EDITORIAL

We can’t change everything

Posted

Recently Munich Archbishop Reinhard Cardinal Marx commented on the Church’s teaching on homosexuality as found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He stated that “the catechism is not set in stone. One can also cast doubt on what is in it.”
In his Apostolic Constitution for the publication of the Catechism, Pope St. John Paul II declared the Catechism, a “statement of the Church’s faith and of Catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and the Church’s Magisterium…and a sure norm for teaching the faith.” In this quote the pope explains that the catechism is a collection of different sources of Church teaching. This means that the authority of its statements depends on the authority of its sources.
The Church distinguishes between at least two kinds of sources. They are the primary objects of faith and the secondary objects of faith. Primary objects of faith are truths set forth by the Church as divinely revealed. Secondary objects of faith are truths definitively proposed by the Church that, while not formerly revealed, their denial would lead to the denial of a primary object of faith. Importantly, both primary and secondary objects of the faith cannot change. They require the complete assent of mind and will. The Church’s teaching on homosexuality is a primary object of faith that cannot be changed. The immorality of unchaste acts is an unchanging and unchangeable teaching of the Church. Faithful to Christ, the Church will always teach that only chaste acts sanctify.
While the catechism may change in some respects, we cannot change everything. Changes of expression in the Catechism will never include jettisoning revealed truth.