Franciscan friar’s attack on bishops and doctrine is a theological disaster

Franciscan Friar Daniel P. Horan, in a response to the USCCB’s March 20th document “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to the Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” refers to the Note as a “disaster”. Why? Because, he writes, it calls “for the refusal to provide gender-affirming care to those experiencing gender dysphoria,” which he says denies “the reality of transgender, nonbinary and intersex persons.” The bishops’ document, according to Horan (who is a professor of philosophy, religious studies and theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana), is a disaster “theologically, scientifically, and pastorally.”

This essay will not address his claim about the scientific aspects of this issue (that is not my training, and others can do that better than I could), nor will it engage his reading of Pius XII’s comments about medical interventions.

That’s because there is more than enough to say about Horan’s apparent misunderstanding of what theology really is and actually does.

Anselm’s deeper understanding of theology

What does Horan think theology is, and how do the bishops fail theologically in his estimation? Horan begins by—rightly—invoking the oft-cited phrase from Anselm, that theology is fides quarens intellectum—“faith seeking understanding.” Based on this definition, Horan avers that “Christian theology is dynamic and complex, not easily reduced to simplistic propositional claims.” This is why “some of the most important dogmatic teachings of the Christian tradition took centuries to develop.” Since this is the case, Horan writes:

It takes time to understand deeply complex realities, such as who God is or what it means to be a human person, and even as we learn more, we never fully exhaust the mystery of reality. That the bishops assume they understand in totality the incomprehensible complexity of God’s creation generally and the human person particularly is a consistent and errant attitude present throughout this document. In every age and time, we continually learn more about the wondrous, mysterious, beautiful and complex creation of which we are also a part. To make absolute claims in the manner present throughout this text is, at best, theologically irresponsible.

There is a good deal that is problematic in this text, thinly veiled under a veneer of intellectual humility. But first, the Anselm quote.

Anselm first uses this phrase in the Prologion, the text where his famous ontological argument for the existence of God is found. He wrote the Proslogion, according to Anselm himself, as “one who strives to lift his mind to the contemplation of God, and seeks to understand what he believes” (Pros, preface). That is, he wants God to help him “understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe” (Pros II).

This is the first clue to what Anselm means by this phrase—that theology is seeking to understand what we already believe, that is, the content of Faith. In the case of the Proslogion, Anselm already believes that God exists, and to some extent what that means (and he states it as an “absolute claim”—more on that in a moment); he seeks to understand how that is the case, to understand what he already believes to be the case.

Anselm clarifies further in a later text, the Cur Deus Homo, or “Why God Became Human.” In this text, written as a dialogue, his interlocutor Boso says:

As the right order requires us to believe the deep things of Christian faith before we undertake to discuss them by reason; so to my mind it appears a neglect if, after we are established in the faith, we do not seek to understand what we believe. Therefore, since I thus consider myself to hold the faith of our redemption, by the prevenient grace of God, so that, even were I unable in any way to understand what I believe, still nothing could shake my constancy. (Bk I, ch 2).

This is quite telling. There is no question of what is believed. The question is understanding what it means. This leads to the question of what it is that Anselm believes is being understood—that is, what is the “faith.” While there is no explicit definition of the content of Faith easily accessible from his work (an 11^th century monk would hardly have needed one), we can see throughout his work, and especially in the preface to the Monologion, that faith consists of what is revealed in Scripture and the authority of the Church Fathers. As Anselm says to Boso:

I say anything not upheld by greater authority, though I appear to demonstrate it, yet it should be received with no further certainty than as my opinion for the present, until God makes some clearer revelation to me. For I am sure that, if I say anything which plainly opposes the Holy Scriptures, it is false; and if I am aware of it, I will no longer hold it. (Cur Deus Homo Bk I, ch. 18).

This last point is crucial. Anselm holds that the content of the Faith—not just belief itself, but what is believed—precedes reason and understanding. Indeed, it must, or one cannot truly come to understand what the Faith teaches at all. Anselm writes in the Proslogion:

I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand. (ch. 1)

There must be that which is already believed, and if it is not believed, then understanding—according to Anselm—cannot and will not come.

Yes, there are things about what we believe as Christians that we do not yet fully understand. It would be quite ludicrous to suggest otherwise. However, this leads to a common misapplication of Anselm’s phrase, one that Horan himself falls into: that because we cannot fully understand something in the data of revelation, we cannot say anything definitive about it at all.

This may not be what Horan intends to say, but it is certainly implied by his statement that “some of the most important dogmatic teachings of the Christian tradition took centuries to develop.” The obvious logic is that we cannot fully understand what God has revealed about persons, and so we cannot say something definitive about God’s intention for biological sex. Hence, to make “absolute claims” about it “is, at best, theologically irresponsible.”

Doctrinal development and sexual distinction

Whatever Anselm would make of Horan’s appropriation of his thought, Horan’s use of it indicates a complete misunderstanding of doctrinal development.

First, the suggestion that, because we cannot understand something fully, we cannot make definitive statements about it at all, is not only ridiculous, it is utterly impractical. The only way a thought, idea, teaching, etc., can develop in the first place is if there is definitive content from which to develop.

But development has to go somewhere—it has to develop further to say something. Definitive content, indeed, is what the Faith develops from and to. To take, for example, the Trinity, which Horan may have in mind when he discusses teachings the Tradition took centuries to develop: there were already beliefs in place that led both to the debate about Christ’s divinity and ultimately the codification of the doctrine of the Trinity. These would have been absolute claims (such as Christ being “God’s Son” and the perfect Image of the Father). But further, once the matter is settled, it is settled definitively (e.g., that Christ is homoousia with the Father). I doubt anyone would be silly enough to claim that by saying this, the Church Fathers were assuming they understand “in totality the incomprehensible complexity of God.” Yet the claim of the teaching is absolute.

Secondly, development must take place in continuity from the already established (in the case of theology, revealed) content. Many theologians have discussed this, most famously Johann Möhler and John Henry Newman. Newman, for example, compares this sort of development to a seed. As the tree grows from the seed, it changes, developing and expressing itself in new ways, but only in line with what was already contained within the seed. The tree never develops arms, or frying pans, or reverses back into its seed. That would be ridiculous. The tree develops from the seed, but does not separate from it and change into something else not already potentially present in the seed. Church teaching develops the same way. While the Church does develop her decreed dogmas and doctrines, she does not change them in the sense that she reverses, contradicts, or removes them.

This brings us to the key point, which is that Horan believes that the sexual distinction created in humans by God is not one of these teachings. Horan writes:

While some aspects of orthodox Christian faith are correctly stated, such as that the natural world designed by the Creator is inherently good and that there is a divinely created order, the authors then bestow upon themselves an uncritical authority to determine what constitutes that order absolutely.

Horan clearly believes that biological sex is not one of the aspects of divinely revealed truth of orthodox Christian faith. Indeed, he fumes:

Recourse in this document to proof-texted passages from Genesis, for example, are as irresponsible in identifying historical, social and scientific realities today as claiming that the Earth was created in six 24-hour days according to the same superficial reading of Scripture.

Fully addressing this would take much more space than allotted here, and would be mostly an exercise in banality. But I do wonder just what Horan thinks we could learn from the Genesis passage at all. For example, he says we can learn that there is a divinely created order, but somehow not that biological sex is a part of that order.

This is to say nothing of the logic of the text itself: the Genesis text presents the distinction of human into male and female (this is noted by the USCCB document, by the way, note 5, and it is hardly a prooftext) as an intrinsic part of that order—that things reproduce according to kinds. The biological distinction is not acting like a literary device (as is the distinction of each day, or yom); it expresses the logic of the divine order itself, culminating in the reunification of the human when the pair become one flesh and a child—the fruit of that union—results.

The genesis of the problem

And all of this does not address the fact that Horan’s argument could quite easily be turned back on him. By what lights, if we can’t make any absolute claims about human sexual difference because we do not fully understand the mystery of God’s creation or the nature of personhood, does he pronounce that the bishops are wrong in their interpretation of Scripture and the Tradition?

He claims the bishops are hubristic to make such claims—why not he himself?

I suspect the answer will lie in his ultimate rhetorical goal: to portray any critiques or rejections of transgenderism as attempts to “erase” people who suffer with these issues that surround gender and sex, to deny ”that transgender people exist; that nonbinary people exist; that intersex people exist.” This appears to be the root of his claim that the USCCB document is a pastoral disaster.

However, I do not see how this is the case. Leaving aside even whether the bishops are correct in their position, it is hard to see how any honest reading of the document can conclude that it denies the very existence of these persons, or that their suffering is not real. For example, as the document says: “To be sure, many people are sincerely looking for ways to respond to real problems and real suffering” (note 20). Writing and releasing the document itself makes no sense if such persons are not recognized to exist and to be truly suffering.

What the document claims—consistent with divine revelation through Tradition and Scripture—is that biological sex is not something that we own, because we do not own human nature, and sex is part of the crucial expression of that nature. Nor do we have the authority or right to manipulate this “fundamental aspect of existence as a human being” (note 5). This is because our personhood, sex, identity, etc., come from God.

This is one of the fundamental claims about human existence, from the Book of Genesis to St. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, something the USCCB document makes quite clear from numerous quotes.

Horan’s central problem, ultimately, is not that he disagrees with the bishops (which he does), but that he disagrees with divine revelation, mediated through Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium. Theology does not involve fully understanding, but working and seeking to understand what we have received and accepted by the gift of faith.

With this in mind, I would caution Horan not to make such absolute claims about what theology and revelation say until he fully understands that.