How church doctrine changes

Traditionalist Catholics have spent a lot of time sneering at Father Tom Rosica for the following:

Will this Pope re-write controversial Church doctrines? No. But that isn't how doctrine changes. Doctrine changes when pastoral contexts shift and new insights emerge such that particularly doctrinal formulations no longer mediate the saving message of God's transforming love. 

See, for example, here, here, or here,.

Yes, there is a spin there. Fr. Rosica can only imagine people changing doctrine for the best of reasons and he is implying that only his side of the argument are brave and honest and loving. This is classic Enlightenment thinking and it leaves us with the quandary of having to decide where it is more charitable to assume he is just dishonest or really blind.

That said, however, he is right about one very important thing: church doctrine can and does change and, if and when it does, the doctrines in question won't have to be rewritten. The Church condemns usury today just as it did hundreds of years ago. But the doctrine on usury has completely changed in meaning. The same could happen, I would argue that it already is happening, with church teaching on sexuality and contraception. The actual phrases setting out the Church's moral teaching have not changed but the doctrine is changing.

David Kasanof wrote a very funny column WoodenBoat magazine for many years. He once commented on the following joke:

How do you get a rat out of the lee scuppers?
Come about.

For those of you who aren't nautical. Scuppers are a gap left open between surfaces to allow water to drain, sort of like the gap inside the walls of your house. The lee scuppers are the ones on the downwind side of the boat. It's a difficult problem for the rat would feel trapped and if you tried to reach down into the scuppers to pull it out you'd be severely bitten. Coming about puts the boat on a different tack so that the downwind, or lee scuppers, are now upwind, or windward scuppers. As Kasanof commented, the rat doesn't move but all the words around him do. A lot of jokes work like that. The joke that life is playing on traditionalist Catholics right now works like that too.

And they have nobody but themselves to blame.