The publication of a major new document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith last week sparked a good deal of debate, almost all of it confined to the spaces filled by professional Catholics of the chattering classes.
Part of that was due to the subject matter of the document: passing on the faith in an era of profound change. Part of it was due to the document’s length: More than 25 thousand words.
The DDF’s Venite ad me: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change addresses a crucial issue in the midst of major decline across the civilizational areas with the oldest and most consolidated Christian tradition. On the other hand, it is as long as a good many theological monographs and it touches on a vast array of questions.
Reading it, one gets the impression its authors intended it to be readable by non-experts.
Venite is not marked “by terminological precision and systematic treatment, but instead allow[s] a more discursive style,” illustrated especially by a final chapter dedicated to “personal testimonies” from people who have rediscovered the faith.
More to the point, the document explicitly states it is not meant to settle doctrinal questions, but “primarily to stimulate ecclesial reflection and pastoral commitment regarding the transmission of the faith.”
“For this reason,” Venite continues, “the text examines a variety of points of view without, however, claiming to settle the matter, which remains open to further analysis and development.”
Readers used to hearing the DDF called “the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog” may do a double-take at that.
Historically styled La Suprema because of its elevated status among the Roman dicasteries, the DDF has oversight responsibility for official Vatican documents and certain “police” power over theological texts and published teaching resources throughout the whole Church.
When Pope Francis gave the running of the DDF to then-Archbishop (now Cardinal) Victor Manuel Fernández, however, he spelled out a novel mission profile for his old friend and sometime ghostwriter: to foster theological dialogue.
That sounds lovely, but in practice it creates problems, among them “mission creep” – the expansion of an organization’s scope of responsibility, usually without sufficient consideration – a perennial danger in any complex organization.
In fairness to Fernández (and Pope Francis), the 2022 law that reorganized the Roman curia – the Church’s central governing apparatus – already put the DDF’s mission profile in a missionary and evangelizing register.
Praedicate Evangelium, as the 2022 fundamental law is called, also still tasks the DDF with its traditional role of safeguarding the deposit of faith.
“The task of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is to help the Roman Pontiff and the Bishops to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world,” Praedicate states. Even according to Praedicate, however, the DDF is to do this “by promoting and safeguarding the integrity of Catholic teaching on faith and morals.”
“The Dicastery over which you will preside in other times came to use immoral methods,” Francis wrote in his 2023 letter to Fernández. “Those were times,” Francis continued, “when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued.”
“What I expect from you is certainly something very different,” Francis wrote. Under Fernández, the DDF would still “guard the teaching that flows from the faith,” only it would do so “in order ‘to give reasons for our hope’,” and “not as an enemy who critiques and condemns.”
That last line was an explicit reference to Francis’s 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, which concluded the Year of Faith proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI (his immediate predecessor). It just happens that Fernández had a hand in the drafting of Evangelii gaudium, by the way.
The 2022 fundamental law rearranging the curia and Francis’s 2023 letter were both long on vision and short on practicalities, which is fine for high-level documents but leaves the How? largely to be worked out on the go.
In short, it is still the DDF’s job to say what the doctrine of the faith is, whatever else the pope may want the department to do, and exactly how an office designed to have the last word should foster dialogue was anything but clear when Fernández took over the DDF.
When an office like the DDF offers “considerations” on anything, it is hard to take them as such, for much the same reasons it is difficult to take the boss’s “suggestion” as such, even – sometimes especially – when the principal says, “I’m only suggesting.”
Since it is October, and the Boys of Summer are playing the Fall Classic, let me use a baseball metaphor: The DDF’s job is to call doctrinal balls and strikes. The DDF is not supposed to coach or manage the teams or offer color commentary.
Fernández got the job in 2023, when Francis was nearing the end of his pontificate. Several DDF projects were still in the works when the cardinals elected Leo XIV, one of which has become Venite ad me.
“Toward the end of his life,” Venite explains in its conclusion, “Pope Francis entrusted the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith with the task of offering the Church a reflection on the transmission of the faith, and Pope Leo XIV subsequently reiterated this request.”
“The Dicastery has embraced this task in the spirit of the missionary renewal that is asked of the whole People of God,” Venite further states, “including the institutions of the Roman curia.”
The thing is, there is an entire department of the Roman curia dedicated to mission and evangelization – the propagation and transmission of the faith – and it is a behemoth with its own assets and resources.
More to the point, Venite admits – in words – that its task “falls within the purview of another Dicastery: namely, the Dicastery for Evangelization’s Section for Fundamental Questions Regarding Evangelization in the World.”
Venite even explains how the Fundamental Questions section at Evangelization “has long been engaged in research and dialogue not only on the transmission of the faith but also on related topics,” including several treated at greater or lesser length in the DDF document, itself.
Why the Dicastery for Evangelization did not get the job that Francis instead gave to DDF is a legitimate question only partially answered by Francis’s predilection for relying on personal relationships rather than institutional profiles.
It hints at a bigger problem within the whole curial system.
In my book on Leo XIV and Catholic Reform in the 21st Century, I noted that Francis’s decision to make evangelization the central focus of the Roman curia’s work “put ideas above reality,” which broke one of Francis’ own cardinal rules.
It also tried to make the curia do something it still isn’t designed to do.
Said simply, the curia is a power structure. It is a bureaucracy. On a practical level, making evangelization the mission of the curia bureaucratized the Church’s missionary mandate, even as it blurred the lines distinguishing the purviews of the various dicasteries.
On the other hand, one of the longstanding criticisms of the curia is that its departments tend to work in isolation from one another (something Leo XIV has noted publicly with undisguised chagrin).
The changes Francis undertook may yet be harnessed in a way that gets them out of their silos, but at present things are still more than a little unsettled.
Leo XIV was elected to stabilize the curia and to “take down the temperature” in the Church after the frequently feverish whirlwind Francis pontificate.
So far, Leo has mostly let offices and senior curial officials do their thing without papal interference. A measure of stability has come from that. Leo has also been content to let DDF complete projects already underway, and that is in keeping with his modus operandi.
Now, the work Francis cut out for the office under Fernández is all but complete.
Earlier this month, the cardinal secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, made headlines when he said the pontiff would “remodulate” his pontificate “if necessary” in the wake of his cancer diagnosis.
Whether the pope will remodulate the DDF’s mission profile remains to be seen. How he remodulates it, if he does at all, will tell a good deal about how the pope intends to govern, and about what the Leonine era will look like when it comes fully into its own.
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