Response: The Conservative Genius of Catholicism

Once, Shaun Blanchard believed that Catholic truth was unalterable. "We Catholics stay the same; the Protestants change": That was the comforting lesson drummed into him by catechists, priests, popular apologists, and articles in First Things. It was "the party line." But now, he writes in the latest issue of Commonweal, it all seems deeply implausible. Hasn't Pope Francis basically changed the teaching on the death penalty -- it used to be theoretically OK, now it's "inadmissible"? Didn't Vatican II pretty much reverse Church doctrine when it said "the human person has a right to religious freedom"? Haven't the greatest modern theologians effectively admitted that teaching can change, as when St. John Henry Newman wrote a whole book on doctrinal development and Pope Benedict XVI discussed the "combination of continuity and discontinuity" in Church history?