Vatican City, Feb 22, 2018 / 13:48 pm
The authentic development of doctrine is about making more explicit the revealed truths of faith, not changing, or "shifting," Church teaching – and to use this idea to defend an agenda is wrong, Cardinal Gerhard Müller has said.
In an essay published Feb. 20 in First Things, the prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said there can be no such thing as a "paradigm shift" in the interpretation of Catholic doctrine, and to push for one is to contradict God's commandments.
Anyone who calls a major shift in the Church's teaching in moral theology a "praiseworthy decision of conscience… speaks against the Catholic faith," wrote the 70-year-old prelate.
The idea of a "paradigm shift" – a "fundamental change in theoretical forms of thought and social behavior" – with respect to "the form of the Church's being and of her presence in the world" is not possible," Müller wrote, simply because "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever," as it says in Hebrews 13:8.