In a recent interview, Pope Francis stated, “The Church has to change” and “it must continue changing its ways, in the way to propose an unchanging truth”. The debate over whether the Church’s teachings can evolve is a contentious topic among Catholics today, particularly in the context of the ongoing Synod on Synodality.
Will the Pope change the Church’s stance on homosexuality, ordaining women as deacons, or blessing same-sex unions? These questions loom large over the Synod, and those who wish for change feel hopeful and emboldened in light of Francis’s recent revisions to the Church’s teaching regarding the death penalty and the permission for some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
Looking to the past
To understand our current situation, it may be helpful to look into the past. In 1845, John Henry Newman, the convert from Anglicanism and future Catholic saint, authored an Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.
Newman’s theology would later influence the Second Vatican Council over a century later. In this text, Newman was concerned about Protestant objections to Catholicism. He observed that when examining the Church’s history, it’s apparent how “the Church of one age” sometimes appears to teach something markedly different from “the Church of another age”.
With significant changes in teaching, how can we be certain that the Catholic Church of the 16th or 19th century was the True Church founded by Christ?
Protestants resolved this tension by rejecting the teaching authority of the Catholic Church and, instead, relied on “the Bible as the sole source of Revelation” and ultimately “their own personal private judgment as the sole expounder of its doctrine”.
A key thing to understand here is that Newman presumed that Church teaching had changed, sometimes in dramatic ways. That was so obvious of a fact for him that his concern was explaining how that change was possible, while still having continuity with Revelation, because the reality of change was so clear to people that it was scandalising them.
Two clear examples of change from the past couple of centuries concern religious liberty and the morality of slavery. In 1864, in his infamous Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius XI explicitly rejected the belief that “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”.
Yet, a century later, the Fathers of Vatican II declared that religious freedom is an inviolable right that “has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person”. The contrast is stark. Pope Benedict XVI eventually said that the Council’s teaching about religious liberty was a correction of the past and a recovery of “the deepest patrimony of the Church”.
Regarding slavery, the change in teaching is just as dramatic. In 1866, the Church authoritatively taught that slavery “considered in itself and all alone, is by no means repugnant to the natural and divine law.”
However, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope Saint John Paul II affirmed that slavery is “offensive to human dignity” and “intrinsically evil”, meaning it is always wrong, regardless of a person’s intentions or circumstances.
How doctrine develops
It is a historical fact that the Church’s teaching has dramatically changed. However, how doctrine develops is a more nuanced matter.
In Dei Verbum, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, the Church distinguished between the unchanging “realities” of Divine Revelation and our ever-growing “understanding” and expression of these realities. This distinction is crucial.
True development of doctrine, according to Pope Benedict, consists of deep continuity with the substance of historical teachings and discontinuity with how that doctrine is expressed. As we have seen, the discontinuity of expression can appear profoundly different from what came before. In his essay, Newman used the example of a butterfly to illustrate this point.
A fully developed butterfly looks entirely different from the caterpillar, let alone the larvae it came from. But those profound differences, even contradictions, do not change the fact that they are precisely the same animal.
An example of this can be seen in Pope Francis’s teaching concerning divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Communion in Amoris Laetitia. Without compromising the unchanging revelation about the nature of marriage and the Eucharist, the Pope drew upon the Church’s understanding of mitigated culpability to propose a new path forward.
In doing so, Francis has not only provided a pastoral solution for people in difficult situations but has also preserved God’s revelation of Himself as a good Father who does not judge His children for things they are not free to choose. Newman’s illustration here underscores another key point: development is something positive.
Dei Verbum states that the “contemplation and study” of believers, along with the teaching of the bishops, continually propels the Church forward “toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfilment in her”.
With this established, it becomes clear that rigidly clinging to historical teachings is not an authentic way to understand Tradition. This mentality was on full display after the Council, perhaps most explicitly in the opinions of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who founded the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
Lefebvre’s resistance to the Church’s development led Pope Saint Paul VI to write him a letter in 1976, where the Holy Father told the arch-traditionalist, “the concept of ‘tradition’ that you invoke is distorted”. This clarification that Paul VI offered Lefebvre is also essential for Catholics today during the pontificate of Pope Francis.
The suspicion and hostility directed at Pope Francis’s teachings, specifically those that have deviated in any way from his immediate predecessors, reveal this distorted understanding of tradition.
There’s a tendency, at least among conservative Catholics in the US, to critique everything Pope Francis teaches in light of what the Church taught in the past. This move may appear “traditional” and “faithful”, but ultimately, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of tradition and the role of the Magisterium.
In his response to a dubia submitted by Cardinal Burke—a response that echoed Paul VI’s letter to Lefebvre—this past summer, Pope Francis said, “both the texts of Scripture and the testimonies of tradition require interpretation to distinguish their perennial substance from cultural conditioning.” In other words, scripture and tradition are not self-interpreting. In that same letter to Archbishop Lefebvre, Paul VI said that Tradition “is inseparable from the living magisterium of the Church.” This is because, according to the Catechism, the “task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone” (CCC 85).
Only the Pope and bishops teaching in communion with him can authentically interpret historical teachings. Catholics understand the past through the present, not the other way around.
The Synod
Which brings us to the Synod on Synodality.
Behind the discussions over hot-button issues, there are competing understandings of development. Progressive voices see tradition as fluid, changing however it needs to in order to adapt to modern values.
Traditionalists, on the other hand, fear that any kind of change will be a rupture from the True Church of the past. From what’s been discussed, however, it’s clear that neither of these perspectives truly understands what the Church means by tradition, nor what Pope Francis is trying to do.
With this synod, Pope Francis has brought together people from all different perspectives and has asked them to listen to the Holy Spirit and listen to each other. At the end of this process, this group of bishops and laypeople will make specific recommendations to the Holy Father, who will ultimately have the final word.
We don’t know what Francis will eventually teach, but we do know that because his teaching is protected by the Holy Spirit, it will have a creative fidelity to Revelation. We also know that Francis believes that any and all change must be “in favour of the dignity of people”.
And that brings us to the place of trust. There’s a scene in the book of Exodus, after all of the plagues, when God’s people are trapped between the Red Sea and Pharaoh’s army. The people cried out to Moses in fear and despair, and he responded: The Lord will save you; you only need to be still (cf. Ex 14:14).
Then the Lord parted the sea. This was something new, something entirely unexpected, but still completely aligned with who God had revealed Himself to be. But even before that, it was God who listened to the anger and despair of his people, and in turn gave them the power, in this moment, to be still and trust.
Through the living Magisterium, God is always doing something new. The Church is always changing. We must ask for greater trust—knowing that God is already waiting to give it to us—not only that the Lord’s guidance and protection over His Church will keep her from falling into error, but that the Holy Spirit will inspire all of God’s people to be a light to the nations and bring about God’s Kingdom in a world that so desperately needs it.
Paul Fahey lives in Michigan with his wife and five kids and where he worked as a catechist and retreat leader for eight years. He has an undergraduate degree in Theology and is currently a full time student working toward a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counselling. He is a co-founder of Where Peter Is and the founder of the Pope Francis Generation podcast. You can find him at: https://popefrancisgeneration.com
