Cardinal Fernández opens DDF plenary with call to ‘intellectual humility’

By Devin Watkins

The Plenary Session of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith opened on Tuesday with a meditation delivered by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández.

The Dicastery’s Prefect entitled his reflection “Do Not Ask the Light, but the Fire,” drawing inspiration from St. Bonaventure’s invitation to pose the great questions of life to God.

“Recently, while in prayer,” began the Cardinal, “I have felt a strong call to intellectual humility, recalling those ancient words: ubi humilitas, ibi sapientia (‘where there is humility, there is wisdom’).”

He extended that invitation to those participating in the Dicastery’s plenary session.

Cardinal Fernández recalled that God has given human beings the univeral capacity for thought, but noted that we can never achieve “exhaustive knowledge or a comprehensive perception of reality.”

“Even with the help of the most powerful technologies imaginable, it is impossible for a human mind to be aware of reality in its totality and in every one of its aspects,” he said. “This is possible only for God.”

The Cardinal Prefect pointed out that human beings even have trouble arriving at a complete understanding of a small part of the world, since everything is connected and that small part must be seen in the light of the totality.

“Consequently, we are incapable of interpreting all the meanings and nuances of a reality, a person, a historical moment, or a truth,” he said.

As technology and science advance, we must remain aware of our limits and need for God, said Cardinal Fernández.

If we fail in intellectual humility, he added, we risk falling into a “a terrible deception—indeed, the very same one that led to the excesses of the Inquisition, the world wars, the Shoah, and the massacres in Gaza: all of which rely on fallacious arguments for their justification.”

Cardinal Fernández invited the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to avoid self-deception through constant prayer to seek God’s guidance and by analyzing reality while welcoming the perspectives of others.

He joined Pope Leo XIV in saying that “no one possesses the whole truth; we must all humbly seek it together.”

Theologians especially, said the Cardinal, must be aware of their limited knowledge, since the “mysteries of faith are interwoven in a rich hierarchy,” in which the whole is illuminated by the truths at the heart of the Gospel.

“In a place such as this, where we have the possibility of giving authoritative answers, of writing documents that become part of the Ordinary Magisterium, and even of correcting and condemning, the risk of losing the breath of our perspective is greater,” he said. “That is why we must recover, throughout the whole Church, that healthy realism proposed by the Church’s great sages and mystics.”

In conclusion, Cardinal Fernández invited DDF Members, with St. Bonaventure, to pray for the gift of interior silence, so that they may “be granted the experience of that about which we have spoken.”