What the International Theological Commission is up to this week...

My class this evening was cancelled because my professor had to go attend this meeting of the ITC:

Oct. 02 (CWNews.com) - The International Theological Commission gathered in Rome on October 2, for a week-long meeting that will center on the fate of children who die without being baptized.

The themes for discussion by the International Theological Commission were set in 2004, to cover a 5-year span. The status of unbaptized children was one major topic, to be discussed in the context of God's universal plan for salvation and the unique sacramental role of the Church.

The ITC was headed by Cardinal Ratzinger for many years.

I found this fascinating article on the ITC by John Allen which I found to be highly informative:

The International Theological Commission, a body of 30 Catholic theologians from around the world that advises the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, can function as a kind of "early warning system" for gathering theological storms. In 1976, the commission produced a document on liberation theology, "Human Development and Christian Salvation," ahead of Rome's crackdown on liberation theology in the 1980s. In 1997, the commission issued "Christianity and the Religions," and the next few years witnessed a series of disciplinary actions against theologians working in the area of religious pluralism. That campaign culminated with Dominus Iesus in September 2001.

Hence it's worth paying attention when the commission tackles a subject, because one can be sure it's on the Vatican's radar screen.

This week [October 8th, 2004], a new group of members assembled to start their five-year terms (see below), and they settled on three topics for reflection.

o Infant baptism and Christian hope: The theologians who just completed their terms left behind the topic of "limbo," the traditional term for a resting place for souls excluded from the fullness of the beatific vision but otherwise not condemned to punishment, e.g., unbaptized babies. As one new ITC member put it to me this week, however, "This kind of group didn't come together just to talk about limbo." The commission therefore decided to put the subject of infant baptism into the broader context of eschatology and Christian hope -- "the universal salvific design of God, the unicity of the mediation of Christ and the sacramentality of the church in the order of salvation," to quote the official Vatican news release.

o Natural Law: Building on the pope's encyclicals Veritatis splendor (1993) and Fides et ratio (1998), the commission will take up the subject of "natural law," what Catholic philosophy regards as a law implanted in creation by the Creator that can be discovered by human reason. One motive for the study is to attack what the CDF has long seen as a "positivistic" tendency in reactions to its pronouncements on moral issues, such as gay marriage or stem cell research. Often it's assumed that the Catholic church expects people to follow its teachings because it says so ("positivism,") when in the Vatican's view, the church proposes a teaching because it's true. The hope is that by recovering a natural law framework, the church can shift the terms of debate from its own authority to the inherent persuasiveness of its teaching.

o Theology and the Academy: Catholic theology has long struggled to balance responsibilities to its various constituencies -- the hierarchy, the broader Catholic public, and other academic disciplines. Some see this as an invigorating challenge, while others worry that by adopting the standards of the secular academy, Catholic theology risks losing its identity. (To take a famous example of this view, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once said he wondered if Christian theology had made a mistake by relocating from the monastery to the university). The ITC will ponder the question, "To whom is theology accountable?"

[Finally, a list of the ITC's 30 members whose terms run until 2009.]