The question of assent to doctrinal ambiguities

This dissertation asks what the faithful canonically owe the magisterium when there appear to be discrepancies in teaching, taking as its 'laboratory' the discordant ecclesiastical legislation on the validity of orders in the first thirteen centuries. The first chapter supplies the formal element: an exhaustive source analysis of cann. 750 and 752-753, tracing primitive, remote, and proximate sources to establish categories of teaching and corresponding degrees of assent. The second chapter supplies the material element: nearly 150 cases - over forty bishops, fifty synods, thirty popes, and eight councils - in which magisterial authority treated as invalid ordinations that today would be considered valid. The third and final chapter seeks to harmonize the discordant elements of the Chapter I's philosophical principles and Chapter II's historical data. Each of the four solutions proposed - the hermeneutic of continuity; an admission of temporary theological deformation on non-definitive teaching; the assertion of broad magisterial powers of dispensation; and a salutary institutional 'forgetting' - is found to be fatally flawed if used exclusively. Instead, the author proposes a methodological response based on Gratian's four rationes and enriched by von Balthasar's concept of 'symphonic truth': the four solutions deployed heuristically, with continuity attempted first and the others held in reserve.