With this episode, we begin our new series on the Doctors of the Church. What is a Doctor of the Church? Are all Doctors also saints? What makes a person a Doctor of the Church? All these questions, and more, will be answered, as well as some hints at what you can expect from this series. Get ready to sample the fruit of some of the greatest minds the Church has ever produced!
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Theme Music: Gaudeamus (Introit for the Feast of All Saints), sung by Jeff Ostrowski. Courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed: https://www.ccwatershed.org/
(singing in foreign language) - Welcome to The Way of the Fathers. I'm Jim Papendrea. This podcast is a production of Catholic Culture. Sign up for our newsletter at catholicculture.org/newsletter. Today we begin our series on the Doctors of the Church with an introduction episode. But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who donated to our fall campaign. Thanks above all to God who provides for all of our needs and we did hit our goal, and I can't say enough how much we appreciate the support. Of course, it's never too late to participate in supporting Catholic culture. So if you haven't donated yet, please prayerfully consider it. Just click the link in the description. As we air this episode of The Way of the Fathers, it is New Year's Day, but more importantly, it is the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. And with this episode, we begin a new year and a new series of The Way of the Fathers. We've had four series on the Fathers of the Church, along with some shorter series in between on the cities of the early church and some of the lesser known fathers. And now we begin our fifth major series on the Doctors of the Church. And in this, the Way of the Fathers goes beyond just the early church fathers. Of course, many of the Doctors of the Church were also early church fathers, but others were medieval scholastics or mystics or important spiritual leaders during the time of the Reformation and responded to Protestant challenges. And so this is the natural and logical next phase of our pilgrimage through The Way of the Fathers. So let's talk about the Doctors of the Church. The first thing we need to clarify is what it means to be a doctor of the church. The word doctor in this context is really just the Latin word for teacher. So to say someone is a doctor of the church means that this person is one of the most important and most trustworthy teachers from the whole history of the church. How does one get to be a doctor of the church? Well, it's not like getting a degree. No one sets out to become a doctor of the church. The church has to declare after a person's life is over that one is a doctor. So in that sense, it's a bit like becoming a saint, but in order to be a doctor of the church, one has to be a saint first. There are technically three criteria for what makes a person a doctor of the church. And one of them is that the person has to be officially declared a doctor by the Pope. Of course, just like when someone is declared a saint, the Pope doesn't do this out of the blue. It's done in consultation with the bishops of the world and the diacastery for the causes of saints, what used to be called the congregation for the causes of saints. And there is a long process of discovery and discernment that leads up to it. Now, other than the fact that a doctor must be officially declared as such by the church, there are really two criteria that would make that possible. First, as I mentioned, is that the person has to be a saint. There are no doctors of the church who are not also saints. So you could say that all doctors of the church are saints, but not all saints are doctors of the church. In this sense, it is in some ways a higher designation than simply saint. But not in the sense that it necessarily means a doctor was more holy than a saint who is not a doctor. It's more in the sense that a doctor of the church is a saint who has left an especially significant legacy for others to follow or learn from, not only in the example of their lives, but in a body of writing that demonstrates and clarifies the teachings of the church. And so this brings us to the third criterion, which is what the popes have called a special carism of wisdom. This is a gift of the Holy Spirit, given on a level that most people do not get. And so if you think about what St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 12, that there are these gifts of the spirit that are not given to everyone. Some people get one kind of gift of the spirit. Some people get another. What the doctors of the church have is a special gift of wisdom in understanding doctrine and in being able to teach it correctly. So based on 1 Corinthians 12, verse eight, the doctors of the church are those who are given through the spirit the utterance of wisdom and the utterance of knowledge. Now the early and medieval fathers, when they talk about how to interpret scripture, they will say that it can't be done outside of a life of prayer. So for them, holiness and prayer are the prerequisites for being a good teacher. And the doctors of the church are those who have most perfectly combined holiness of life with wisdom in writing and teaching. Now it doesn't mean that they were sinless, but it does mean that to whatever extent they were sinners, they took their sins seriously. These were not people who thought the spiritual life was easy. They struggled for their sanctification. And in that, they set an example for the rest of us as all the saints do. Of course, to be a doctor of the church, one would have to be Orthodox in one's theology. That's small O Orthodox, meaning correct, according to scripture and tradition. But their teaching also has to be accessible in some way to the rest of us. On the other hand, being a doctor of the church does not mean that they are infallible. Even a doctor of the church can be wrong about a few things. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, the latest addition to the list of doctors, he got his dates mixed up and put Jesus' life with the wrong Roman Emperor. Another example of this is Saint Augustine. As I mentioned when I did the episode on Pelagianism, Augustine overreacted a bit against Pelagius and his followers. And Augustine, a doctor of the church, went a bit too far down the road of predestination. And the church would later clarify that we can't follow him quite that far down the road that would later lead to the heresy of Calvinism. Another example would be those doctors who wrote a lot of commentaries on scripture, like Saint Jerome. The fact that Jerome is a doctor of the church doesn't necessarily mean that we have to agree with his interpretation on every passage of scripture. So the fact that someone is a doctor of the church doesn't mean that every word they wrote automatically becomes church teaching. But the point is that a doctor of the church is someone who has left behind a body of writing that is generally trustworthy and that the church encourages the rest of us to read and learn from. Like any saint, we should also emulate their lives as we live in the world, but with the doctors, we should also learn from them and emulate them in the life of the mind. I always tell my students that the history of our faith is in large part the history of our ancestors in the faith and their interpretation of God's revelation. Now God's revelation includes the old and New Testaments of course, but God's primary revelation is the incarnation, the person of Jesus Christ himself. And so the task of our ancestors in the faith as they handed on the faith to us was to answer Jesus' own question. Who do you say that I am? And to answer it in a way that gets clearer over time. So the history of the church is very much the history of the teaching on that question. And incidentally, as I also tell my students, all heresy is the result of trying to answer that question without taking into account the precedent set by those who came before us. In other words, all heresy comes from the attempt to interpret scripture apart from tradition. Well, the point of all this is that the doctors of the church are those who have done the most significant work for the church in answering this question. Who is Jesus Christ? And the other important questions of doctrine and Christian identity. And they are those who are most trustworthy in terms of their teaching. Now it's interesting to notice that even though we do believe in the infallibility of the office of the papacy, Popes are not automatically doctors of the church. In fact, of all the doctors, only two of them were the Bishop of Rome. That's Pope St. Leo the Great and Pope St. Gregory the Great. Though others were bishops of important centers of Christianity like Alexandria, Jerusalem and Milan. And so as of this moment, there are 37 doctors of the church, though more could be added at any time. Who knows, by the time we get through the 37, there may be more. Or maybe when we get to the end of our list, we'll speculate on who might be added next. And just like there are mothers of the church among the early church fathers, there are some female doctors. Of the 37, four of them are women. They are St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese of Lizzou. Now, I won't mention all the names of the doctors here. I think it would be tedious for me to just run down the list. But you can look them up if you want to, to see the big picture. Just make sure when you do that, you get a current list with all 37. And if you do that, you might wonder why there are no apostles on the list. And I think the assumption is that they are automatically considered authoritative teachers chosen by Jesus himself, especially the ones who wrote the New Testament. And so they don't have to be designated as doctors by the church. But in any case, the official list begins after the time of the apostles. The earliest one being St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who wrote in the late second century. And as I mentioned, he is actually the most recent one added to the list. Okay. Now, here's what you can expect from this new series. First of all, those doctors of the church who are also early church fathers, that is the doctors from the early church period, well, the way of the Father's podcast already includes episodes on these. We will cover them in this series too, but we're going to wait a bit so we don't go over the same ground we've recently covered. We're going to get back to the early church doctors later and we'll definitely have more to say about them. But for now, we're going to pick up where we left off at the end of the early church period. That means our first doctor in the series will be the venerable bead. And from there, we'll take them chronologically based on when they lived and continue the way of the fathers through the history of the church by way of the lives of the doctors of the church. For each doctor, we will have two episodes, a whole month dedicated to each doctor, starting with the venerable bead this month. In each month, the first episode will be one on the life of the doctor and why this person is considered a saint in the first place. And the second episode will cover the doctor's legacy and what we can learn from this doctor. In other words, why this person is considered a doctor of the church. So two episodes for each doctor, the life and the legacy, why the person is a saint and why the person is a doctor. In the episode on the doctor's life, I'll give you some context for the life of each doctor and what was happening in the world and in the church in their lifetimes and whether they were responding to some heresy or controversy. Then in the episode on their legacy, I'll talk about the major themes or important concerns of their teaching. And I'm also going to do my best to read some engaging excerpts from each doctor's writings so you can hear each one of them in their own words, at least in English translation. And at the end of the second episode, for each doctor, I'll give you an entry point like a suggestion for one of the documents to read or maybe a book or other resource in case you want to dig deeper into that particular doctor of the church. So to summarize, some of the doctors of the church were also early church fathers, but the doctors span across the whole history of the church. All of the doctors are saints, but not all saints are doctors. The doctors of the church are the teachers with a capital T of the church. And so in this series, you'll get a taste of the wisdom of some of the best minds of the church down through the ages. And with that, we're ready to begin. Join me next time on The Way of the Fathers as we dive into the doctors of the church with our first episode on Saint B. The Venerable. Thanks for listening. (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) - Way of the Fathers is a production of catholicculture.org. Check out our other podcasts, including Catholic Culture audiobooks, bringing to life classic Catholic writings, criteria the Catholic Film Podcast, featuring deep analysis of great films from a Catholic perspective, and the Catholic Culture Podcast, an interview show exploring Catholic arts, culture, and issues. You'll find all of this as well as Catholic news, commentary, liturgical year resources, and much more at catholicculture.org.
