When Pastoral Language Refuses to Answer: On the Rhetoric of Accompaniment

Introduction

There is an old parlour trick, beloved of diplomats and theologians alike. Ask whether the soup is too salty and receive, at generous length, a meditation on hospitality. The taste of the soup remains untouched.

Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe has elevated this into an art form. Ask him whether an act is licit, and he will tell you about friendship. He does not change the subject; he changes its register (from proposition to atmosphere) and trusts, correctly, that most of us will find the atmosphere so pleasant we forget we came in with a question.

Two documents make the case better than I could argue it cold: a homily preached in June at a Mass for two men marking fifty years together, and an essay on the Synod written for L'Osservatore Romano, in which the same manoeuvre is performed at greater length and, rather touchingly, with footnotes.

The Mass itself is worth a sentence or two, since two accounts posted on it could not agree on what kind of sentence to give it. On June 13th, at Holy Apostles Church in Pimlico, London, some hundred and fifty guests gathered for a "Mass of Thanksgiving for 50 Years of Friendship, Partnership, and Commitment in the Pursuit of Justice," marking the golden anniversary of Julian Filochowski and Martin Pendergast; two men who met at a Catholic conference in 1976, entered a civil partnership in 2006, and were, on this occasion, formally blessed at the altar on the strength of their relationship's anniversary.

It is worth noting that Fiducia Supplicans, the document usually cited to license such gestures, permits only spontaneous, non-liturgical blessings and excludes any blessing given in connection with a civil union's anniversary; a distinction a scripted Mass of Thanksgiving does not obviously observe.

Cardinal Radcliffe concelebrated and preached. One outlet, sympathetic to the couple, reported the day as a triumph of pastoral tenderness over an older, harder Church. Another, reliably polemical on such matters, reported it as a scandal dressed in a chasuble. Both mistook the homily for the main event, though the homily is the more interesting because it refused to be either.

Exhibit A: The Homily That Answered Nobody's Question

The homily is, on its own terms, lovely. Friendship, we are told, is not introverted; it is a sharing in the life of the Trinity; it anticipates the peace of God. All true, all traditional, all the kind of thing you could preach at a golden wedding, a religious profession, or the retirement of a much-loved schoolmaster, and nobody would blink.

The trouble is not what was said. The trouble is what the occasion required and never received. A few sentences would have done it. The assembled company had not gathered to celebrate the general proposition that friendship is good; a claim on which, I am reliably informed, the Church and the world are in complete agreement.

They had gathered for something rather more specific: to witness and bless the fiftieth anniversary of a named, civilly partnered same sex relationship. That is the soup. Nobody asked whether friendship as such was nourishing. The question hanging over the celebration was whether this friendship, instituted at a conference, sealed in a civil partnership, renewed at the altar with language about deepening a bond that unites, was of the kind the Church calls chaste, or the kind it does not.

The homily never acknowledges that the question exists. Instead, it performs a remarkable rhetorical substitution: the specific becomes the general; the general is treated with great eloquence; everyone leaves feeling answered although nobody has actually been told anything new. That is theology declining to inform, dressed as theology declining to speculate.

The Herbert McCabe Problem

Here is where the argument must slow down, because buried in the homily is a citation doing far more theological work than its brevity suggests, pressed into service for an argument it was never intended to support.

McCabe was answering a metaphysical question: how can God be the total cause of a creature's existence and act without competing with that creature's own freedom? He was not offering a theory of pastoral accompaniment.

The argument trades on a quiet equivocation. "God lets creatures be free" is a claim about metaphysics. "A Cardinal should therefore not say whether an act is sinful" is a claim about pastoral prudence, and it does not follow from the first claim any more than "God permits the rain to fall on the just and unjust" entails that a meteorologist should decline to say which way is north. McCabe was making a point about causation, not issuing a permission slip for silence.

It is a beautiful footnote in the wrong argument.

The irony is that the Church already possesses the vocabulary that would have made such honesty possible. Catholic moral theology distinguishes the moral disorder of an act from the will's free turning from a known good. It also distinguishes both from personal culpability, which may be diminished by ignorance, fear, habit, or poor formation. A pastor can therefore name the first without pretending to judge the second or presume the third.

The homily proceeded as though those distinctions did not exist.

The pastoral dilemma was genuine. But it was also, to a considerable extent, self-created. Two bishops and a cardinal had agreed to participate in a public liturgical celebration whose very purpose invited the question the homily declined to address.

Exhibit B: The Same Trick, now with a Continent Attached

The second document is a different animal: a signed essay in the Vatican's newspaper, written after the Synod on Synodality's first assembly, at a moment when critics on several sides were asking loudly what, if anything, the whole three-year process had actually decided. Radcliffe's answer, characteristically, is that the deciding was never the point; the Spirit works the way a seed does, quietly, underground, embarrassing anyone who expected a harvest by October.

It is a serious essay, ranging over friendship, clericalism, inculturation, and the Church's reception of Aristotle, and it deserves to be read as such. It also takes up, in its central section, Fiducia Supplicans and the African bishops' revolt against it.

The same manoeuvre appears again: the question is not answered here; it is relocated: from the register of truth to the register of process, from the moral status of an act to the pastoral texture of the conversation surrounding it. The migration is so smooth, so well-mannered, that one can read the whole essay and never notice the question left the room.

Identity itself, we are told, including sexual identity, is something the Christian must relativise, must "die to," in favour of a deeper identity as a friend of God. It echoes St Paul: in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, and so on. But notice what the move accomplishes. Paul's text relativises identities to insist that all are equally called to the same moral and sacramental life. The essay relativises identity to suggest that the moral evaluation of acts connected to that identity becomes somehow less urgent, or at least less discussable, than the shared journey of friendship in which everyone is walking.

The African bishops' resistance to Fiducia Supplicans is handled the same way, treated almost entirely as a matter of cultural imposition and inadequate consultation, which it may well also be, while the question the bishops were actually pressing, namely whether the document was doctrinally sound, is allowed to recede into procedure.

Process becomes the answer to a question about truth. It is the soup and the hospitality, played out this time across a continent.

The Word "Development," Doing Its Usual Work

The pattern appears again in the essay's treatment of development. To be fair to the Cardinal, he does not claim the Church cannot change its mind about anything. Quite the opposite: the essay's third movement is an explicit defence of doctrinal development, complete with Aquinas rediscovering Aristotle and the Church "dying" to inadequate understandings to enter more deeply into the mystery she has always professed. This is real Newman territory, and Newman is not an author a Catholic can dismiss lightly.

Doctrine develops. Newman insisted upon it. But development is not simply change; it is change continuous with what came before, corrigible against it, never simply its reversal. The essay invokes "development" warmly while giving us almost no criterion for recognising it. We are told the Church must be willing to abandon old ways of understanding, but not which understandings are historical and which are constitutive.

Applied to Aquinas rediscovering Aristotle, the word does real work. Applied, by implication, to whether the Church might one day bless what she has always called disordered, it is asked to do the same work on a case that has not remotely been shown to belong to the same family. Invoke development often enough, in contexts general enough, and it stops functioning as a criterion and starts functioning as a mood, exactly the issue this essay has been describing.

The trouble with an argument built this way is not that it is dishonest. It's that it has the consistency of freshly made jelly: handsome on the plate, impossible to pin to the wall. Press on where, precisely, the boundary of legitimate development lies, and the shape dissolves and reforms somewhere else, still handsome, still unpinned.

Conclusion: A Style, not a Man

I raise all this not to convict a Cardinal of malice. I do not think he is lying, any more than the man discoursing on hospitality is lying about the soup. But because the pattern is not confined to Cardinals, or to this particular controversy, or even to progressives, whatever the comment-thread taxonomies suggest.

I have had this exact conversation, nearly word for word, with correspondents of impeccably orthodox self-description who, asked a plain question about church doctrine, culpability or grace, retreat into "lived experience," "complexity," or "imagination," with the same fluency Radcliffe retreats into "friendship."

The tell is always the same: a direct yes-or-no question is met with an unfalsifiable answer, moving, and about something slightly to the left of what was asked.

It is possible to build an entire theological style out of never quite being wrong, by the simple expedient of never quite answering.

The remedy isn't harshness (not calling the man heterodox, or the Mass sacrilegious, or reaching for the nearest available saint's feast day as an ironic cudgel); that is simply hospitality's opposite number, equally allergic to the plain question, just louder about it.

The remedy is smaller, and I suspect more annoying to everyone involved: to notice, gently and repeatedly, when the soup has gone unaddressed, and to keep asking about the soup.

Somewhere underneath all our processes and our beautifully theorised accompaniment, there remains a very old and very unfashionable Catholic conviction that some questions have answers, that the answers are occasionally yes or no, and that a Church which has forgotten how to say either has not thereby become more merciful. It has only become better at accompaniment than at witness.