Dominion Theology vs. Liberation Theology

When is an "absolute" right an absolute "wrong"? When the affirmed absolute right obliterates another absolute right. "Humanae Vitae" (about population control) is a cautionary tale. The new Vatican II inclusion of people in Church as having right of authority in Church sought lay input to the drafting of "Humanae Vitae". But because hierarchical authoritarians did not like the lay input, it was ignored in the drafting of the encyclical. So, the Church created a document that the people mostly ignore because the people, the "vox populi" was ignored. Might it have been different if lay insight had been repected?

"Humanae Vitae" was about two "absolute" rights, the individual right to life, and the total dependency of human life on other life, human and nonhuman — Ecology. Laity was sensitive to this latter issue, hierarchy was not, so the issue was perilously excluded from deliberations. Only lately are Churches awakening to the paramount issues of ecology/environment.

Arthur Jones, National Catholic Reporter, September 9, 2005, pg 7, speaks of the "Roman Imposition...the Wojtyla-Ratzinger continuum". [See, THE POSSIBLE JOURNEY, Essays 16 & 17, www.secondenlightenment.org]. Claim of authority in Church has historically been cast as a claim of faith over reason, spirituality vs. secularity (materiality). Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) affirms the essential codependency of faith and reason, but he seems also to affirm the absolutism of Episcopal claim in Church that dates to Irenaeus and Tertullian. But there has been a prolonged rift also between popes and bishops/cardinals over the claim of authority, that is, between "infallibilism" (papal authority) and "conciliarism" (collegial authority). The great papal schism (Rome-Avignon) was over this internal popes/bishops controversy.

Vatican II introduced a radically new dimension to authority in Church, namely, including the laity as having authority. The new ecclesiology is "The People Church". The hierarchy has been unsettled ever since for it is challenged to reconcile the past history of the Church with its claim of inerrancy, and in going forward and still claiming hierarchical exclusionism.

Pope Benedict, speaking to the bishops of South America, affirms a litmus-test, like Pope John Paul II, that sustains the dominion culture and the unjust colonial system enabled by dominion theology, which is what Arthur Jones might call the "imposition continuum of Wojtyla-Ratzinger". The Pope seems to distinguish between works of faith and reason — political, social issues as proper to the people and outside the Episcopal/Church domain of faith. Isn't this a dichotomy already proven and accepted (Vatican II) as untenble?