Catholicism’s “Paradigm Shift”: Continuity or Rupture?.

Since the acension of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to the office of the papacy as Pope Francis, unease to unrest and now to open conflict has suffused the Catholic Church, from lay to clerics to even the Vatican. Various Catholics wonder, suggest and even argue that a paradigm shift (cf. Thomas Kuhn) in Catholic theology has taken place. Wherever a paradigm shift occurs, the relation between the pre-sifters and the post-shifters becomes one of incompatibility, of being incommensurate, such that a mutually excluding fissure takes places., the divided house will fall. Has that been happening to Catholicism? It has been suggested that the thinking of Bernard Lonergan SJ exhibits the same cognitive dynamics as that of Pope Francis. In order to attempt a judgment as to whether continuity or rupture structure the Catholic Church of today, focus is directed to Lonergan and his own view of what is transpiring in current Catholicism. One discovers quickly that Lonergan sees traditional Catholicism as classicist, conservative, normative and Aristotelian in orientation whereas the renewal theologians are modern, liberal, and distinctly historicist, a theme amply developed by Lonergan himself. The conclusion of this study is the traditionalists and modernizers do indeed constitute the incommensurable prongs of a paradigm shift such that currently Catholicism is a 2-in-one church, i.e., two validly baptized groups of believers between whom a irreconcilable conflict rages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]