The good referee leans towards letting the game flow

The content below is an excerpt from the current issue of The Tablet.

In the life of the Catholic Church it is understood that there is a referee who can blow the whistle when one of the players has strayed offside. But a good referee’s instinct is to proceed with humility and caution, and to prefer a quiet word of warning to sending players off the field of play. Pope Francis has appointed a new referee to take charge of the game of theological football – and has instructed him to exercise restraint before doling out red cards. In View from RomeChristopher Lamb writes that the appointment of his fellow Argentinian, Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández, as the leader of the doctrine office and his call for a total overhaul of how the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith does business has set off an ecclesial earthquake. The Pope told Archbishop Fernández that “at other times” his predecessors “came to use immoral methods, when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued”. As we write in our leader this week, it will have escaped no-one’s notice that from 1985 to 2005 the man with the whistle was one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to become Francis’ immediate predecessor as Pope Benedict XVI. 

There are occasions when the fundamentals of the Church’s teaching need to be protected: in 1953 the Holy Office excommunicated Fr Leonard Feeney, who taught that only Catholics baptised with water can go to heaven. Everyone else would go to Hell when they died. Sometimes the referee has to take the whistle out of their pocket. But the theological conversation has its own internal self-correcting mechanism. Badly flawed reasoning and thoroughly bad ideas are exposed by other theologians and fall out of favour. The good referee leans towards letting the game flow.