Should the Church still speak of 'heresy'?

This column is the second part of a two-part series. Read part one here.

Beyond the weapon of combat

I believe it is necessary to move beyond the dogma-heresy dichotomy in the consciousness of believers, that is, in their self-understanding of their Christian faith. This means moving beyond a conception of dogma that is intrinsically (and polemically) bound to the heresy it opposes: a militaristic conception of dogma as a weapon of combat.

As we know, unfortunately, this is not merely a metaphor, because wars of religion have been fought in the name of dogmas (even if they were often motivated by other interests), and “heretics” have been exterminated. But a dogma encrusted with violence is no longer a Christian dogma — or at least, it cannot be recognized as such by a contemporary Christian conscience. We should call it a para-dogma (one that defines a form of dogmatism).

Naturally, one can argue — as was argued in the case of John Paul II’s requests for forgiveness concerning the past — that such an approach is anachronistic because it fails to take into account what the reflective consciousness of Christians in distant historical periods might have been, within the interplay of powers, cultures, and sentiments as they were understood at the time (or, at least, as they were predominantly understood).

But here, drawing on the approach of Manzoni in The Column of Infamy — Alessandro Manzoni’s 1842 essay on a 17th-century Milanese witch-hunt trial — I would respond: they already had the Gospel with them, and the Gospel was always the same.

Certainly, one can conceive of a gradual penetration of the Gospel, a progressive evangelization that may not yet have been complete. But this does not change the issue. Hatred, violence, and war are the opposite of the Gospel, and therefore anything associated with them cannot be associated with the Gospel.

Dogmas linked to actual episodes of hatred, violence, and war cannot simultaneously be linked to the Gospel. Consequently, from the perspective of lived Christian experience, they assume the character of para-dogmas.

The poisoning of relationships

Para-dogmas poison relationships. Since they are inseparably connected to heresies, which must be polemically condemned, fought, and eliminated, they inevitably foster hostile sentiments and evil actions toward “heretics,” both men and women.

Relationships among Christians become non-Christian relationships — or, more precisely, anti-Christian ones.

Para-dogmas are easily exploited in power dynamics because of their absolute, monistic character. It is no coincidence that they are embedded in so many power asymmetries — based on gender, role, and ethnicity — as the history of Christianity attests, both within and outside the ecclesiastical structure.

More generally, however, a tendency toward forms resembling para-dogmatic rigidity can also be found in the historical development of other religions (certainly the monotheistic ones), giving rise to various forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism.

It can also be found in the historical development of atheistic or “secular” ideological movements, even those intrinsically oriented toward human happiness, such as the Enlightenment, socialism, and today even certain forms of democracy.

It is no coincidence that the concept of “heresy” has also been used in other ideological spheres, such as political thought, particularly where totalitarian tendencies have emerged among dominant majorities.

A need for purification

Mauro Pesce — the Italian biblical scholar and historian of early Christianity — has convincingly argued, from a scholarly standpoint, that the concept of heresy is not a historiographical concept but a confessional instrument used by one group to condemn another group or individual.

In other words, historians must certainly take into account what a religious group has considered heresy over time, but they cannot themselves use the concept of heresy as historians.^[1]

It seems to me that we need to take this one step further and therefore abandon the concept of heresy, even within the consciousness of believers themselves and in relation to dogma: a purifying act of abandonment.

Heresy means choice, an option in thought. The earliest Jesus groups expressed a choice — or, rather, several different choices — both in relation to the various forms of Judaism of their time and within them, as well as in relation to the different early proto-Christian movements, before a majority position had been established.

We might say that, at the beginning, there were many different Christian options, many Christianities: many heresies and no orthodoxy. Multiple visions of Jesus and different Christologies were present and continued to evolve.

In Paul and the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of Man; he is associated with the divine throne and possesses divine characteristics, but he is not God. In the later Gospel known as the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Logos and is God.

Historically, we must consider how the idea of heresy was already present in the Jewish context and subsequently played a negative role in the gradual development of Jewish-Christian relations (for example, in the question of the twelfth of the Eighteen Benedictions in the Amidah prayer — a central Jewish daily prayer whose twelfth blessing is widely believed to have originally included language directed against early Christian sectarians).

As Ágnes Heller — the Hungarian philosopher (1929–2019) — wrote:

Both these religions, which derived from ancient Judaism, survived for almost two thousand years after the destruction of Jerusalem, but they did so in a relationship of hostility. For a brief initial period, Judaism, which was in the majority, excluded Christianity, which was in the minority; however, Christianity soon became the dominant religion under the Roman Empire and began persecuting Judaism.^[2]

A gestation lasting centuries

Within the earliest Jesus communities, there were no heresies understood as doctrines diverging from a shared orthodoxy. Instead, there were divisions and separations of a moral or cultic nature, such as those condemned by Paul.

It was only from the middle of the second century, with Justin Martyr, that a concept of heresy properly emerged as an erroneous and pernicious doctrine to be fought and eliminated.

Gradually, the canon of Scripture was established, and in parallel, following the Constantinian turning point (note this!), dogmas were formulated on the basis of Scripture and Greco-Roman culture, in order to combat what was considered heresy, such as Monophysitism and Nestorianism — two early Christological positions on the nature of Christ, both condemned by church councils in the fifth century — to cite two important examples.

Obviously, the historically decisive turning point was the transition from conciliar definitions to their actual acceptance and reception in the churches, thereby permeating people’s lived spiritual experiences, while sometimes also encountering resistance and opposition.

From that point onward, during the Middle Ages and the modern era, other “heresies” were fought, and various councils defined new dogmas (which were, in reality, understood as already implicitly contained in the original “deposit of Revelation”).

A profound change with Vatican II

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Catholic Church believed it had to combat various heretical churches: the Chaldean Church (in present-day Iran, Iraq, and India), which was Nestorian; numerous Monophysite churches (the Coptic Church of Egypt, the Syriac Jacobite Church, the Armenian Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the Eritrean Orthodox Church); as well as the Waldensians, the various Protestant denominations, the Anglicans, and the Old Catholics (who did not accept the dogma of papal infallibility).

All these churches still exist today.

As is well known, the Second Vatican Council profoundly changed this approach, above all, though not exclusively, through its Decree on Ecumenism, UnitatisRedintegratio.

Naturally, this is not the place to revisit the Council’s reflections and its new ecumenical stance. Two brief quotations from the decree will suffice:

“Catholics must gladly acknowledge and esteem the truly Christian endowments from our common heritage which are to be found among our separated brethren” (No. 4).

“It is necessary that Catholics be familiar with the outlook of our separated brethren. This requires study, which must be pursued with a sense of realism and goodwill. Catholics who are properly prepared must acquire a better knowledge of the doctrines and history, the spiritual and liturgical life, the religious psychology and the culture proper to our separated brethren” (No. 9).

Today, consequently and rightly, we speak of separated sisters and brothers, of sister churches. We no longer call them heretics or fight them as such.

Religious hatred has given way to respect and charity, to better understanding and a shared journey of evangelical conversion toward unity.

During his apostolic visit to Turkey, Pope Leo XIV greeted Armenian Patriarch Sahak II at the Armenian Apostolic cathedral in Istanbul on Nov. 30, 2025, and said Christian communion is “not domination but an exchange of God-given gifts,” inviting Christians to rediscover themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ, as reported by Vatican News and the Catholic News Agency.

A plural dogmatics

But then, as we continue the work of purifying memory begun by John Paul II during the Jubilee of 2000, why not adopt the same fraternal attitude toward the so-called “heresies” of the past?

If we do not call Luther and the Protestants heretics, should we not also refrain from calling Nestorius and the Nestorian churches heretics — not only those that still exist today, but all those that have existed throughout history?

Dogmatics, then, will no longer take the form of what we might call a “Denzinger-style” collection of individual propositions — a reference to the Enchiridion Symbolorum, the standard compendium of church creeds and doctrinal definitions compiled by Heinrich Denzinger — almost like axioms or postulates, following a Euclidean geometric model.

Instead, it will take a conjugated and plural form, like a verbal paradigm, following a morphological-grammatical model, to “carry” what all followers of Christ have believed and continue to believe: fero, fers, tuli, latum, ferre; to bring, brought, brought.

The paradigm, of course, also carries the meaning of an exemplary model, one that is normative in some sense.

We could then go so far as to say that dogma is the synthesis of all so-called orthodoxies, of all dogmatic systems — not as a mechanical and extrinsic juxtaposition, nor as a reductio ad unum, but rather as the critical and prayerful relationalism of all confessions.

It is through the dialogical whole, both convergent and divergent, that each position comes to be better understood and, through engagement with the others, contributes to delineating a common dogmatic, or paradigmatic, ground: a “symbolic” boundary that is flexible and fluid, without any absorption or domination — a paradigmatic Creed, within a historical homologia, that nevertheless stands out with a clear profile, without confusion or separation.

Toward a dialogical and integrative perspective

Critical relationalism means an approach that considers all possible relationships by engaging with each of them, that is, by critically examining them, but with a disposition that is not hostile, rather gentle and sympathetic.

It neither accepts nor rejects anything a priori. It neither absorbs (in-clusion) nor excludes (ex-clusion) in order to dominate, because this is not an uncritical encounter that “closes” the conversation (con-clusion), but an open, dynamic process of shared inquiry (integration).

The paradigm, in other words, is partial, incomplete, and not whole if any voice is missing — a lack that affects the other voices as well. In other words, an absence makes the presences themselves deficient.

The paradigmatic approach is methodologically integrative, but always open and never concluded, because it extends toward the eschatological horizon, which prevents it from becoming rigid and immobilized. It is therefore more difficult to exploit in power dynamics, since it has no absolute and fixed monistic structure.

On the contrary, it assumes the potential to serve as an instrument of liberating denunciation, intersectional in its exposure of the many forms of human oppression — based on gender, class, ethnicity, age, culture, and physical or psychological ability — especially when Christianity is reduced to an instrumentum regni — literally “an instrument of the kingdom,” a term for religion used to serve state power — or the opium of the people.

The paradigmatic approach overcomes every reductive perspective of de-Hellenization because it integrates formulations that can be conceptually traced to Greco-Roman culture while, by virtue of its open-ended dynamic, refusing to remain confined and immobilized within them.

Certainly, the paradigmatic perspective is particularly complex — in the specific articulation of critical relationalism itself, in its value-based qualifications (which may, for example, assign a unique and particular value to the Apostles’ Creed), in its possible resulting internal structures, and in its overall anti-dogmatic stance.

It opens up several challenging avenues for reflection.

But is that a reason to avoid it? Dialogue is also more complex than monologue. Complexity must be managed, not rejected: it drives the development of doctrine. Moreover, it brings gains in terms of dynamic flexibility.

The development and decline of dogma

Two dissonant models — the model of progress and the model of decline — can thus be brought into harmony and dynamically integrated. Indeed, we find both models in the documents of Vatican II.

According to one, we make historical progress toward a greater understanding of dogma (so going backward would constitute an absurd loss).

According to the other, historical processes produce “wounds” in the Church, representing an inevitable decline through mythologization and the progressive accumulation of earthly, unfaithful, and distorting layers that obscure the original revelation (so an honest and genuine examination of conscience, together with historical, philological, and critical work aimed at “demythologization,” seeks to recover the original, pure meaning).

The transition from dogmatics to paradigmatics makes it possible to harmonize and integrate these two models as co-essential movements of systole and diastole in the self-awareness of believers.

This process of systole and diastole enables a continuous pulsation of the Gospel’s inculturation (and, naturally, also its de-culturation in relation to previous and now superseded inculturations, while preserving their possible dogmatic profile through relational integration).

This can make possible both what Newman called the development of dogma — which is now blocked — and what might be more aptly defined as paradigmatic expansion, respectful of all cultures, all peoples, and all times, without absorption or domination, as well as the healing of what Rosmini called the “wounds” of the Church — Antonio Rosmini’s 1832 treatiseOf the Five Wounds of the Holy Church, which identified five structural ills in Catholic life and was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1849 before later influencing Vatican II; Rosmini was beatified in 2007 — with a view to an Ecclesia semper reformanda.

What matters is maintaining, within a historical vision, the contemporaneous dynamics of these processes. In the fourth century, for example, we can see both growth through inculturation and the accumulation of encrustations that drain vitality.

Moreover, the first inculturation is “incultuation,” if we also consider the original Jesus communities. In other words, it takes place through worship, both personal and, above all, communal — lex orandi, lex credendi (“the law of prayer is the law of belief”) — which, to use Sequeri’s words, “synthesizes the connection between historical evidence and revelatory experience” and shapes the sensusfidelium.

Indeed, the paradigmatic approach shines forth in the liturgies, as spiritual worship, as fully realized doxologies, and as devout affection.

Notes

[1] See M. Pesce, Esistel’eresianelCristianesimo?,Morcelliana, Brescia, 2017.
[2] Á. Heller, Gesù l’ebreo, Italian translation, Castelvecchi, Rome, 2023, p. 27.

This is a translated and edited version of the Italian-language column that first appeared on Viandanti and has been republished with permission.