Assembly '97 News Home page Documents next story		Resort to 'authority' no answer to hard questions Thursday, July 10 Hard, substantive questions facing the church cannot be resolved simply with an appeal to authority, whether that is an appeal to papal or to biblical authority, according to Cato lecturer Father Gabriel Daly. An Irish Catholic theologian, Dr Daly was in dialogue Wednesday with Ireland-born Rev Dr Robin Boyd. He was responding to a question from Dr Boyd about the suppression by the Pope of the question of women priests. "It is impossible to state, 'Let there be no further debate'. We are seeing the opposition of the pope to a very wide grassroots movement. The whole question has been reduced to a matter of authority — and I would say it is not purely a Catholic defect. "A certain type of Catholic deals with papal authority the same way that a certain type of Protestant handles the Bible," he said. He noted that in the ecumenical discussion between Catholics and Protestants, many aspects of Protestantism cause him no difficulty. "Justification by faith through grace, for example, causes me no trouble." "I have, however, a very big problem with biblicism, that is, that you have only to raise the Bible and say, 'It's perfectly plain, it just jumps off the page.' That's not true," he said. "It's an insensitivity to the way in which any human text comes to be. Human beings are interpreting beings, whether they're interpreting the telephone book or the Bible. The word of God reaches us in human words and you can't bypass the human word to get to the divine word. It comes to us out of certain circumstances and out of the minds of certain human beings."