It looks like we must always struggle in the Church and elsewhere to situate the precise status of truth. In an intellectualistic perspective tributary to Hellenism, there was a tendency to link truth (intellectual, speculative or practical) and concrete action, as if they were part of the process of cause and effect. Moreover, it is always difficult for human beings, at whatever level they are in a hierarchicized world, to be content with probability, just as it is hard to make room for other ways of looking at questions, ways that are legitimate but hard to reconcile with one another. One needs to be careful about falling into what might be called a “pathology of the truth”: in the end and despite all appeals to the truth and to revelation (sometimes well founded), a certain anxiety concerning orthodoxy can arise from a preoccupation with the need for intellectual security rather than from a jealous love of the Word of God. This sense of security is sought more by way of excluding other positions than by the humble interiorization of the truth.
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When truly new perspectives emerge, they often cannot be worked out in the grid of the existing synthesis and one risks judging them (indeed even condemning them) in terms of the categories at hand. But the latter have to be integrated into a wider whole that is in the process of being built. Excessive caution, outright rejection or condemnation slow down and even hinder the process of refocusing.
(Ghislain Lafont, OSB, Imagining the Catholic Church: Structured Communion in the Spirit (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), p. 146.)
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