Father Barnabas Ahern C.P., a soft-spoken biblical scholar with provocative ideas, says the state of the Church is good in the post Vatican II era despite “growing pains.”

“We have had qualitative deepening and some quantitative loss,” the Passionist priest said last week before his talk on the Scripture, “but out of the turbulence and growing pains the people will acquire a greater maturity.”

In his address at a clergy conference, Father Ahern, a peritus council, said that the teaching function of the Church is passing through a crisis. “The previous doctrinal security is now under attack -- among priests, seminarians, religious, teachers, laity -- but the present state of uncertainty had to come as a healthy reaction against false security.”

He said that papal infallibility was misunderstood as a positive total illumination rather than as a safeguard from errors. Three of the conditions he cited were that pronouncements of the Holy Father were looked upon as oracles from Delphi, unwittingly infallibility was extended to pronouncements from the Roman congregations and theological opinions also took on an “infallible” note.

Father Ahern, a professor at St. Meinrad’s (Ind.) Seminary, said, “The false security of the past hundred years was destined for confrontation with an emerging intellectualism in the Church.” “In every field there has been development in exact scientific thought..and these scientific insights have come to challenge the false security of much Catholic thinking. This confrontation of popular Catholic thinking and scientific intellectualism was a disturbing reality at the Council,” he said, citing the bitter debate on the relation of scripture to tradition.

“As a result, in this period after Vatican II, we are living through the confrontation between the false security of the past hundred years and the questions which are being asked by the new intellectualism,” he said. “The confrontation has had the effect of a tractor demolishing a house. A cloud of dust has arisen and men, seeing only the dust, ask ‘Is everything in ruins?’” But, the biblical scholar said the girders of faith are still standing and the truths known through magisterial definition and the affirmations of revelation are still with the Church. He pointed out, “Time and again, these truths are seen in a new light when fitted into a new, full context, but the truth itself never changes.” In his evening lecture on the Bible, Father Ahern stressed the biblical theme -- the People of God. “The changes in the Church have come from the new realization that she is the

People of God.” “It is not easy for us to grasp this theme because we are children of the century of rugged individualism -- me, myself and I. We don’t find it easy to carry out the burden of being our brother’s keeper.”

Father Ahern said the Bible gives a brilliant picture of God which is easily understood. “He is spoken of as a shepherd, as a rock, as an eagle, as a God who loved His people and who was constantly at work to save them. He was interested in their hunger, thirst, suffering and wars.” “Israel was conscious of being God’s people and prayed as members of the family of God. A lot of the things they did shock our sensibilities, but they were children learning moral law little by little.”

Father Ahern said, “We have been created in a new people of God. Christ became like us in all things except sin. Blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh. He was an individual but because of a burning love He completely identified with us and everything he accomplished for us.”

“We are bound into a family by baptism and we all become one in Christ. To live as the family of God in this world is a challenge. All things are ours so we can develop them and bring them to perfection. We can prepare the world to be our eternal home with God.”