UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Thomas Reese | Feb. 14, 2014 Faith and Justice
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) was once known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition. Later it became the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. Even after the Second Vatican Council, when it got its current name and lost the adjective “supreme,” it was still the top dog in the Roman Curia.
This is the congregation that went after so-called Modernists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It imposed biblical fundamentalism on the church until Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) by Pope Pius XII freed Scripture scholars to use modern literary and scientific tools to study the Bible. It also silenced American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray when he wrote about issues of church and state, and it took on famous French theologians before Vatican II. …
But the supreme congregation doesn’t look so supreme anymore. It has been publicly criticized by a curial cardinal from Brazil, by the president of the German bishops’ conference, and by two cardinals who are members of the Council of Cardinals, appointed by the pope to advise him on reforming the Vatican. Even Pope Francis told Latin American religious not to worry about the congregation.
* CDF’s decision in 2012 to place the Leadership Conference of Women Religious under the control of three U.S. bishops was made without consultation or knowledge of the Vatican office that normally deals with matters of religious life, the office’s leader complained. It caused him “much pain,” Cardinal João Braz de Aviz said.
* Pope Francis met with top officials of the Latin American Conference of Religious and was reported to have said: “They will make mistakes, they will make a blunder, this will pass! Perhaps even a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine [of the Faith] will arrive for you, telling you that you said such or such thing. … But do not worry. Explain whatever you have to explain, but move forward.”
* Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, a member of the Council of Cardinals, publicly issued a rebuke of Archbishop Gerhard Müller, current prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on the subject of divorced and remarried Catholics: “The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith cannot stop the discussions.”
* Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, defended a plan to offer Communion to divorced Catholics despite Müller’s opposition.
* Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, coordinator of the Council of Cardinals, told Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper that Müller is “still learning.” As a German theology professor, Rodriguez Maradiaga said Müller is convinced something could “only be wrong or right — and that’s it. But I say: The world, my brother, is not like that. You should be a little more flexible when you hear other opinions so that you don’t only say: No, this is fixed and final.”
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