Vatican City - This morning Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, opened the Plenary Session with a reflection that was both spiritual and methodological: a concrete reminder of how the Church thinks, discerns, and speaks with authority. The Plenary begins today, will conclude on 29 January, and brings together around seventy participants.
The Prefect’s starting point was not a technical topic, but an inner stance: intellectual humility. Fernández said that “in recent times, in prayer” he has felt a strong call to this posture, invoking the motto “Ubi humilitas ibi sapientia.” From there came his practical direction: enter the shared work without the presumption of “possessing” reality, and without confusing the ability to think with the claim to exhaust whatever one is thinking about.
At the centre of the text, the Prefect set out a clear distinction. God has given the human being a faculty of thought “with universal reach” – “one can think the world, history, origins; one can even think God” – yet this openness does not make the mind capable of total comprehension. Fernández puts it plainly: “this universal capacity of thought does not mean that human persons have an ability for exhaustiveness, for an integral perception of reality.” And he adds: “it is impossible for a human mind to be aware of reality in its totality and in every aspect. This is possible only for God.”
From that premise follows the move that holds the entire reflection together: the impossibility of understanding “integrally” even what appears small and self-contained, because every fragment becomes clear only within the whole. Fernández insists: “we cannot have an integral understanding even of a small part of this world,” because that part “can be fully understood only in the light of the totality in which it is integrated: everything is connected.” The conclusion is a sober acknowledgement: “we are incapable of interpreting all the meanings and nuances of a reality, of a person, of a historical moment, of a truth.”
To make the point more concrete, Fernández turns to St Thomas Aquinas: the inexhaustible richness of God is expressed more fittingly through the richness of the whole and through the variety willed by “the intention of the first agent”, such that “what is lacking in each thing for representing divine goodness is supplied by other things.” The decisive line follows: God’s goodness “cannot be adequately represented by a single creature.” Along the same line he places a citation from Pope Francis on the need to “grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships” and to contemplate each creature “within the whole of God’s plan”.
The cardinal then widens the horizon to the mystical tradition. Fernández cites St John of the Cross, who describes the “thicket” of God’s works and a wisdom “so abundant and so full of mysteries” that the soul can “enter ever more deeply”, because it “is immense and contains incomprehensible riches”. The message is that reality – and even more so the mystery of God – cannot be reduced to quick schemes or brisk certainties. Against this background, Fernández warns that progress in science and technology does not remove our limits; it makes it more necessary to keep them in view. “The more science and technology advance, the more we must keep that awareness of limits alive,” he said, distancing himself from the “terrible deception” of feeling secure and of justifying, with fallacious reasoning, choices and violence. In his address he links this dynamic to historical and contemporary examples – “the excesses of the Inquisition, the world wars, the Shoah, the massacres in Gaza” – to show how argument can become an alibi when it loses hold of truth. The Prefect then returns to ordinary life: “the same can happen in the life of all of us,” because “we repeat that deception by living too sure of what we know.” He then offered several directions.
The first concerns the relationship with God as a condition for understanding: “to understand anything fully we must let ourselves be illuminated by God; we must invoke him, pray, listen to him, let ourselves be guided by him amid the shadows.” Fernández adds an essential formula: “We trust him (credere Deo).”
The second concerns the Church’s way of thinking: reflecting and analysing while listening to others, welcoming different perspectives that open up “other aspects” of reality. For this reason, he writes, “it helps us to pay attention to the peripheries, from where things are seen differently.” Within this framework he cited Pope Leo: “no one possesses the whole truth; we must all seek it humbly, and seek it together,” along with the call for “a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains listening to God so that it can likewise listen to everyone.”
Fernández then applies this criterion specifically to the truths of faith. Today, he observes, a theologian often has competence “limited to a discipline” or to an “isolated topic”, while the mysteries are intertwined in a “precious hierarchy”, illuminated above all by the central truths “that constitute the heart of the Gospel”. And it is precisely here that he places a delicate passage about the role of a body such as the Dicastery: in a place where answers may be given “with authority”, where texts can be written as part of the ordinary magisterium, and even where one may “correct and condemn”, the risk grows of losing the breadth of perspectives.
To these considerations the cardinal adds a contextual note on the drift of the “psycho-blogs” proliferating online: Fernández explains that today many “condemn” with the same ease as those who presume to speak ex cathedra. For that very reason, it becomes urgent to recover “that healthy realism proposed by the great sages and mystics of the Church.” The close of his reflection, entrusted to St Bonaventure, gathers everything into a single image: the great questions should not be addressed to “the light”, but “to the fire that inflames and carries everything”, and that fire “is God”. Fernández then reprises the idea that, at a certain point, “negations are more appropriate than affirmations”, and that “inner silence contributes more than words”.
s.M.C.
Silere non possum