Vatican Urges Novitiates to Learn Earliest Teachings

VATICAN CITY —  Students for the Catholic priesthood need to return to more traditional learning by studying both Greek and Latin and the teaching of the church’s earliest writers, the Vatican said this week.

The Congregation for Catholic Education said seminaries and theological faculties should place greater emphasis on the study of the so-called “Church Fathers” of the early centuries, whose work is considered the basis of church doctrine and orthodoxy.

The writings of the Church Fathers are important to both Eastern and Western Christian traditions, and the study of their work is called patristics and patrology.

“Theological reflection has always been clearly aware that there is something in the Fathers which is unique, irreplaceable and perennially valid,” it said. “In order for the church to continue growing, it is necessary to know their doctrine and works thoroughly.”

The document lamented that theologians often give scant attention to the early teachings, which sometimes become “caught up in an overall rejection of the past” or “taken over by the various fashionable philosophies and ideologies of the day.”

“Theologians . . . think that they are doing theology but are really only doing history, sociology, etc.,” it said.