Haight Controversy

While browsing through the news I found this article on a US Jesuit now barred from teaching Christology by the Vatican.  While I'm not overly familiar with Haight's work it stirred up my interest, since several years ago while working in an interfaith group I began to view the claims of pluralism as incompatible with Catholic doctrine:

Here's an excerpt from the first article I found in USA Today, which left me wanting to know more:

VATICAN CITY — An American Catholic theologian censured by the Vatican for "grave doctrinal errors" has been told to cease teaching about the nature and identity of Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Roger Haight, a Jesuit, has been asked by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church's highest doctrinal authority, not to teach Christology at any institution, even one unaffiliated with the church.

Haight, 72, has been forbidden to teach theology at Catholic universities since 2005, when the congregation denounced his book "Jesus: Symbol of God" for casting doubt on the reality of Christ's divinity, resurrection, and unique role as the savior of all humanity.

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After looking into it a little more, I found this much more informative piece at the National Catholic Reporter.

A recent Vatican move barring American Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight from teaching and publishing while he works with the order’s leadership to clarify his views could, at least theoretically, be analyzed in a variety of ways:

• At the level of church politics, it could be seen in terms of long-simmering tensions between Rome and the Jesuits, or as the predictable tendency of a first-time American prefect in the Vatican’s doctrinal office, Cardinal William Levada, to take a special interest in his own backyard.
• It could also be fed through the grinder of clashing interpretations of Pope Benedict XVI, since the Vatican’s interest in Haight dates from the period when the pope was still running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. (As one Jesuit wag put it, the recent moves show that “Ratzinger is still alive and well inside Benedict.”)
• Yet another approach would be in terms of administrative judgment: Granted that the Vatican has a right to police Catholic teaching, is preventing a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, not to mention a septuagenarian academic, from teaching in a non-Catholic setting going too far? (As a consequence of the restrictions, Haight will no longer teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York.)

....As worthy of discussion as all that may be, however, it’s no more than a sideshow to the main event. That’s because at the level of substance, the Haight case pivots on the most explosive question in Catholic thought today: What theological sense should Christianity make of non-Christian religions?

In a post-9/11 world, in which inter-faith relations are, for good or ill, a central driver of history, how Catholicism answers that question has potentially mammoth consequences.

To be clear, what’s at issue is not whether non-Christians can be saved, or whether there are “elements of truth and grace” in non-Christian faiths. Both are settled points of church teaching. Instead, debate turns on the theological basis for these attitudes. In varying ways, theologians such as Haight have argued that religious pluralism exists not only de facto, as a consequence of sin and the fractured unity of the human family, but also de jure, as a positive feature of God’s plan for salvation.

Put in an admittedly over-simplified form, the idea is that Christ is bigger than Christianity, and that at least in this order of history, God may well be content for some portion of humanity to approach him through non-Christian paths.

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Apparently Haight is best known for his work Jesus: Symbol of God.

Comments

[Pia]

I just read today an article about the Pope's latest pronouncements on Martin Luther, in which he states that Luther's affirmation that we are justified by faith alone is "true if we do not oppose faith to charity and love", and that "faith works through charity. In the faith that creates charity, all faith is realized".

Apparently the Pope, in his studies has come to the conclusion that Luther was more a reformer than a heretic, that he probably didn't intend initially to split the church in two, and that he was simply ahead of his time. This opening seems to be creating a great deal of interest in the Lutheran church, especially in Germany and Scandinavia.
Another historical figure who has been mentioned quite a bit in the past 2 weeks is Galileo(every Wednesday, Sunday and Holy Days, the homilies given by the Pope are covered on the daily national news on tv).

What I am wondering is, why does it take the Church so long to come to these conclusions? I'm not wondering this for love of polemics, but because I can't help thinking about of all the human lives that were lost, the wars fought, the suffering wrought...all for nothing!

So getting back to Haight, who knows if in 500 years, he'll be re-instated because he simply was ahead of his time...

[Deacon DW]

Yes, interesting indeed, and it reminds also of something I heard years ago--that the spirit of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin loomed over the procedings of the Second Vatican Council.

We can never say what the future will bring--500 years of even two or three.