CNS STORY: U.S. theological society distressed at Vatican action on theologian

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CNS Story:

HAIGHT-CTSA Feb-16-2005 (1,050 words) xxxn

U.S. theological society distressed at Vatican action on theologian

By Jerry Filteau
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The board of directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America has expressed "profound distress" at the Vatican action condemning a book by U.S. Jesuit Father Roger Haight and banning him from teaching Catholic theology.

"Father Haight's book 'Jesus Symbol of God' has done a great service in framing crucial questions that need to be addressed today," the board said in a statement given to Catholic News Service Feb. 16.

It said the book, sharply criticized for doctrinal errors in a notification issued Feb. 7 by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has provoked the kind of lively debate and criticism within the theological community that is encouraged by the church's teaching authority.

"Ironically, rather than promote greater criticism of the book, the congregation's intervention will most likely discourage debates over the book, effectively stifling further criticism and undermining our ability as Catholic theologians to openly critique our colleagues," the board said.

Father Haight, a member of the New York province of Jesuits, was teaching at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Boston when his book was published in 1999. In 2000 the Vatican ordered his suspension from teaching there pending an investigation of the book. He is currently teaching at the Protestant interdenominational Union Theological Seminary in New York.

The Vatican notification criticized the book for "statements contrary to truths of divine and Catholic faith" and said disseminating those statements "is of grave harm to the faithful."

The doctrinal congregation said the book contains views contrary to Catholic teaching "concerning the pre-existence of the word, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, the salvific value of the death of Jesus, the unicity and universality of the salvific mediation of Jesus and of the church, and the resurrection of Jesus." It also criticized the methodology used by the theologian, saying he subordinated "the content of the faith to its plausibility and intelligibility in postmodern culture."

The CTSA board did not deny there were errors in the book's theology and individual theologians contacted by CNS also said they had serious problems with the book.

The congregation said that Father Haight failed to give a satisfactory response to the doctrinal questions it posed during its investigation, and therefore he is barred from teaching Catholic theology "until such time as his positions are corrected to be in complete conformity with the doctrine of the church."

The CTSA board said that during the association's 2002 convention there was an open forum on the book in which Father Haight "willingly explained his views and responded to his colleagues' critical observations."

"In many ways," it added, "the theological community has been engaging in precisely the kind of internal debate and mutual correction that has been encouraged by the magisterium," the teaching authority of the church.

"The congregation's intervention in this case gravely threatens the very process of serious, systematic, internal criticism which the congregation and the bishops have long been encouraging among theologians," it said. "While this process of internal critique can never replace the proper teaching and disciplinary roles of the magisterium, the intervention of the magisterium should be a last resort, reserved for situations where this process has clearly failed."

Roberto S. Goizueta, CTSA president and a theology professor at Boston College who is currently living in Spain during a sabbatical from his teaching post, told CNS in a telephone interview from Madrid that he viewed the doctrinal congregation's notification as blurring the line between theology and catechetics. "What they're trying to do is get him to restate the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church,'" he said. "That's not what theology is. Theology is about creative exploration of revelation and the doctrine of the church."

The book "is an exploration, and Father Haight doesn't pretend anything else," he said.

William P. Thompson-Uberuaga, a theology professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and a former CTSA president, told CNS that he basically agreed with the content of the Vatican notification. "Many of us in the theological community had real issues" with the book on those same points, he said.

"I just wish the congregation would let the theological community sort things out first," he said. He added that under the "principle of subsidiarity" he thought that before a public intervention by the church's highest authorities, a number of intermediate steps might have been taken within the theological community and within the Jesuit order to address the problems in the book.

Thompson, who has written several books on Christology, said a number of reviews of Father Haight's book by theologians, including his own in the Marquette University review, Philosophy & Theology, were quite critical of the book.

The doctrinal congregation said Father Haight denies Jesus' divinity and eternal pre-existence as the word of God when he interprets the word of God as a metaphor rather than a reality and when he says Jesus was simply a man who mediated God's saving presence in history as a concrete symbol of God.

Thompson called the Christology of the book "bland" and "pretty watered down." When theologians explore the Christian beliefs that Jesus was truly God and truly became a man, suffering and dying to save humanity and giving hope of eternal life by rising from the dead, "my own feeling is that there is nothing more radical than orthodoxy," he said.

Sixto Garcia, a theologian who teaches Christology at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Fla., affirmed many of the doctrinal congregation's criticisms of the book during a telephone interview.

"Father Haight's methodology is flawed," Garcia said. He said the priest takes the principle that theologians must critically interpret the church's teaching and tradition to an extreme that is "radical and to me unacceptable."

"Theologians are accountable not just to the theological community but to the church. They need to be sensitive to the faith of the people of God," he said.

Thompson said that while the theological assertions criticized by the doctrinal congregation are in Father Haight's book many of them are presented "more tentatively" than one would gather from the notification. On many of the issues, it is possible to make a "more generous" interpretation of the author's intent and meaning than that expressed by the doctrinal congregation, he said.

END

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