The Apostle Paul calls us to believe with one’s heart and to confess what one believes (Romans 10:9). This is a twofold Christian imperative—the creedal and confessional imperative—that is at the root of creeds and confessions of faith. Faith involves both the fides qua creditur (“the faith with which one believes”) and the fides quae creditur “the faith which one believes”).1
What is the nature of faith, according to Pope Francis?2 If I understand Francis correctly, his emphasis is on the former: faith as it is experienced, encountered, and lived. Of course, this emphasis is necessary and important. Still, Francis’ manner of expression leaves not only unclear but also unanswered—and he does so consistently—the question how both asserted truth and lived truth (the fides quae creditur, which is the faith which one believes, the conceptual content, the beliefs which one holds to be true, affirms, and asserts, and the fides qua creditur) belong to faith as a whole. In short, he leaves in the dark the Church’s teaching that faith is both a personal and cognitive-propositional encounter with the divine revelation of God’s Word in the authoritative sources of the Faith: Scripture and Tradition. The International Theological Commission makes this point:
There can be no subjective understanding of faith alone (fides qua), which is not linked to the authentic truth of God (fides quae), handed down in revelation and preserved in the Church. There is therefore “a profound unity between the act by which we believe and the content to which we give our assent. The apostle Paul helps us to enter into this reality when he writes: ‘one believes with the heart and confesses with the mouth’ (cf. Romans 10:10). The heart indicates that the first act by which one comes to faith is God’s gift and the action of grace which acts and transforms the person deep within.”
Francis misses this profound unity.
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