The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has published Venite ad me, some considerations on the transmission of the faith in what, by inheritance from Francis, has already come to be called the change of epoch. The text begins with a curious confession. It warns the reader that it will not have the precision of language that usually characterizes the dicastery, and in its final pages acknowledges that the matter properly belongs to the Dicastery for Evangelization. The Doctrine of the Faith thus ventures into unfamiliar terrain after having left precision at the door, which is precisely its office.
It would be unjust to deny the document its merits. The sociological diagnosis, armed with contributions from episcopates of the five continents, is broad and to a large extent correct. There is a luminous defense of the baptism of children, a sincere praise of popular piety and of the Spanish confraternities, and a courageous request to study why Catholicism has collapsed precisely where it seemed most deeply rooted. The problem arises when the dicastery abandons sociology and begins to speak of theology in its own voice, because then the text becomes vaporous in the places where greater firmness would be needed.
A kerygma without sin
The document recalls with Saint Paul that, if Christ had not risen, our faith would be vain. It overlooks, however, that three verses earlier, in that same letter to the Corinthians, the apostle records the oldest formula of the Christian proclamation that has come down to us: “Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.” The synthesis that the text proposes as the core of preaching speaks of a Christ who loves you and gave his life to save you, without ever clarifying from what.
That omission makes sense when one reads the first chapter, where the Passion appears as the almost inevitable outcome of a conflict between Jesus’ preaching and religious and political powers given over to discrimination. The reasoning culminates in a blunt phrase, according to which “no law or human or religious authority can ever declare anyone unworthy” of God’s love. Throughout the entire document, the word sacrifice appears only once, and it does so in the mouth of Benedict XVI. This is striking in a text that claims to be written with an eye on the Jubilee of the Redemption of 2033, and that ends up presenting a cross more akin to the price of tolerance than to the expiatory offering of which the letter to the Romans and the Council of Trent speak.
A love that admits no no
The thesis that runs through the document from beginning to end is that of a universal and perpetual divine love, a yes of God to man that can never become a no. Seen from God, who desires that all be saved, there is nothing to object. What is disturbing is the silence on the other shore of the mystery. Throughout the entire text there is not a single mention of judgment, of hell, or of the real possibility that a human freedom might definitively reject grace, truths that the Catechism teaches with clarity and that Benedict XVI, in Spe salvi, knew how to present as a motive for hope, because only a just God takes seriously the evil that victims have suffered.
The document turns to Hans Urs von Balthasar to speak of beauty, but forgets his Theo-Drama, the work in which the Swiss theologian showed that the history of salvation is a true drama between the infinite freedom of God and the finite freedom of man. A love that cannot be rejected presupposes a freedom that does not count, and it is difficult for a freedom that does not count ever to come to love.
Doctrine as dispensable baggage
One of the most delicate passages takes the principle of the hierarchy of truths, which Vatican II formulated with a very precise purpose, that of ecumenical dialogue among theologians, and transfers it without further ado to catechesis. From this it draws the recommendation not to disperse oneself among the many areas of doctrine when dealing with young people, with adult catechumens, or with those returning to the Church. The same Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had warned in 1973, in Mysterium Ecclesiae, that this hierarchy indicates the bond of each truth with the foundation of the faith, but that all are believed with the same divine faith and none can be silenced as secondary.
The contrast is all the more eloquent because the document itself acknowledges that many of the newly baptized in France return to indifference shortly afterward. Faced with a faith that does not take root, the proposed remedy is lighter doctrinal baggage. The Church of the first centuries, which converted an empire, did exactly the opposite, and handed over to its catechumens the complete Creed, article by article, in a solemn ceremony that obliged them to learn it by heart.
Experience as criterion
The document insists that faith is not transmitted in the first place as a set of doctrinal contents and calls for a proclamation capable of provoking an experience that touches the heart. In the same movement it warns against scholastic, dogmatic, or moralistic languages. It is true that in other passages the text declares the act of faith and its content inseparable, and that it even praises a renewed apologetics, but the concrete proposals rest almost entirely on experience.
Vatican I grounded faith in the authority of the God who reveals himself, and Saint Pius X warned in Pascendi against the temptation to turn religious experience into its source and measure. Newman, who became Catholic precisely out of fidelity to dogma, wrote that the dogmatic principle had been from his adolescence the foundation of his religion, and that a religion reduced to feeling seemed to him a dream and a mockery. It is somewhat melancholy that the heir of the Holy Office, the institution that for centuries guarded dogmatic definitions, today employs that same word as a reproach.
A liturgy without sacrifice
The pages devoted to the liturgy are among the most beautiful in the document. They invoke the old principle that the law of prayer is the law of faith and rescue a splendid account by Romano Guardini, who in Monreale saw the Sicilian people participate in the Mass with only their gaze. Despite that beauty, the text speaks of gestures, of symbols, and of the paschal mystery without ever naming the Mass as sacrifice or the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The clearest affirmation of that presence is not made by the dicastery, but by an anonymous woman in one of the testimonies in the final chapter.
The document also records, with some astonishment, that many young converts seek the ancient and the traditional, and asks that in each diocese the various liturgical sensibilities of the Church be made known, though always within the norms in force. That final clause leaves the matter where it was, and turns into a mere observation what could have been a response to so many Catholics concerned about the Mass.
The entire flame
The text takes its leave with the image of the paschal candle at the Vigil, whose flame passes from candle to candle until it illuminates the entire temple. It is a beautiful and exact image, and precisely for that reason it is fitting to recall what it teaches, that the flame is transmitted entire or it is not transmitted. An accurate sociological diagnosis accompanied by a faded doctrinal synthesis produces precisely what the document itself laments: fervent conversions that are extinguished at the first wind.