A few days ago, obviously with good intent, somebody tried to defend measures recently taken by the Gozo Bishop. Instead, because they lacked up-to-date-knowledge in the domain of Sacred Theology, they threw the poor Bishop into a veritable quandary!

Asserting that Bishop Grech “is a keen admirer of the heroic Basque Jesuit John Sobrino” is no statement of true praise for our Bishop. Still less is it of praise to note that Bishop Grech is “having the Liberation Theologian John Sobrino SJ as a role model”!

Only a few months back, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith approved a “Notification” by Pope Benedict XVI, censuring the false doctrines about the person of Christ propagated by Sobrino since at least the early 1990s. The nine single-spaced pages of the Notification on the Vatican website begin by rejecting Sobrino’s politicised Christology.

The document emphasises the theme of the perennial continuity of Catholic doctrine with the “apostolic faith”. This because Sobrino and other modernists had driven a wedge between what they consider as the “real Jesus” of history, and the “unhistorical” image of Jesus supposedly produced by the Church’s “evolving faith” after his life on earth.

The Congregation rejects as having “no foundation” the view that the dogmatic definitions about Christ of the early Ecumenical Councils are “limited and even dangerous”. It also rejects the view that the formulations of Christological doctrine by the early Councils had no value except in the ancient cultural milieu in which they developed.

Sobrino had also reduced to vagueness and ambiguity fundamental truths such as the divinity of Christ. Amongst assertions of his, one finds that “at the outset Jesus was not spoken of as God, nor was divinity a term applied to him; this happened only after a considerable interval of believing explication, almost certainly after the fall of Jerusalem”. Sobrino’s “new insights” correspond substantially to proposition 24 and proposition 27, condemned by Pope St Pius X in the decree Lamentabili of 1907.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declares that Sobrino “fails to affirm Jesus’ divinity with sufficient clarity” and so has given credence to the suspicion that the Church “has arrived at the formulation of Jesus’ divinity without a clear continuity with the New Testament”.

In support of what the Congregation says, we are given many references to Biblical texts, such as John 20:28, wherein Jesus is referred to as “Lord” and “God”, and John 1:1 which says that “the word was God”.

Sobrino’s ambiguity about Christ’s divinity is accompanied by a fuzziness about the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures. So much so that the Congregation has here discerned a warmed-over version of the Nestorian heresy, which had postulated two different persons in Christ. Perfect Cardinal William Levada, who signed the Notification along with Secretary Archbishop Angelo Amato, declared that the literal sense of what Sobrino says here “is incompatible with the Catholic faith”. And the Cardinal appeals to the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) as well as to Pius XII’s encyclical Sempiternus Rex, from which he quotes.

As Sobrino had pictured Christ as “a believer like ourselves”, Cardinal Levada, again appealing to Pius XII, notes that this idea is a thinly-veiled attack on Christ’s true divinity. Jesus “did not need” the theological virtue of faith as we do, because the Lord always knew his father and his own divine identity by the direct knowledge of vision. And the Cardinal again cites the Gospels, as John 6:46 wherein we are told “Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father”.

He also makes reference to the magisterial teaching of Pope John Paul II as well as to the Catechism which speaks of “the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God made man has of his Father.” (nn. 473-474).

Against Sobrino, Cardinal Levada also quotes from Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis to show that Christ possessed this knowledge throughout his earthly life. When he refers to Christ’s knowledge of the members of his mystical body, Pius XII has this: “But the knowledge and love of our Divine Redeemer, of which we were the object from the first moment of His Incarnation, exceed all the human intellect can hope to grasp. For hardly was he conceived in the womb of the Mother of God when he began to enjoy the beatific vision.”

The Notification censures other grave errors in the books of Sobrino, including his rationalistic reduction of the meaning of Christ’s salvific death. The Cardinal here cites not only Vatican Council II and the Catechism, but also the Decree on Justification of the Council of Trent.

See what a poor and wrong effort is the idea of picturing a Catholic bishop as an admirer of a censured theologian! Even more telling us that he takes this very same theologian as a role-model! Quod Deus avertat! I am pretty sure the good Bishop abhors Sobrino’s theological stand condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Mgr Anton Gauci

Victoria, Gozo