c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The recent “Declaration, Dominus Iesus,” was headlined by the Washington Post as “Vatican Claims Church Monopoly on Salvation.” For many journalists, this resonated like the battle cry of the Crusades, as if the Roman Catholic Church had assaulted and insulted every other church and overturned and undermined its own cooperation with other denominations in discovering what united rather than divided them.

Most of the reaction has been to the document’s sorting out varied theological formulations of faith, although, as perspective improves, the way it talks about how we believe may prove more provocative than its declarations about what we believe.

Our view of this opus begins with its timing. The 21-page paper was issued just before the Perseid meteors, midsummer’s fabled falling stars, began streaking across the sky. Is this a calming signal about the document’s bright but brief life in our consciousness?

The paper is hardly novel in its assertions that, for Catholics, Jesus Christ is the source and center of belief and salvation. Its almost grudging use of Vatican II does not make it an ecumenical triumph but neither is it a document that will reverse the course of history. It may, therefore, be a dangerous luxury to work ourselves up, one way or the other, about it.

What deserves our attention, however, is a consistent element in its phrasing that has received little or no reflection so far.

While it defines theological faith as “the acceptance of the truth revealed by the One and Triune God,” it adds emphatic italics when it tells us that the “doctrine of faith must be firmly believed.” The same wording is used in other sections (11, 13, 14, 16, 20) and is also applied unambiguously in paragraoh 16: “The Catholic faithful are required to profess …”

Faith, it would seem from a common-sense reading of these italicized statements, is our response to a command by an authority. In this declaration, faith belongs to the imperative rather than the subjunctive mode.

But is that, and can that ever be, the nature of religious faith? In the last paragraph, we read that the “Sovereign Pontiff … with sure knowledge and by his apostolic authority ratified and confirmed this declaration ….”

This is the vocabulary of royal decrees and external controls applied to complex internal spiritual realities.

This paper is written as if it were a technical manual for a Mystery. One hardly needs to possess a degree in theology to conclude that the object of command is obedience rather than faith. To order belief is to diminish belief. To order it in an official document is to diminish the very authority that is invoked to support its demands on believers.

The Scriptures do not speak of faith as a function of commands from without as much as responses from within. “We walk by faith,” Paul tells the Corinthians, “not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).”

“Believe in me,” Jesus says, making faith a function of relationship, a response to another person of love, fidelity and trust that arises spontaneously from within us because of the qualities of the other.

Faith is not an arranged marriage to which we must agree in hopes that we will get along better with God, or that we will at least get used to each other, as time goes by. It is listed in Galatians as one of the “fruits of the Spirit,” and comes only after “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness” and before “meekness and temperance.” It nestles among profoundly human reactions. The strength and meaning of each depends on their being given freely rather than dutifully.

How we believe is more akin, then, to how we love than to how we obey. Catholics prefer to think of the pope as their Holy Father rather than their “Sovereign,” as their pastor rather than their king.

Religion is essentially a mystery more than a puzzle and its appeal is to the human imagination rather than to the will. It is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).”

If this Vatican document were carbon dated, its half life would be found to have already passed. Nature erodes things according to their composition. Thus a line drawn in the sand, as some have described this work, is ruffled easily by the wind and is hardly ever there in the morning.

For all its good intentions, this paper is more a threat to itself than to ecumenical relations. Its presumption that humans can be commanded to believe takes it out of the realm of the believable. Don’t spend a lot of time arguing about it. It will barely be remembered a year from now.

DEA END KENNEDY