the actual or at
least practical beliefs of her members, including many hierarchs. That gap seems
unusually wide today, but even with the best will it could not simply be abolished,
since there is always a tension between theory and practice.

It’s an awkward tension to deal with, in part because it’s so resistant to clear
understanding. As someone said, in theory there is no difference between theory
and practice, but in practice there is. That means theory can’t see the issue, so it
can’t comment on it, but practice can’t explain it either, because practice acts
rather than explains.

The awkwardness becomes all the greater in a religious setting. Religion must be
practical, because it must transform life, but it can’t be merely pragmatic, because
it transforms it by reference to realities that go beyond what is visible. It tells us
that this-worldly ways of grasping reality fall short, and we must supplement
them with faith, “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things
that appear not.” Doctrine articulates faith, and makes it usable as a path to
truth, so the Church must take it very seriously even in the face of difficulties. As
Paul said, she must preach the Word in all patience—reprove, entreat, rebuke—
even out of season.
Today taking doctrine seriously is often enough called “fundamentalism.” For the
most part that’s a term of abuse, not useful for analysis, that simply means
“religion that tells people something that doesn’t seem sensible to present-day
secular progressives”—in other words, religion that matters. It’s a way for left-
wing culture warriors to say that Southern Baptists and orthodox Catholics are
just like ISIS. After all, don’t they all say crazy things—things people don’t say at
Harvard or in the New York Times? And once people start saying crazy things,
who can tell what they will do?

So complaints about fundamentalism are most often a way of shutting people up

by appeal to supposedly authoritative social consensus. Even so, the term does
have a legitimate use. Catholicism is a religion of reason and not of fideism or
fanaticism. That’s part of what it means to place the Word before the Deed. We
accept natural law, cultivate the arts and sciences, have a long history of
theological speculation, and believe that the different departments of human
thought and activity illuminate each other.

With that in mind, Catholicism features a certain amount of back and forth
between religious understandings and other aspects of life and thought. They
require each other to complete our understanding of the world: how we
understand the Bible is affected by the development of the secular sciences, even
as our understanding of those sciences, and how we place them within the
scheme of human life and the world as a whole, is affected by the Faith.

As in all complex affairs, it’s possible to go wrong in many ways, and the true path
requires a balance. Within the Church that balance is maintained by Tradition,
Scripture, reason, the example of the saints, and the living authority of the
Church. Without those things working together—without, for example, mutual
support between clergy and tradition—there’s no reliable way to understand the
Faith and its application.

In recent times the balance seems to have become very difficult to maintain.
Tradition has been debunked, authority and reason overvalued as well as
undervalued, and the sense lost that truth should provide the ultimate standard.
Hence the supposed conflicts among doctrine, theology, human reality, pastoral
considerations, and so on.

When the balance falls apart people grab whatever fragments they can. Some go
with sacred texts and inherited understandings in a literal-minded and
individualistic way, and become genuine fundamentalists. Others go with what
seems most consonant with their experiences, reasonings, and understanding of
the demands of the hour, and turn the Faith into a therapeutic approach or
merely human philosophy.

Hence the attempts, most recently during the pontificates of Saint John Paul II
and Benedict XVI, to re-establish doctrinal and to some extent disciplinary
coherence. Such attempts have had their benefits, but the coherence of a system
can’t depend too much on the statements and actions of a single participant, so
it’s not clear how far they were able to turn the tide. At present the effort seems in
disarray, leading to open conflicts of opinion on basic matters at very high levels
of the Church, and talk of downplaying doctrine and discipline in favor of
decentralization and practical judgments in particular situations.

Such an approach seems unlikely to support the reliable system of thought and
action people look for in a Church that claims to be One, Holy, Catholic,
Apostolic, and capable of speaking for the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It makes
life easier for functionaries, and lets people with problems that seem
overwhelming avoid dealing with them in their gravity, but it will evidently lead
to the Church mattering less and less to anyone. That’s not good if what the
Church has to say is supremely important.

So what to do? What any of us can do is limited. The most essential point to
remember, though, is that the truth about the most important things does not
change, and the Church can’t simply be identified with her current state from a
human perspective. It did not change the Catholic doctrine of marriage, which is
a simple statement of the reality of the situation, when Pope Alexander VI
threatened his mistress with excommunication if she went back to her husband.
Nor did it transform papal authority when ninth and tenth century popes fell into
the unfortunate habit of invalidating each others’ acts, and in one case mutilating
each others’ corpses. For the rest, it seems we can’t go with the flow and leave
things of the spirit to others as much as some of us might like. Now more than
ever, it is up to each of us to do what he can to know the Faith and bring it to life
here and now. That, after all, is what we are here for.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared January 14, 2016 in Catholic World
Report and is reprinted with permission. The image above, which depicts Peter
preaching in Jerusalem, is located in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, Italy.
What a Pastoral Church Looks Like
JAMES KALB
Now more than ever, there are calls for a more pastoral Church. That’s a good
thing. It’s the clergy’s job to be our pastors, and who could object to priests,
bishops, and popes doing their job?
“Pastor“ means shepherd, so we find what pastors should do by looking at what
shepherds do, especially in the Bible. A pastoral Church, then, would be one that
looks out for her members, protects, feeds, and fosters them, maintains a
sheepfold, brings back those who stray, drives away wolves and bears, and is
ready to sacrifice the personal interests of her pastors—for example, their worldly
standing and reputation—to their flock’s well-being.

With that in mind, it’s hard to see why a pastoral church would primarily be one
that rejects boundaries, is always going outside of herself, emphasizes openness
to the world and dialogue with those who reject her, and wants above all to
accompany people on their walk, wherever that may take them.

Some of those things have a function in some ways—the Church should offer
what she has to those outside her, and speak respectfully, honestly, and
substantively to them, and pastors should retain their concern for strayed sheep
who show no interest in returning to the fold—but they cannot be central. What is
central for pastors is the good of the flock, and, in particular, the specific goods
entrusted to the Church for their benefit.

Jesus said he came so that his people might have life more abundantly. More
specifically, he said he came to give eternal life, which he identified with knowing
God. So it seems our pastors’ job is to help those willing to accept the Christian
way attain a better life in this world, and then eternal beatitude, by growing
closer to God.
That seems basically a matter of developing the right orientation toward God and
the world in which he has placed us. In other words, our pastors are to help us
love God with our heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves. The
success of that project evidently requires certain conditions: concern for the
nature of God and man, so man’s good and God himself can be known better;
concern for the network of human connections of which we are part, so that unity
in truth and mutual love can grow, and evil communications can be kept from
corrupting good manners; and some concern for our physical well-being, since
poverty and illness disrupt human life.

So it seems our pastors, to be pastoral, should cultivate the theology of God, man,
and society—more or less in that order, since that is the order of their importance
and of the competence of the Church—pass them on to the people, and help them
understand and live by them. By doing so, they will lead them into the truths that
make them free, and help them become what God meant them to be and they
most truly are.

The effort is needed. It is difficult for an ordinarily weak and wavering Catholic to
live well in a world that treats him as an employee, consumer, and client to be
managed, and thus as a means to the political, social, and economic goals of
powerful interests and institutions. It becomes much more difficult when the
Church, which should be pastoral, leaves him to his own devices, and (worse)
finds reasons to subordinate herself to those same goals, interests, and
institutions. Matters become even worse to the extent the Church undercuts
institutions, such as family and local community networks, that interfere with
administration and commerce but enable ordinary people to come into their own.

Of course it is obvious what an ordinary Catholic should do in such a situation.

He should stop being so weak and wavering. Instead, he should fast, pray,
frequent the sacraments, love God and neighbor, and become a living saint. He
should view his situation as a challenge and opportunity, a spur to seeking
holiness with ever-greater fervency and a chance to display the loveliness of the
Faith to a skeptical world.

While he’s at it, he should also lose fifteen pounds, get regular exercise, eat a
healthy balanced diet, keep all his New Year’s resolutions, avoid wasting time
pointlessly, and do many other things he’s not likely to do more than a day or two
at a time. All of us know how to live much better than we do, and we deserve
blame for our failures. Even so, Church and society haven’t normally left it at
that. To the contrary, they’ve been quite concerned about ordinary people, who
after all constitute the great majority of their members—in most ways practically
all, since very few people exhibit heroic sanctity and virtue in all respects.

So a pastoral Church would be concerned about the weak and wavering who
nonetheless want to adhere to her. That is the whole point of having pastors.
With that in mind, such a Church would insist on giving people what is
specifically hers to give. She would teach clearly; catechize; ensure the solidity of
Catholic schools, scholarship, and publications; and insist that her teachers
accept her teachings. She would provide good examples through the conduct of
her clergy, and enforce at least minimal standards on everyone.

If she concerned herself with the environment, she would concern herself most of
all with the environment for Catholic life. Do institutions and accepted patterns
of life and outlook guard life, including infants in the womb and those nearing the
end of their lives? Do they respect and foster families and community networks,
which, after all, is a basic obligation of social justice? Do they educate young
people toward the best things in life? Do they facilitate means of livelihood that
are productive, don’t involve cooperation with evil, and leave time, energy, and
attention for other even more basic aspects of life?
If she decided to deal more specifically with a particular issue, for example, by
holding a Synod on the Family, she would emphasize most of all the Catholic
family and its current problems, for example, how it can maintain itself in an era
of careerism, consumerism, cohabitation, contraception, daycare, early childhood
education, media overload, gender ideology, and family policy that increasingly
refuses to accept the specificity and importance of the family as an institution.

What she and her rulers would never do is subordinate her efforts to those of
global managers, even though some goals—avoidance of starvation and ecological
disaster—are the same, and others like healthcare sound similar if they are left
sufficiently vague. The world’s rulers are enormously powerful, much more so
than in the past. They want to restructure all social relations in accordance with a
vision of things that is radically at odds with the Catholic one, and the success of
their projects would lead to something we would never want to live with.

We are called to be wise as serpents as well as innocent as doves, and he who sups
with the devil should have a long spoon. So a pastoral Church would above all
maintain her independence, based on her own understanding of the human good,
care little for popularity in the media, and nothing for her standing as a
contributor to current social projects. It is not those things, but Christ and the
salvation of souls that are her highest law. In times of trouble, she should
specially rally around those standards.