Christians have mastered few things if not disagreeing with other Christians about what being a Christian is, and what believing Christianity actually means. If we want to find unity, where do we find it? Surely we ought to look to Jesus and his church, but where one finds what we can call “the church” has divided the faithful for a long time. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus doesn’t mean much if you find yourself unable to point to an ecclesiam and thereby identify what counts as extra. If ecclesiology did not already exist, after all, it would be necessary for man to invent it. Sidestepping entirely the question of who gets to teach or clarify doctrine – I am after all but a single mortal – I wish to address the question of what teaching even is in the first instance.
Events have brought the church to a place where she has to think these things through carefully, especially in light of some recent statements from the Bishop of Rome. Most recently, we learned that the Roman Pontiff made a statement that appeared to endorse some kind of civil union system in secular, civil law for same-sex couples. Reactions came immediately. To some, this proved a welcome change, an adaptation, a development in the church’s teaching that makes her more welcome to those who often find themselves outside her embrace. To others, in my view more inclined to find greater continuity than the circumstances merit, the Pontiff’s statements made a judgement only in matters of civil law, and cannot be construed in any way as marking a change in the never-changing teachings of the Roman church. To still others, St. Peter’s successor only gave a private opinion, and one subject to censure at that. All in all, many of Rome’s loyal faithful found themselves confused about what had even happened.
So did any “teaching,” as we would understand it in a Christian context, occur here? That depends very much on which person you ask. Officially, of course, the Bishop of Rome made no official, dogmatic declaration akin to the Assumption or the Immaculate Conception: on paper, the Roman church continues to teach the same thing in regards to marriage that she always has. The Pontiff not writing it down, and not writing it down in exactly the way an ultramontanist would like him to, means that no teaching has here occurred. The unchanging church remains unchanged, and we can all go about our day as usual.
But emphasizing these kinds of distinctions between private opinions and formal judgments, fine and learned though they may be, should remain the province of the schoolmen. It may not meet the written rules for when teaching does change and does not change, but to view this as having no bearing on what the church actually considers doctrine is to adopt a blindness so willful the gods themselves labor against them in vain. Understanding reality in ways that always conform to what you wish to be will not do.
Though I am not a priest or bishop of any kind, I consider myself qualified to weigh in on this because while I may be neither of those things, I am still a teacher, and I know little bit how we communicate teachings. You learn some important things as develop in your teaching career, and two of them bear remembering here. The first is that teaching occurs as much in what we do, and the context in and by which we communicate it. The second is that if your students didn’t learn something, it’s because you didn’t teach it. You could even rephrase this by saying that if your students didn’t learn what you wanted them to, it’s because you taught them something other than what you intended.
Though somewhat distinct from each other, we can consider these ideas together. The words you say and write are not the only way you teach. As a teacher, you also teach by tone, by emphasis, and by how you interact with your students. You don’t just teach a subject area, you teach people what they can expect. If you continually promise consequences for negative behavior and you never deliver, you have taught a lesson: that you do not mean what you say, that the behavior does not matter enough to merit consequence. If you permit bullying or harassment to occur in your classroom, you teach people these things will go unpunished, and that they do not matter. If you treat students with indifference or sneering contempt, you teach them that you do not care about them. Whatever policy you put in your syllabus, or whatever you write to your administrate bosses or to parents, or what you say on the first day, or on back to school night, people learn from behavior and the things that people actually do. You may not have intended to teach your students these things, but by your actions that is what you indeed have done. I can claim up, down, and sideways, that my teaching has not changed by pointing to the text of my syllabus, but it matters little. People remember what you do.
What should this mean for us in the church? I do not wish to argue here for a sensus fidei as a source of doctrine – that topic is better suited for later. But the same principle applies here as well. To be clear, this applies not just to the Roman church, but to each member of Christ’s body. If the church’s teaching on, for example, marriage, has gotten wobbly, it is by the church’s own conduct. We see marriages dissolve on “no fault” grounds, and the church barely bats an eye, communicating either indifference or acquiescence. You can talk as great a game as you want about how your church views marriage as indissoluble and sacred, but if you behave in ways that suggest it is not, in ways that make it easy for the church to acknowledge civil divorce within its canons, then people remember that. When clergy, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike, commit depredations against those in their care, and suffer few to no consequences, that too is a form of teaching. When young women are taught that they are permanently tainted or stained by sexual encounters, consensual or not, that is a form of teaching. When the church refuses to care for the widow, the orphan, and hireling, that is a form of teaching. The abstruse reasoning of theologians and scholars counts little at that point.
To argue that only pronouncements of doctrine made or written by someone in authority, whether made by a Pope, or a council, or a synod, or by the baptist preacher down the street, count as teaching, is to mock God. These things are ways of teaching, but teaching is so much more than that. If we believe that the church stands in the right before God because we have maintained the right teachings in a formal sense, but have acted on them in no meaningful way, we deceive only ourselves. God sees our declarations of faith and our creeds, but He sees also how we have applied them. “Our teaching didn’t change because we never passed a binding resolution to do so out of the committee of the whole” is the battle cry of those who wish to find continuity where it is in want.
We can, if we wish, wander into the minefield of arguing about whether church teaching should change, whether we’ve just gotten it wrong. But to pretend that only formalist teachings matter when practice has already moved well beyond it is catechetical gaslighting. There is no point in denying a change has occurred when it quite transparently has. We should not pretend that any of this is easy. Sometimes all we can do is throw ourselves before the throne of grace and pray that the Holy Spirit will lead the church, and us, in the right way.