The removal by Pope Benedict of Bishop William Morris from the diocese that had been placed into his care for the Catholic faith in 1993 has been major news throughout the Catholic world over the last fortnight.
While the removal was almost unprecedented in Australia, it not-so-surprisingly illuminated fault lines within the Church which all reasonably well-informed observers have known about for decades. To use somewhat technical language, the fault-line is sometimes described as the one which runs between the hermeneutic of continuity on the one hand and a mentality which can be described, on the other, as a hermeneutic of discontinuity. At the end of the day, however, the issue under debate was the simple fact that in the Catholic Church every Bishop, a successor to the apostles, is obliged by sacred oath to teach what the Catholic Church teaches – period.
The hermeneutic of continuity is an outlook which sees the history of the Church from Christ up until now as an organic and constantly developing unity which takes into account the person and teachings of Christ, Scripture, two millennia of Catholic faith and practice and the defined body of teaching called the magisterium. It accepts as a matter of faith that some things can’t change, no matter what the popular view such as, for example, the belief in Christ’s divinity. Such things are, in effect, the constellations in the night sky by which the ordinary Catholic man or woman can safely navigate because they do not change position.
The hermeneutic of discontinuity, conversely, is more a mentality that tends to regard much of the Church prior to the Second Vatican Council as somehow deficient and which seeks to obscure, change or reverse some or much Church teaching, not excluding the dogmatically defined magisterium, usually in matters to do with the sanctity of human life and gender, but also extending to issues such as ecclesiology, liturgy, and in specific instances such as the ordination of women. It usually seeks to do so in accord with moral relativism and the values predominantly to be found in popular culture. It often confuses the individual sinfulness or failings of members of the Church throughout history with the actual faith of the Church.
One mentality is informed by two millennia of constant belief and practice, often heroically witnessed to by martyrdom, the other by the mass media and the fashionable theories that abound in our culture. On the side of the essential unity of Church belief and teaching from Christ up until the present is Pope Benedict; on the side of changing Church teaching and practice to suit some values of majority opinion, sadly, was Bishop Morris.
The arguments surrounding the dismissal of Bishop Morris are therefore also about ecclesiology, which is to say they are about the Church: among these being questions such as what is the Church, who constitutes it, who has authority to define what are the essential beliefs which distinguish Christianity, especially Catholicism, from other beliefs and philosophies and who, if anyone, has the power to change Church teaching? This is why the arguments surrounding the dismissal of Bishop Morris are fundamental in nature; they are neither irrelevant nor obscure. They also have direct consequences for Catholic youth, for Catholic marriages, and for Catholic family life. Although he is undoubtedly a good man and shares much in common with fellow members of the Church, Bishop Morris’ first problem was that he didn’t understand that.
The problem for Bishop Morris, in the end, was that given the two positions he had to make a choice – his way or the Catholic Church way. The problem for the Church was how to handle a Bishop well down the road in effectively promoting what might now reasonably be called heresy in his diocese. As The Australian’s columnist Christopher Pearson (also a convert to Catholicism) wrote shortly after the story broke, Bishop Morris had already sown consternation in his diocese with his 2006 pastoral letter. Seeking comment on how to respond to a shortage of priestly vocations in the diocese of Toowoomba, the Bishop canvassed possibilities including the ordination of women priests and recognising the validity of Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church Orders. He did this although he should have known that the Church had already definitively ruled these out. In 1994, Pope John Paul II declared authoritatively as the Vicar of Christ in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis that the Church had no power to ordain women priests. A year later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the future Pope Benedict XVI, clarified John Paul II’s teaching as “to be held definitively as belonging to the deposit of faith.”
Official Church teachings and various statements on the validity or otherwise of the Orders of other Christian denominations are numerous, date back centuries and were, in some instances, reaffirmed by the CDF (under the future Pope Benedict XVI) as recently as 1998 as definitive. To suppose that such teachings could be dropped or changed by the Church was never anything more than mere fantasy. And whether critics were in a majority or a minority in the diocese of Toowoomba is immaterial. The truth of the Gospel never depends on numbers.
Bishop Morris has been portrayed (not surprisingly) by organisations such as the National Council of Priests of Australia as the innocent and unjustly treated victim of a dogmatic, pharisaical mindset under Pope Benedict and Rome (the usual conspiracy theory in the NCPA world of billabong theology where no fresh water appears to have flowed in since 1968).
But as reported in this edition of The Record (see stories on pages 6-7) he was actually treated with the utmost delicacy, discretion and respect by two Popes and three Vatican dicasteries. He was given more than ten years to resolve the issues and, remaining immovable, still stubbornly resisted repeated requests for his resignation.
One other problem seems to have eluded Bishop Morris. Catholic spouses and families everywhere face an unprecedented onslaught against their faith, their values and their children from a modern anti-culture predicated on the idea that there are really no more moral rules and no real consequences: one should do whatever one wants. As the simple people of faith do their best to lead the at-times difficult Christian life of fidelity to Jesus and everything He taught, they do not need bishops who will obscure the way or who become obstacles to the heroic vocation of Christian marriage and family. In fact, they are, sadly, better off without them. One might say that they need a Bishop who can be a rock. One of the two Bishops at the heart of this controversy is undoubtedly that.