Bishop Musonius of Neocaesarea died in 368, and St. Basil sent a consolatory letter to the Christians of that city. He praised the deceased as “a bulwark of his native land, an ornament of the churches, a pillar and foundation of the truth, a firm support of the faith of Christ, a steadfast helper for his friends, a most formidable foe for his enemies, a guardian of the ordinances of the Fathers, an enemy of innovation.”
This seems a fine eulogy, except that the final sentiment is almost unintelligible to modern ears. It seems eccentric, contrary to common sense. Isn’t innovation a Good Thing? The newest computers are cheaper and more powerful. The newest cars get better mileage. The newest buildings are built stronger. Isn’t newer better?
It’s getting a little hard to find people who answer, “Not necessarily.” Even many of today’s self-described political conservatives—their very name seems to imply an opposition to things new—want innovation. They are not interested in the re-establishment of a status quo ante. They do not want to return to the interventionism of the Nixon administration or the complacency of the Eisenhower years.
They want to do things that have never been tried before (at least in living memory), such as a flat-rate income tax and the separation of school and state. They want to effect a thoroughgoing break with current ways of thought and action.
In short, they want to innovate. At times it seems they have little in common with the father of political conservatism, Edmund Burke, who argued that “if it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
Burke was not a Catholic, but his was a Catholic sentiment. Of all the world’s religious institutions, the Catholic Church is the most authentically conservative, the least innovative. And yet it is always changing. Its changes are misunderstood even by many of its members, and its refusals to change infuriate Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The confusion arises from an inability to distinguish between doctrines and customs.
Despite claims to the contrary, on no doctrinal teaching, once definitively stated, has the Church ever “changed its mind.”
Slavery, you say? The Church never taught its desirability but only that, given the fact of its existence and the institution’s intractability, the slave should be obedient in all things short of sin. (See Paul’s advice in Philemon.)
Usury? The teaching hasn’t changed, but the definition of the word has, so that today, in civil law, it doesn’t mean what it meant in medieval moral manuals—where, by the way, it had nothing to do with the amount of interest on a loan.
Birth control? Despite what some confessors or theologians may say, the Church teaches what every Christian community taught before 1930: that contraception is immoral without exception. It is not a matter of personal preference.
Purgatory? It’s still something that every Catholic must believe in, just as he must believe in the Resurrection, the Trinity, and the existence of heaven and hell. Purgatory has not become an “optional” doctrine (there being no such thing).
Many people, both liberals and conservatives, have difficulty perceiving that the Church can be innovative and unchanging at the same time—innovative in the presentation and protection of its patrimony, unchanging in that patrimony’s content.
Liberals look at the customary aspects and see change: the pope in a popemobile instead of a carriage, the establishment of national episcopal conferences, the admission of women to certain non-ordained ministries. These are all changes, so why not changes in doctrines too?
Where liberals would welcome doctrinal changes, some conservatives fear that they might occur. They draw conclusions not unlike the liberals’. They think that changes in customary matters imply impending changes in beliefs.
For years (I can remember this from my youth), in religious matters we kept separate from Protestants; now we talk with them. Does this mean we are about to accept their once-anathematized doctrinal distinctives as true?
Women and girls are now found in the sanctuary. Does this mean ordination of women is coming? Some conservatives think so.
Those conservatives lack confidence in the immutability of Catholic doctrinal teaching, and that suggests that they too confuse doctrines with customs. In fact, none of the doctrinal about-faces they fear will come to pass.
Doctrines can become more deeply understood over time, but they aren’t subject to essential change. Once true, always true; once false, always false.
Protestant distinctives such as belief in sola scriptura and disbelief in purgatory remain false, and our talking with Protestants and even at times praying with them won’t change doctrines.
That females now can serve at the altar doesn’t change what the priesthood is. Like many, I think this particular change was unwise, for multiple reasons. Nevertheless, it doesn’t bring women any closer to ordination. Those who hope that it will, and those who fear that it will, have an insufficient grasp of the distinction between doctrines and customs.
According to the historian Eusebius of Caesarea, St. John the Evangelist fled the public bath of Ephesus when the heretic Cerinthus entered. “Let us flee, lest the bath-house fall in, for Cerinthus, the enemy of truth, is within.”
Nineteen centuries later popes take a different tack. They meet theological descendants of ancient and medieval heretics and seek ways to bring them into union with the one Church established by Christ.
Two approaches, two methodologies, but only one set of beliefs underlying them.
When it comes to the content of what we believe, our recent popes haven’t differed from the long-deceased Musonius. Each has been, like him, “an enemy of innovation,” even as he innovatively protects the unchangeable.
No matter what this or that pope may do to the externals, he can’t change the internals—partly because the Holy Spirit won’t let him, but mostly because facts are facts.