Sentire cum Ecclesia

Sentire cum Ecclesia, "to think with the Church," is St. Ignatius's phrase for the habit of mind this site is meant to serve. It asks what you actually hold on the disputes that have divided philosophers and theologians, places you beside the saints, Doctors, thinkers and rulers who have held the same, and then does what an ordinary philosophy quiz does not: it tells you where the Church has spoken, how much room she leaves, and which named errors you are standing nearest to.

How positions are measured. Every dispute is an axis with two poles. Each statement you answer moves you toward one pole; dilemmas move you on several at once. "I don't know" and "badly posed" leave that answer blank and never count against you. Thinkers are matched by the average closeness of your positions to theirs on the disputes you both have a position on, weighted toward the answers few thinkers share. Where a thinker's view on a question was never recorded, it is estimated from the thinkers nearest to them and counted at half weight, so a Doctor whose politics no one wrote down is not outscored by a statesman whose every view is on record. A thinker whose views sit near the middle of every dispute would match almost anyone, so each match is discounted by how well that thinker matches the average answerer: a high match means something particular to you.

How the Church's teaching is represented. For each axis the content records where settled teaching sits and a latitude around it. Where the Church has defined nothing (Thomism versus Molinism, the essence–energies distinction, the way of prayer) the axis is marked an open question, with cautions only at the extremes. Thresholds beyond which named errors begin are drawn from the relevant councils, encyclicals and decrees, cited on each axis and in the glossary of errors. An error is flagged only when you affirm a statement, or choose a dilemma answer, that states the condemned proposition itself; a strong but orthodox answer can take you to the edge of teaching, never past it. The classifications describe propositions, never persons: a "contrary" result means you affirmed a condemned proposition, which is a reason to read the source, not a verdict.

East and West. The Eastern Catholic Churches are not a footnote to the Latin Church but her own patrimony, "the two lungs" of St. John Paul II's Orientale Lumen. The disputes therefore include matters the Latin tradition rarely asks (the uncreated energies, hesychasm, the monarchy of the Father, synodal governance), and the thinkers include the Fathers of Cappadocia, Syria, Alexandria and Armenia, the saints of Kiev and Lebanon and Kerala, and the Byzantine Catholic confessors of the twentieth century.

Which Thomism. "Thomism" names several different things: St. Thomas's own writing; the commentators who systematized him; the manualist Thomism of the twentieth-century seminaries, which most traditionalist and sedevacantist writing takes for Thomas himself; and the recoveries of Gilson, Pieper, Chenu and Pinckaers, who argued that the manuals had lost his negative theology, his morality of happiness and his sense of mystery. The thinkers are placed in their strands, and the results say which strand your answers are nearest to, so that "I am a Thomist" can mean something.

How the questions are chosen. Each question is picked from your answers so far. Every thinker starts equally likely; each answer raises the ones whose documented positions fit it and lowers the rest, and the next question is the one the remaining candidates most disagree on. The questions every Catholic answers alike are asked once, as gates, and then left alone; the ones that divide Bonaventure from Thomas, or Thomas from Luther, are asked again in other words. When you reject a statement, the opposite claim is put to you too, so rejecting one error never assumes you hold the other. When an answer leans hard toward a side where the Church names an error, the next question on that dispute states the error itself, so an error is found only in your own answer and never inferred. A Sketch stops after forty-five questions, a Portrait after a hundred, and a Full study asks everything, most telling first. An answer that few thinkers share weighs more in the matching than one every thinker shares.

The disputes of our own day. Several of the disputes concern the Second Vatican Council, assent to the Pope, the two forms of the Roman Rite, marriage and sexuality, and Holy Orders and the Church's constitution. On each the Church's position is marked and the errors on both sides are named: sedevacantism, the claim that the reformed Mass is invalid, the refusal of the Council, and hyperpapalism on one side; the "spirit of the Council," the claim that the traditional Latin Mass is abolished or no longer a true Mass, the ordination of women, the approval of homosexual acts, gender ideology, contraception and a democratized Church on the other. The aim is the same as everywhere else on the site: to show where the line is, who drew it, and what to read.

For readers outside the Church. Seven disputes are the ones that divided the Reformation. The results name which of them you already hold with the Church and which divide you from full communion, each with the Catholic teaching and reading chosen for someone on the way in. Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Barth and C. S. Lewis are among the thinkers, so that a Protestant can see where they stand and a Catholic can see when they hold a Reformation position without knowing it.

Your way in. Whoever you are coming from, the results end with a pathway: for the fallen-away Catholic, the Orthodox, the Protestant, the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Confucian or Taoist, and the unbeliever. Each follows Nostra Aetate 2: the Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions, and whatever good is found there belongs to her and is found more fully in her. So each pathway names the goods of that tradition your answers show you hold, says how the Church holds them more fully, names what still stands between you and her, gives reading chosen for someone on the way in, and ends with one concrete first step. You may say where you are coming from when you start, or change it on the results page; if you say nothing, the test infers it from your answers.

Reading. For each axis two lists are kept: books that explain, sympathetically, the leaning you hold, and books that draw toward the Church's own mind, always with the aim of bringing the reader nearer to God. The result page gathers them where you most need them, adds the books of the thinkers nearest you, and suggests a way deeper through your own school and lineage. Any reading can go into a private journal: mark it wanted, reading, finished or set aside, say what you made of it, and the site suggests what to read next with its reason. Nothing is sold or sponsored, and no suggestion favors a seller.

A saint for you. Besides the thinker nearest you, the results name a saint for you: the saint, Doctor, blessed, venerable or servant of God whose mind is nearest yours, and of your own sex if you say it when you start. The headline match is still decided by your ideas alone. A saint needs enough recorded positions among the disputes your answers reached to be matched, so those with a slender written record appear mostly on the longer tests.

Book-study groups. A leader starts a group, says what kind of reading it wants (approachable, spiritual, theological, philosophical, everyday life, lives and stories, or Church documents) and lists what it has already read; members join by an emailed invitation or a link. Each suggested next book is weighed on how well it fits what the group asked for, how many members it serves from where they stand, a question the members divide on, the books the group liked before, and what members already want to read. The reasons are shown, and they speak of the group, never of one member.

Sources. Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum; the decrees of the councils; the papal encyclicals cited on each axis; the Catechism of the Catholic Church; the Summa Theologiae; the standard histories of philosophy (Copleston, Gilson) and of doctrine (Pelikan, Congar); and the thinkers' own works. Positions assigned to thinkers are the site's reading of those sources and are open to correction.

Your data. The test needs no account and stores nothing about you beyond the answers that make up a result. Your answers describe religious and philosophical convictions, which the law treats as sensitive personal data, so keeping them under a name is your choice: sign in by email only if you want your results and reading journal kept, or to join a book-study group. In a group, your latest kept result and your verdicts on the group's books help choose its next book, together with everyone else's; the group never sees your answers, your journal or what you write. Nothing is used for anything else or shared with anyone, and from your account page you can download everything as a file or delete it all at once.