This image frames what follows. The fire symbolizes the “pastoral” turn examined below: authority exercised without doctrinal reckoning, memory set aside rather than refuted. What was not formally denied was rendered unusable. The article that follows argues that such a move is not pastoral at all, but foreign to Catholic theology itself.
The phrase “pastoral only” does not belong to the Catholic theological tradition. It belongs to another intellectual world altogether—one in which teaching is reduced to perspective, authority is softened into suggestion, and governance is severed from truth. That world is not Catholic. It is humanist.
Another Council Rejects Truth
In the Catholic mind, pastoral action has never meant less than doctrine. It has always meant doctrine at work. The pastor is not a stylist. He is a governor of souls, and governance presupposes truth. One cannot order what one does not first know. One cannot guide without judging. One cannot speak authoritatively while remaining neutral about what is true.
This is why the language surrounding Vatican II represents such a rupture. When Pope John XXIII announced that the Council would avoid dogmatic definitions in favor of a pastoral orientation, and when Pope Paul VI later reaffirmed that choice, something novel was being asserted: that the Church could exercise authority while declining to bind truth explicitly. The claim was not merely procedural. It was philosophical.
Classical Catholic theology does not recognize a magisterium that governs without teaching or teaches without binding. Pope Leo XIII understood this instinctively. In his ecclesiology, to govern the Church is already to teach her, because governance orders action toward an intelligible good. Pope Pius XII was even more explicit: non-solemn teaching still demands assent precisely because it proceeds from doctrinal judgment. There is no authoritative speech that floats above truth like mist.
This is why the “pastoral only” category would have struck earlier theologians as unintelligible. St. Thomas Aquinastreats law, counsel, and command as acts of practical reason. They are measured by truth or they are unjust. A pastoral directive that refuses to state what is true while nonetheless reshaping practice is not humble. It is incoherent.
Humanism, by contrast, is perfectly comfortable here. In the humanist imagination, language does not bind; it influences. Teaching does not command; it proposes. Truth is encountered perspectivally and negotiated socially. Authority exists to facilitate consensus, not to order minds to reality. Pastoral speech, in this framework, is meant to accompany rather than to rule.
When this logic enters the Church, it does not announce itself as humanism. It adopts ecclesial vocabulary. It speaks of dialogue, sensitivity, development, and lived experience. But the effect is the same: doctrine recedes into atmosphere while practice advances as fact. Governance proceeds, but no one will say plainly why.
This is precisely the method St. Pius X warned against: the quiet alteration of belief through changes in emphasis and language while denying doctrinal intent. He recognized that one does not need to deny a dogma to empty it. One need only stop letting it govern.
To call Vatican II “pastoral only” is therefore not a modest admission. It is a revolutionary claim. It asserts that the Church may exercise authority without explicitly ordering minds to truth, that she may reshape life without defining belief, that she may govern without teaching in the classical sense.
That idea did not come from Catholic theology. It came from elsewhere.
And once admitted, it does not remain contained. It transforms everything it touches.
The Church can speak pastorally. She always has. But she has never spoken pastorally instead of truly. To suggest otherwise is not to defend tradition. It is to replace it with something far more fragile. It is to replace it with falsehood.
