Cardinal Fernández warns against ‘ex cathedra’ condemnations online, urges humility

The prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith opened the discastery’s Jan. 27-29 plenary session with a strong call for humility in thought, theology and online discourse.

He said that the capacity for thought is one that “does not mean that human beings possess a … comprehensive capacity for perceiving reality,” and warned that human reason — even when aided by advanced technology — can never grasp reality in its fullness, a capacity that belongs to God alone.

Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández said in his meditation, titled “Ask not of the light, but of the fire,” that even with the help of “the most powerful technologies imaginable, it is impossible for a human mind to be aware of reality in its entirety and in every aspect. This is possible only for God.”

He spoke only days after Pope Leo XIV published his message for the 60th World Communications Day, in which he outlined both challenges and solutions for facing technology and artificial intelligence.

“The more science and technology advance,” Cardinal Fernández said, “the more we must keep alive that awareness of our limits, of our need for God so as not to fall into a terrible deception, the same one that led to the excesses of the Inquisition, to the world wars, to the Holocaust, to the massacres in Gaza, all situations that are justified with fallacious arguments.”

He said a parallel thing can happen in our lives — when people believe they fully understand reality or God’s will, they risk justifying violence, exclusion, and atrocities: “In fact, we repeat that deception by living too confidently in what we know.”

The prefect of the doctrinal dicastery said the solution to such an approach is humility — intellectual, spiritual and theological.

“To fully understand anything, we must allow ourselves to be enlightened by God, we must invoke Him, pray to Him, listen to Him, let Him guide us amid the shadows,” Cardinal Fernández said.

He also stressed that listening to others is crucial before speaking out — to “open ourselves to other points of view” — “it is good for us to pay attention to the ‘peripheries’ from which things are seen differently.”

Quoting Pope Leo, who said in October during the Jubilee of the Synodal Teams that “no one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it and seek it together,” Cardinal Fernández urged theologians of his dicastery that “in a place like this, where we have the opportunity to provide authoritative answers, to write documents that become part of the ordinary magisterium, and even to correct and condemn, the risk of losing our breadth of perspective is greater.”

The issue is even more serious, he stressed, “because today, on any blog, anyone, even those who haven’t studied much theology, expresses their opinion and condemnations as if speaking ‘ex cathedra.’ This is why we must recover throughout the Church that healthy realism proposed by the Church’s great sages and mystics.”

Speaking a day before the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, the cardinal pointed out that human thought has a universal reach but is never exhaustive — only God sees the whole. Even advanced technology cannot overcome this limitation.

Quoting St. Bonaventure, he concluded that in order to address the big questions, interior silence is needed — and speaks louder than words at this moment.

“At this point, therefore, our discourse must end and it is better to pray to the Lord, that he may grant us the experience of which we speak.”

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