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Congar agrees. "The theologian today is recognized as a mediator between the magisterium and the world," he says. "The magisterium possesses the charisma representing the unity of Christ." The magisterium's role is to express "what is true," Congar emphasized, while today's theologian is expected to chart new modes of defining those truths. "The theologian must be in constant contact with human sciences, with latest developments in all kinds of thought. Take the question of sexuality. We cannot speak of such a matter in the same terms we used before Freud. The theologian has the responsibility of elaborating and searching."
Party Whip. Yet this elaboration and search is now being sharply questioned, especially when it leads to the relaxation of discipline. One of the questioners is Jean Cardinal Danielou, a Jesuit theologian once regarded as a liberal, who has become a kind of party whip for orthodoxy. Danielou recently took to Vatican Radio to deplore the "false concept of liberty" that he says has sprung from a misinterpretation of the Second Vatican Council. "We must put people on their guard against books, journals and conferences where false ideas are propagated," he said. One idea he cited as false was that of "women religious giving up their dress, abandoning their own works, only to immerse themselves in purely secular activities, substituting banal and political activities for their orientation toward God."
Nor are many new theological ideas welcome in teaching. Last fortnight The Netherlands' Bernard Jan Cardinal Alfrink returned from Rome after doing some explaining about a controversial high school catechism* course. The course, more than a little untraditional, emphasizes the student's need, as one of its authors puts it, "to believe according to his own way of thinking." It lets students decide for themselves, for instance, whether Jesus was God; it offers the Resurrection as an inspiring belief rather than historical fact. The authors—some 50 theologians, most from the Catholic University of Nijmegen—are convinced that this open-minded approach is the best way to reach questioning Dutch teenagers. The bishops of the two dioceses involved have reservations about the course, but apparently prefer it to the adhoc sex-and-sociology classes that preceded it. Nevertheless the Vatican has ordered the new course withdrawn from use.
Whatever the merits of the Dutch arguments, one progressive in the Curia insists that liberals must preserve a recognizable core of faith or lose their credence within the church altogether. Says he: "When the liberals become so vague, so completely speculative, doubting and unsure of their own beliefs, they leave their own followers with a loss of identity, direction and dedication. If all we can offer is a vague kind of 'social gospel,' the same thing can be found in secular political movements and the church loses any reason for existence. Unless the liberal theologians offer something solid and begin to attract a liberal following, I fear the next generation of the church may be overwhelmingly conservative." Says Congar: "Time is on the side of Rome —the public gets tired of being told something new every day."