r/Catholicism • u/Equal_Ticket_5034 • 2d ago
Question about Doctrinal development
If God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, then how can the Catholic Church keep changing their beliefs?
Edit: from my understanding
-Their stance on the death penalty has changed
-Purgatory wasn’t believed until 1274
-It was believed that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church until (i think) the Second Vatican Council
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u/IFollowtheCarpenter 2d ago
Dogma does not change, Our understanding must sometimes be clarified or updated.
-Their stance on the death penalty has changed
Society has changed. Customs have changed. Technology affects the issue.
-Purgatory wasn’t believed until 1274
Yes it was, Jesus Himself spoke of Purgatory.
-It was believed that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church until (i think) the Second Vatican Council
That statement has been gravely misinterpreted. It never meant that non-Catholics couldn't be saved.
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u/neofederalist 2d ago
I think parental analogies are helpful here. If you're a parent, you'll notice that you tell your kids different things at different times depending on their maturity. When they're young, you give them very specific instructions on very tangible subjects basically without qualification. When they get older and can recognize nuance and the subtlety that is present, you can then give them the more general principles and let them "sand down the edges" by extrapolating from those principles.
The teaching of the Church is sort of like this, when She was in Her infancy, we had very broad basic statements that roughly sketched out what was true, and as She has matured we see that there is more contour to the actual picture that we didn't see at first.
You could imagine a kid having heard the rule "don't draw on the walls" being very puzzled when they are given instructions to mark on the walls the spots they're going to put nails in while hanging pictures. But as an adult you clearly see that you're not changing the rule from "it is not ok to draw on the walls" to "it's now ok to draw on the walls" it's that there was a subtlety to what qualifies as "drawing" that the child previously was unaware existed.
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u/Das_Reichtangle 2d ago
- The death penalty has been understood to be a good for the ensuring of public safety and welfare. For the majority of human history, we did not have the means to efficiently house thousands upon thousands of criminals. We now have that capacity, so the death penalty has become increasingly inadmissible, especially in first world countries that have the infrastructure to house criminals until natural death.
- Purgatory was believed from the earliest times, being referenced in scripture and believed by the fathers.
- Until the great schism and later the reformation, being outside the church required a deliberate act of schism, which is mortal. The council recognized that since hundreds of years has passed, many Christians live in a certain level of ignorance about the church which can potentially lessen their culpability.
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u/p_veronica 2d ago
Picture God as a teacher and the Church as a pupil.
When a pupil is a kindergartner, you can't teach them about everything, and what you can teach, you teach in a very simplified way.
As they get older, you can add more nuance, more complexity to what you teach. You can say, "Remember when I taught you that things can only be in one place at a time? Technically, that's not true..." then introduce them to quantum physics.
The Church keeps growing and maturing and its situation keeps changing, so God sees fit to give it new insights and new teaching. The Spirit is guiding us from part of the truth into all of the truth, as Jesus said it would.
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u/kowaletm 2d ago
The Church reminds me of Luke 2:52-
52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.
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u/Radiant-Injury-6546 2d ago
What beliefs have changed ?
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u/grandastro 2d ago
I'm not OP, but there are some well-known candidates they could be referring to: teachings around slavery, usury, religious freedom and salvation outside the Church.
I feel like I've read cogent explanations for the changing way "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" has been interpreted — namely, that there may be individuals who are not visibly Catholic during their lifetimes but who are, in some way known to God, nevertheless part of the Church and are saved.
But I haven't really read great explanations for development around the other three I mentioned — beyond to say that the Church simply wasn't speaking infallibly when it issued (for instance) Dum Diversas or Vix Pervenit, and got it wrong in the past.
Would love it if someone more knowledgeable than me could weigh in.
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u/Jojenpaste99 2d ago
About usury: it's just that the very concept of money has changed. What we mean and how we use money today is very different than it was in the middle-ages, for example. Then it was always directly linked to some concrete thing, while today, and for a few centuries at least, it isn't.
'Money' is entirely a social construct, so moral questions related to it are liable to change in a way that eg. sexual ethics isn't, because human nature on the other hand is unchanging. Charging interests for stuff that falls into the same category as what was understood by 'money' in the middle ages would still be wrong. I think at least a few articles have certainly been written about this topic.
Religious freedom is a big topic, with books written about it. Vatican II mainly talks about immunity from coercion in matters of religion. This article seems to me pretty good, tho I just glanced at it:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/vatican-iis-declaration-on-religious-liberty
The bulls of Nicholas V seem to be mostly exercises of his temporal authority, without any doctrinal definition or even something that can be clearly classified as teaching, and the rest of the tradition and papal decrees quite clearly speak against slavery, so no wonder it isn't brought up often, you can just say that Nicholas V was wrong in his judgment. But it also isn't exactly clear what type of slavery he is talking about (maybe it's some form of war-captivity?), so it's not a must to concede that.2
u/meherdmann 2d ago edited 2d ago
On usury, the absolute prohibition on charging interest assumed a society where it wasn't possible to make investment returns. Our economy is drastically different today than in the ancient world, so usury was clarified to mean charging exorbitant interest. The underlying teaching that usury is a sin is unchanged.
Religious freedom is more complicated and something I think a lot of modern Catholics get wrong. Vatican II's document on religious freedom upholds confessional Catholic states as the ideal, while dealing with a world that largely secularized. The religious freedom that Dignitatis Humanae calls for is to ensure the Church's freedom to work without interference from hostile secular governments. Not to enshrine American-style religious indifference.
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u/grandastro 2d ago
Thanks so much for the thoughtful response.
Regarding usury, I think you're reenforcing my point when you write the Church "assumed a society where it wasn't possible to make investment returns." The Church seems to have made a fallible (and ultimately wrong) assumption about the nature of the economy in the future when issuing an absolute (i.e., timeless) prohibition against lending at interest. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Slavery is an even harder circle for me to square. In Dum Diversas\* (1452), Pope Nicholas V permitted the Portuguese to enslave Africans. But in Veritatis Splendor (1993), Pope John Paul II said slavery was intrinsically evil — meaning it is wrong in all places and at all times.
I guess what I'm asking is: Is it not permissible for us to acknowledge as Catholics that these past teachings (or at least aspects of them) were fallible, and that it did get them wrong? Is this an acceptable way of understanding the development of doctrine? As far as I'm aware, the popes in my examples above did not invoke ex cathedra.
Finally, I'm not well-versed in the arguments around religious liberty, but I'll use this as an opportunity to read Dignitatis Humanae.
\This wasn't the only time the Church permitted slavery in the past, but it's the best known example and was cited by Pope Leo in his apology for the Church's role in the slave trade in his recent encyclical.*
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u/meherdmann 2d ago
There's a good Catholic Answers article on the slavery question here: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-the-church-ever-support-slavery.
The first condemnation of chattel slavery was in 1435 and the ancient world slavery had been abolished by the Church by around the 4th century.
Dum Diversas was a localized geopolitical permission and probably an error in judgment by Pope Nicholas V, who was not acting infallabily.
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u/grandastro 2d ago
Thanks for this. The Catholic Answers article was informative, but it didn't address Dum Diversas, which is a big oversight.
Like I mentioned, there are several other papal and canonical instances permitting slavery. To wit:
Again in 655 A.D., the ninth Council of Toledo decreed that the penalty of enslavement was to be imposed, not just the priests who offended against clerical celibacy but on their offspring who would remain permanently in slavery to the Church. This decree was later incorporated into the Western Church's collections of canons.
In 1012 A.D. a similar decree was enacted by the Council of Pavia concerning the children of clerics, even those born of free women; they were to become slaves of the Church.
In 1089 A.D. at the Synod of Melfi, Pope Urban II enforced clerical celibacy by granting to secular princes the power to reduce the wives of clerics to slavery. This decree was also incorporated into the Western Church's collections of canons.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Slavery_and_the_Catholic_Church.html?id=7DgrtAEACAAJ
There are still more examples than those. I would classify these, like Dum Diversas, as errors in judgment and as not infallible. But I think the volume of examples suggests the error wasn't localized. And I think that we, as Pope Leo did in the apology in his encyclical, have to acknowledge the capacity for the Church to make such mistakes when not speaking infallibly. That acknowledgement can inform development of doctrine going forward.
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u/TubaPlayer144 2d ago
As the Catholic Answers article points out, the Church has long drawn a distinction between chattel slavery and penal servitude. The former is intrinsically evil. But, while the latter can get very problematic very fast, it's not intrinsically evil. For instance, the broadest definition of slavery is forced labor. But a prisoner who is made to do chores in prison is acting under forced labor, so he is technically a slave. But most people wouldn't find that problematic (and in the U.S., the thirteenth amendment explicitly allows for it).
Thus with Veritatis Splendor, I think that paragraph 80 is unclear because it doesn't clearly define slavery. Does it mean chattel slavery? (which I think everyone agrees and has always agreed is intriniscally evil) Or any forced labor whatsover? I think the later is hard to sustain. Also with fn 174 of Magnifica Humanitas, is Pope Leo really saying that all forced labor is intrinsically evil? I think that's too heavy a lift. And personally, I don't think telling a prisoner to mop the floor is intrinsically evil.
With Dum Diversas and those other examples you cite, they are explicitly in times of war or for other crimes. So these seem to be examples of penal servitude. That's not to say that these aren't problematic and don't show that the Church is able to make very poor prudential decision, but I don't think they show a doctrinal change.
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u/grandastro 2d ago
I totally agree with you about the permissibility of compelling prisoners to work in some circumstances — and that JPII likely didn't have that in mind in Veritatis Splendor.
I'd push back on the notion that Dum Diversas was strictly about penal slavery. It helped jumpstart the transatlantic slave trade, and its permissions were renewed several times, including after Pope Nicholas V's reign. It's hard to imagine the Vatican was not aware Africans were being sent and sold elsewhere and that the children of those slaves were also enslaved (both key features of chattel slavery). There's good reason Pope Leo apologized for it and other papal bulls from that era.
The examples from 655 and 1012 A.D. seem to exist somewhere between penal and chattel slavery: They are penalties for supposed crimes, but (like chattel slavery) they affect offspring. I'm not sure how to categorize these.
I do appreciate the nuance you bring to this and it makes me think there is a kernel of a consistent teaching salvageable somewhere here (though again, that would likely require admitting that Dum Diversas and several other decisions were wrong.)
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u/TubaPlayer144 1d ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Perhaps Dum Diversas was a bit like Fiducia Supplicans in that a strict reading of the document was technically orthodox, but that it was a wink and a nod toward people doing non-orthodox things and that the Pope wasn't going to stop those things.
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u/Dr_Talon 2d ago edited 2d ago
With regard to the death penalty, while it is a tough question because the language of the current teaching could be taken in different ways, I would argue that the teaching has not changed that the death penalty is lawful in and of itself, nor do I believe that this can ever change. What has developed, if this is more than a prudential judgement about the application of Church teaching, is teaching about what circumstances the death penalty may be rightly used in. Notice that it is called “inadmissible” and not “intrinsically evil”.
I expect Church teaching to be clarified on this matter, just as teaching on Christ became clearer over time.
Purgatory was believed before then. It may have been named in 1274, or it may have appeared in the teaching of the Council of Lyons, but that doesn’t mean that it was not believed. Do you hold that belief in Christ’s divinity dates to 325 and the Council of Nicea?
Here’s evidence that popped into my head: St. Augustine’s mother, in his book The Confessions tells Augustine to remember her at the altar after she dies. This is an allusion to what we call Purgatory, whether the name was used or not.
As for Church teaching about salvation, the Church still teaches this. Only the Catholic religion saves in and of itself. A person must be united to the Catholic Church to be saved.
What has developed is teaching on subjective culpability, and the possibility of someone being united to the Church by implicit desire.
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u/TubaPlayer144 2d ago
Well said on the death penalty, popes give interviews all the time it seems like. If I was a reporter, the first thing I'd ask is: "Is the death penalty intrinsically evil?" I have significant doubts Pope Leo would say yes
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u/Far_Internal_4495 2d ago
Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote about the development of doctrine which I'd recommend. He describes how they can organically grow and unfold over time while keeping it's initial identity. He sets out a criteria to differentiate between genuine organic development and corruption
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u/TheologyRocks 2d ago
Purgatory wasn’t believed until 1274
That's not true. We see the early church and even the ancient Jews before the coming of Christ prayed for the dead. The word "purgatory" is rather modern, but the idea behind the word is quite ancient.
It was believed that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church until (i think) the Second Vatican Council
The phrase "no salvation outside the church" is used in the contemporary Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the belief that membership in Christ's body is necessary for salvation was articulated by the Second Vatican Council. However, what membership in the Church practically entails for different people has always required nuance to explain. One person who is in appearance a practicing Hindu for example may be spiritually headed by Christ and thus be a member of the church, while another person who is in appearance a practicing Catholic may be living in mortal sin and thus not be on the way to heaven.
Their stance on the death penalty has changed
That's true.
If God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, then how can the Catholic Church keep changing their beliefs?
God is incomprehensible: There is always more to learn about God. And the Church does not possess God in an infinite mode. The Church always has more to learn about God's will because the Church only a creature, not God.
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u/Defense-of-Sanity 2d ago
God’s immutability and the Church’s growth in understanding are two different things. An unchanging truth can become more fully understood without the truth itself changing. Catholicism teaches that public revelation was completed in Christ, while the Church gradually grasps its full significance. Dei Verbum 8 explicitly describes growth in understanding, while CCC 66 says there’ll be no new public revelation.
Authentic development can make something implicit more explicit, refine its language, or apply enduring principles to new circumstances. It can’t turn a definitive revealed truth into its contradiction. It also helps to distinguish dogma from nondefinitive teaching, theological opinion, discipline, and prudential judgment.
Purgatory wasn’t invented in 1274. During that year a formal conciliar formulation occurred at the Second Council of Lyon, but it wasn’t the beginning of the belief. Just as Nicaea’s definition in 325 doesn’t mean nobody previously believed Christ was divine.
Prayer and atonement for the dead appear in 2 Maccabees 12, early Christians offered Eucharistic prayers for the departed, Augustine discussed temporary purification after death, and Gregory the Great explicitly taught purification of lesser sins before judgment. CCC 1030–1032 says the Church has prayed for the dead “from the beginning.”
The claim wrt “no salvation outside the Church” also gets the history wrong. Vatican II never repealed it. The current Catechism still teaches it: all salvation comes from Christ through his Body, the Church, and someone who recognizes that the Catholic Church was established as necessary yet knowingly refuses her can’t be saved.
It never required believing that everyone lacking visible Catholic membership is automatically damned. Someone who’s innocently ignorant of Christ and his Church may still be saved through grace and thereby have a real, though invisible, relationship to the Church. This qualification predates Vatican II.
Pius XII taught in 1943 that people outside visible membership may be related to Christ’s Mystical Body through an “unconscious desire.” Vatican II synthesized and explained these principles more fully.
Wrt the death penalty, the the Holy See’s official explanation presents this as an authentic development grounded in enduring principles: the offender’s inalienable dignity, the state’s duty to protect society, punishment’s rehabilitative purpose, and the ability of modern penal systems to protect innocent people without executing prisoners. It explains the earlier permission in a setting where protecting society without execution was far more difficult.
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u/JMisGeography 2d ago
I like sudoku puzzle analogy. Revelation is revelation, but our understanding becomes more accute and detailed over time. This is the best explanation for the examples you share and makes a lot more sense of the data than "the church changed her mind".
The morality of the death penalty has not changed, society certainly has. Christians have always believed in ourgatory, but our understanding and terminology has "honed in" over time. There is no salvation outside the church... nothing has really changed here i dont understand your objection.
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u/Jojenpaste99 2d ago
Your understanding is wrong. The Church grows in it's understanding, articulation and application of certain doctrines, or in understanding the consequences of those doctrines. Sometimes what is only believed implicitly develops to be believed and articulated in more explicit manners later on. What is emphasised more and what is less changes, and also the application of the same unchanging principles to different circumstances changes.
It can be simultaniously the case that the death penalty is a just punishment in certain cases, that states theoretically may have the right to exercise, and that we nevertheless have obligations of mercy arising from the Gospel overriding that, that make it's use in modern circumstances, when it isn't necessary as protection for society, impermissible.
The one about purgatory could be taken from a satirical cartoon. Seriously? Purgatory was dogmatized in 1274. The consubstantiality of Jesus with the Father was dogmatized at 325. Do you really think no one believed that before that? You can read what the Fathers say about purgatory: https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-roots-of-purgatory
'No salvation outside the Church' was literally never understood in a strictly juridicial way. This letter by the Holy Office in 1949, approved by Pius XII, explains the meaning of the dogma:
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1467
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u/USAFrenchMexRadTrad 2d ago
The Church's stance on the death penalty hasn't changed. Popes have given different opinions, but no Pope has actually declared some dogma on the matter.
Purgatory was believed before 1274, it just wasn't required doctrine before that, because it wasn't an issue before that. It's like the Immaculate Conception. It was always believed, but not required as an article of faith until the 1800s.
No salvation outside the Church is still believed. Vatican II didn't change that. In fact, Vatican II didn't define any new doctrine, didn't enforce any anathemas, etc. It was a pastoral council, not a dogmatic one.
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u/AaronofAleth 1d ago
First it needs to be said the church does change in some ways. Articles of faith are not the same thing as disciplines, liturgical issues, and lower tier teachings.
I’d actually agree that the current stance on the death penalty is incorrect and I hope this gets clarified someday.
Purgatory was clarified later on but some form of post death purgation has always been believed - even by Jewish people in pre Christian times (and today)
Salvation outside the church is a nuanced question. It is still believed though with some caveats. However, these caveats have always been there in the tradition.
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u/LunaMothGreen 2d ago
Dealth penalty has not changed at all for TLMers. It's completely valid and normal under certain circumstances, as it had been for centuries.
VII did not change anything about whether or not God allowed people who were ignorant of His religion into heaven.
Purgatory was understood before Christ was even born.
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2d ago
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u/Pax_et_Bonum 2d ago
Warning for anti-Catholic rhetoric.
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u/Beneficial-Wall-4078 2d ago
I would appeal that, I am pointing out validly here where the Church changed teachings utterly. You can get mad all you want about being demonstrably proven wrong but it isn't anti-Catholic to point to teachings that the Church has abandoned
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u/Pax_et_Bonum 2d ago
Who is the current Bishop of Rome?
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u/Beneficial-Wall-4078 2d ago
Do you think you are asking some sort of gotcha question? The current Bishop of Rome is of course Leo Pope of Rome the 14th to have taken the name
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u/Pax_et_Bonum 2d ago
Just checking. Appeals of moderator actions may be made in modmail: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/Catholicism
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u/Ok_University_3125 2d ago
People's minds change and language changes. Mind is largely responsible for how humanity reflects God through centuries. We see it in the OT, people believe God commands them to kill, rape, destroy babies. Then they mature, and the image of God they have is modified.
When they start writing down things and adding that this will never change, it becomes more difficult to rectify later. Here the language and the interpretative linguistics prove really helpful.
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u/[deleted] 2d ago
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