Now, this brings me to my second line of criticism of Carroll's line of criticism. In his learned understanding, Carroll intimates that the powers that be in the Roman Catholic Church fear changes not only in the teachings regarding artificial contraception and celibacy but also in the very idea of change itself.
Carroll makes the following statement: "Until then [the Second Vatican Council], an insufficiently historically minded church had regarded such contingent questions [as birth control and celibacy] as God-given absolutes."
Perhaps Carroll is here deliberately echoing terminology that the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) uses in his famous 1966 essay "The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness," which is reprinted in A Second Collection of Lonergan essays (1974, pages 1-9). However, even though Lonergan taught theology at the GregorianUniversity in Rome for many years, his views about historical-mindedness had little influence on the church hierarchy.
Nevertheless, Lonergan does at least suggest a useful way to refer to the mindset that Carroll aptly characterizes as regarding such contingent questions as birth control and celibacy as God-given absolutes this way of thinking represents what Lonergan refers to as a classicist world-view. In the classicist world-view of certain church prelates and of many conservative Roman Catholics, change is anathema.
After all, how can teachings that they have been thinking of as absolute truths (Carroll's God-given absolutes) change?
If there is any reasonable justification for holding religious faith in God at all, isn't it supposed to be the opposite of certainty about propositional statements? In other words, in a world where there are no certainties, don't we hold to religious faith in God in place of trying to hold to certainties of one sort or another?
But what happens to religious faith in God when church authorities substitute absolute faith in moral teachings for faith in God and try to pass off moral teaching as though they were God-given absolutes, to use Carroll's term?
Carroll correctly suggests that many of the church's moral teachings will probably stand or fall together. This is exactly what the church hierarchy fears if one moral teaching is changed, it will lead to changes in other moral teachings.
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