Volume > Issue > Note List > God Exists, But Does the Magisterium?

God Exists, But Does the Magisterium?

Kenneth D. Whitehead, a temperate fellow, has let loose with a shocking statement about the condition of the Catholic Church in the U .S.: “There no longer effectively is any accepted Church Magisterium in the traditional sense…a Magisterium that teaches ‘with authority’ and sees its pronouncements accepted on the basis of that authority” (this from his article “How Dissent Became ‘Institutionalized’ in the Church in America,” in the July Homiletic & Pastoral Review, edited by the unimpeachable Fr. Kenneth Baker).

If dissent has become institutionalized and the Magisterium has essentially ceased to exist in the U.S., how did this come to be? Whitehead, a scholarly former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and no bishop-basher, traces it in large measure back to a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. bishops in 1968, Human Life in Our Day, which carried a short chapter called “Norms of Licit Theological Dissent,” which, curiously, cited no theological or ecclesiastical sources. To Whitehead, the notion of licit dissent is “incoherent.”

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

The Church's Strange Reappraisal of Islam

The Church came to see Islam as meriting different treatment because it is a religion, unlike Nazism and Communism, which were secular and atheistic ideologies.

At Last, a Reckoning?

Archbishop Viganò has cracked open the Vatican cone of silence and exposed what might be a Church-wide cover-up of McCarrick’s crimes.

Some Questions for the American Bishops

Pewsitters I have met have questions in the categories of architecture, the priesthood, education, marriage & annulment, our dress-down Church, and more.