Home >> Global Organizations >> Vatican and Churches

     Email   Print 

The God Issue And The Pope's Advice To Missionaries: "Only Catholics Make Heaven"

Angelique van Engelen - 12/28/2007

If one thing has become clear in recent days, it is that the G-issue is highly unpredictable. God triggers debate when you least expect it. All the more so, because the Almighty is generally not easily scheduled for public discussion.
Tony Blair, who recently told the world he converted to Catholicism, had long been a churchgoer. But during his first days as the UK's premier, his spin doctors advised him to steer clear of religious issues. Religion is not done in the UK. It was as simple as that.

But is it really?

Over all the recent controversies over which public figures should be allowed to flaunt their religion in what way, a very poignant issue concerning the world’s main religious bulwark was totally overlooked; Pope Benedict XVI himself had some thoughts about just how seriously people ought to take the gospels. He approved a 19-page document aimed at making sure that practitioners of missionary activities are told in no uncertain terms that they’re expected to preach the old fashioned gospel, rather than merely focus on community building that happily by-passes Christ's redemptive offer.

According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which authored the document, there’s a “growing confusion” among missionaries about what to preach. The document, entitled “Doctrinal Note on Some Aspects of Evangelization,” is an extension of the Vatican declaration Dominus Iesus, a controversial doctrine issued in 2000. It asserts that Catholics alone have “the fullness of the means of salvation.”

So it’s to work then for missionaries. Instead of just being community builders convinced that salvation without knowledge of Christ is also very well possible, the missionaries are told to preach again. No doubt about it; catholicism rulez.

Or it aspires to, at least. In all honesty, the church’s importance in public life should never be underestimated. Even though high profile people’s conversions are unlikely to have been induced by missionaries, it is undeniable that their decisions underpin the power of the church. But what exactly it means to be a Catholic is pretty much an issue left up to the individual.

At the same time, the institution’s teachings do not cease to amaze. How serious should outsiders take these signals? Change and continuity in the Catholic church is hardly an issue that you'd expect to be highlighted from the particular angle of salvation through Christ.

Doctrines that the church took a u-turn on during recent centuries are often ill understood. In this sense, the (aspired) role of the Catholic Church in people’s daily lives is eerily similar to life in general; a walk to the shop on the corner presents you with as many mysteries, likely.

The church can say all they want but who these days listens or takes the message in any way literally? To understand why certain decisions were made at a daily level equates to observing that your neighbor’s door is red, or that the garbage bin comes with two handles; it hardly goes beyond a mere observation.

Or does it?

Our understanding of the Catholic church is very similar to a general knowledge of a set of facts, some of which will prompt a level of familiarity and others mere oblivion. Only the peculiarly nosy will feel it their duty to pry incessantly into the why’s and how’s of other people’s space, except when public spaces are involved. Hence perhaps the attention for Mr Blair's seeing the light.

The Catholic Church’s invisible domination over public life is undeniable because the institution has a long history of blending doctrine with tradition. That allowed for a seamless blending with cultures. The church is an accepted part of public life. Its doctrines might be disputed, but its presence hardly ever is. What is peculiar however is that doctrine changes tend to have a news value and always lead to fierce debate, despite the fact that it’s seldomly understood what’s really behind the changes.

At a 1999 catholic theologians’ conference about this issue entitled the Catholic Theological Society of America, one participant might have explained it. He said that continuity in doctrine is more accurately recognized in retrospect, by examining the past through a present-day lens. The theologian, John Thiel of Fairfield University, compared the relevance of doctrine to reading a novel. From the viewpoint of the reader, "the story's coherence is ever being reshaped as plot unfolds, sometimes most meaningfully through narrative shock."

Nice words. Thiel rejected the notion of tradition as rooted in an authoritative past. That's perhaps even nicer. But what is he getting at? How is he proposing doctine makes sense right now. Are we allowed to know? And who the hell’s writing the novel? The answer to that question might in part have been formulated by another participant, church historian and federal judge John T. Noonan who, at the same conference, outlined change on doctrine on usury thoughout the centuries.

Judge Noonan who authored several books on doctrinal history, said that lending money against interest was prohibited by the church in the 12th century. Just exactly how this inconvenient prohibition disappeared is not clear, but by the 19th century the church no longer thought it a sin to lend money against interest. Noonan believes it had become outpaced by culture and customs and new ideas about what makes financial sense. And this is the church that wants you to convert for a healthy prospect for after life.

Another issue is of course the death penalty. It has only in very recent times, under Pope John Paul II, been condemned by the church. Death was standard punishment for heretics in the Middle Ages and even Thomas Aquinas was in favor of it. In many instances the church took matters into its own hands, especially in European papal states, and killed heretics on its own accord. "It was the church that punished capitally. In the papal states, the death penalty was an ordinary part of criminal law enforcement, used against brigands and heretics alike", said Noonan.

Only well after European countries abolished capital punishment did the pope finally declare that the death penalty ought to be a thing of the past; in 1995, Pope John Paul II published the Evangelium Vitae, stating there was no need for such penalties.

The controversies are as unlikely to end as the existence of the Catholic church is unlikely to be terminated. One man who took a bet on this as early as the 17th Century was Blaise Pascal. His wager, also known as the gambit, is a nifty piece of decision theory that even George W. could learn from. Originally published in his unfinished Pensees, Pascal asserts that it is a better "bet" to believe that God exists than not to believe this.

Pascal, who pioneered probability theory, argued that the expected value of believing -considered infinite by Pascal- is always greater than the expected value of not believing.

A deft arguement or what?