Canon 812: Who is allowed to teach the Catholic Faith?

Canon 812 appears within a large section of the Code of Canon Law, dealing with Book III, “The Teaching Function of the Church.” Canon 812 is situated among many other paragraphs [793-821] devoted to the competence and especially the orthodoxy of Catholic teachers and catechists, i.e., that all Catholics speaking and teaching for the Church are teaching what the Church believes. The Canon in question before us today is a brief but potent change to a special population:
 
Can. 812 Those who teach theological disciplines in any institutes of higher studies whatsoever must have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority.
 
The word “mandate” comes from the Latin word “to order.” In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus, during his Last Supper discourse with his disciples, announces [13:34] “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also shall love one another.” If you look at an older Daily Missal from before Vatican II, you might be surprised to see that Holy Thursday used to be called Maundy Thursday, a reference to Jesus’ order or mandatum at the Last Supper. The Church’s authority to mandate—to govern, set policy, and verify its teachers--is drawn from Jesus’ example.
 
Canon 812 is addressed to those who teach the “theological disciplines.” These would include:
 
Scripture
Fundamental theology [philosophical roots]
Dogmatic theology [essential doctrines and their meaning]
Moral theology
Spiritual and Pastoral Theology
Liturgy
Church history
Patrology [study of Church Fathers]
Archaeology
Canon Law
[Paulist Code Commentary, p. 970]
 
Clearly, Canon 812 has advanced professional studies in mind: the people who teach colleges and universities, or professional researchers for publication, and presumably seminaries [though seminaries get special attention in Law.]. We generally don’t expect our third grade CCD teachers to have mastered Patrology, let alone teach it. But we do expect a religion teacher in a Catholic college to know how to research St. Augustine’s teaching on original sin, a necessary key to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in that Mary was preserved from original sin by an intervention of God. Canon 812 does have a profound impact on the Church at the parish level, though. What is taught and preached in parishes—from religious ed to marriage preparation--is generated from what our Catholic professors and researchers have mined from Revelation and our Faith Tradition. [I will address the question of Church doctrinal supervision at the parish level—religious ed, primary and secondary Catholic schools, etc., in a future blog.]
 
Academically speaking, Catholicism in the United States was intellectually moribund through the first half of the twentieth century. A rare exception was the noted Church historian Father John Tracy Ellis [1905-1992]—who sought admission to the University of Illinois rather than Catholic University to earn his Church history doctorate—created a firestorm in U.S. Catholic academic circles in 1955. He published a forty-page critique of the languid state of Catholic academics, noting for example that [barely] competent personnel were spread too thin across the 200-300 Catholic colleges at that time, most underfunded, poorly staffed and attended. He and others noted the wave of renewed theological excellence and energy emerging from Western Europe after World War II. Many of America’s future Catholic scholars, in fact, studied and earned advanced degrees from universities in France, England, Belgium, Germany, Canada, etc. Younger American Catholic scholars were energized by the Council itself and the new wave of theological scholarship as the 1960’s and the world of theology engaged Vatican II.
 
One of the enduring interpretations of Vatican II claims that the “new theology” scholars of Western Europe hijacked the Council and infected the Church with the virus of modernism. Were this true, it would be amazing that Pope Leo has called for us to read the Vatican II documents with his leadership and example. I think we will find that some of the theology of the Council was taken too far in certain circles, and that local churches ran too far ahead of the Church at large in the interpretation of the documents and the theological revolution. It took years to implement the outcome of the Council and many Catholics at every level did not wait for the letter of the law. But Vatican II was and remains the invigoration the Church needed, particularly in the United States.
 
By the mid 1960’s, the wave of “new theology” washed ashore in America, and by the time I entered the college level of my seminary education in 1966, the post-Conciliar reforms had reached even the mountaintop isolation of my seminary. If you remember the old example of new teachers laboring to stay one chapter of the textbook ahead of the students, well, we had that in our theology courses to a degree. Tangible renewals of rites and architecture replaced the strict dogmatic and medieval Thomistic style of years past. Even my seminary allowed us to go home for Thanksgiving in 1967, a first.
 
As we progressed through college, future pastors in training like myself were exposed in class to the European revisions of such subjects as the nature and rubrics of the Mass, moral issues on matters like the contraceptive pill, and interpreting the Gospels to recapture Jesus’ radical teachings on the poor [and aliens!] Nearly every diocese in America was experiencing some level of stress—the Church is changing too fast; the Church isn’t changing fast enough. Recall, too, that the principles of the new rites, arrived at during the Council, were slowly being digested and integrated into official Church practice. The Mass format we use today, referred to as the Novus Ordo or new order, was not ready until 1970; Penance not till 1976. To say the Church in the U.S. was feeling its way along in the 1960’s and 1970’s is an understatement.
 
The story goes that at the end of the Council in 1965 Cardinal Spellman was flying back to New York. He supposedly remarked to priests with him on the plane that “none of this will ever get past the Statue of Liberty.” If this story is true, the Cardinal was wrong on multiple counts. The local U.S. churches were in turmoil, and bishops took on numerous ways of containing the mayhem. When I arrived in Washington, D.C. as a major seminarian in 1969, my new home was just a few blocks from Catholic University, where I would complete my bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1971. I was only vaguely aware that Catholic University was ground zero of the struggles of episcopal authority versus academic freedom for Catholic professors and writers. Father Charles Curran, of the Catholic University’s theology department, was fired by the university’s trustees, [undoubtedly with input from Washington’s Cardinal, Patrick O’Boyle] in 1967 for his position that artificial birth control was not sinful. A campus strike of faculty and students led the trustees to return Father Curran to his post, with full tenure.
 
However, other teachers—clerical and lay—were not as lucky, and there were wholesale firings at St. John’s University and the University of Dayton of religious faculty who did not teach in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. At this juncture the president of Notre Dame at the time, Father Theodore Hesburgh, hosted a meeting of the International Federation of Catholic Universities [1967] where “The Land O’Lakes Statement” was declared:
 
"To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
 
“Land O’Lakes” bought time, but not much else. The relationship of Catholic colleges and universities to standing ecclesiastical structures—dioceses, bishops, religious orders-- became hazy. As religious orders declined in number, their colleges tended to divest into private corporations. For those still standing, the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI took a much more aggressive stance against those theological thinkers and writers who directly challenged Church teaching.
 
As luck would have it, exactly one year ago [2025] I reviewed Theology and Higher Catholic Education by Massimo Faggioli, then a professor at Vilanova University. Faggioli underscores the decline in philosophical and theological studies in American Catholic colleges. I clipped this paragraph from my review: “In a post-1967 world, the author believes that Catholic theology—enjoying its newfound “freedom” --jettisoned its history and method for the inevitable parade of causes and philosophies that have marked the last several decades. Faggioli uses the example of the searching college student—and according to developmental science, most students of college age are seeking to identify themselves—who attends a Catholic college seeking stability and community, and then discovers that his professors have eschewed Catholic roots in favor of the angst du jour. Little wonder that fewer students [and their parents!] are going to pay for that.”
 
Faggioli, a noted historian of Vatican II and its aftermath, seemed to me to raise honest questions about the direction of theological academic teaching—what is taught, where it is taught, who is teaching it. Although his book was published just a year before the death of Pope Francis, he is advocating precisely what Pope Leo is mandating in returning to the actual texts of the teaching Council Vatican II. The Land O’Lakes statement of 1967 probably overreached, but few can question the need for more intense conversations between our bishops in the United States and Rome, on the one hand, and higher Catholic education on the other. Curiously, this is what Pope Francis was hoping for in his emphasis upon synodality.
 
There is still work to be done on precisely what a mandate involves. And there has been talk about ceremonies to convey mandates and some kind of recognition of faith and competence for parish catechists, for example. Boy, little paragraph 812 is carrying a lot of freight.