Metaphysics is not some interchangeable bolt-on to theology, like the parts of a vacuum cleaner. If you change metaphysics, you change theology. Nominalism led directly to Protestantism, for example. Hume and Kant led directly to theological modernism (and heavily influenced personalism). Etc.

As St. John Henry Newman put it: "Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part it tells us of persons and facts in simple words"

Metaphysics are not a required aspect of Catholic theology, because Catholic theology is neither systematic nor a philosophy, but just a set of objective, historical claims. They might have implications, but even those are unclear.

For example, with the story of the multiplying of the fish and the loaves, there is no definitive answer as to how this occurred. Only that over five thousand people were there, they had this many loaves, everyone ate their fill, and afterwards they had more loaves left over.

Metaphysics might be helpful in guessing how this happened, but it's neither required nor infallible when explaining it.

Examples of the importance of metaphysics to theology are innumerable. To take a few off the top of my head:

If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. Locke, famously, mocked the idea of 'substance', so one can hardly believe in transubstantiation while holding to a Lockean metaphysics.

If you are a metaphysical idealist after the manner of Berkeley, the quote from Newman you provided can't be right, because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind.

With the multiplying of the fish and loaves, we only know that this is a miracle because we know that a miracle is something that occurs outside the normal course of nature; but we only know that there is a normal course of nature because of a particular metaphysics. (If we adopt Hume's metaphysics, for example, then there is no normal course of nature, and so everything is a miracle, and so there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the multiplication of the fish and loaves.)

As we've seen, what you understand by the word 'soul' is profoundly affected by metaphysics.

And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything. People who say we don't need it, whether they're discussing natural science, theology, ethics, politics, or whatever else, end up contradicting themselves without fail. History is replete with examples.

The very recent official Vatican document I referred to elsewhere here explained that, while the Church has utilized Aristotelian explanations of Catholic theology, especially as used by St. Thomas Aquinas, even in official Church documents such as the Council of Trent, this in no way officialized this theology, but was only used as a convenience.

> If you don't hold to a classical metaphysics, your understanding of transubstantiation will be different from the Church's. (The word only makes sense in an Aristotelian context.)

Right, the Catholic Church says that if you use St. Thomas Aquinas's explanations of Catholic theology through the framework of Aristotle, then yes, his explanations are correct. However, it also says you do not need to use his framework, and in fact new ways of explaining Catholic theology should be sought out, in much the same way the Early Church Fathers did.

> And so on and so on. Metaphysics affects everything.

> because persons and facts would be mere artifacts of the mind.

These two things you said are clearly showing me that you're not understanding me.

You're thinking of everything I'm saying through the eyes of some metaphysics. You're presuming it.

I'm not. I'm looking at reality in a common, everyday way, experientially, in the same way practically every person does all the time in their daily lives.

The difference is depth.

When we examine any aspect of reality, you seem to take it as far down as you concretely can. (I wonder if it's all just turtles for you.) You go depth first.

Whereas I myself go breadth first, and only as deep as needed to resolve a given question.

So when we talk about the multiplying of the loaves, you've already brought metaphysics in. You've presumed some kind of framework.

Whereas when I think about it, there is a point A and a point B. The point A is the historical facts as laid out by the gospel authors. The point B is some question, such as "how did they end up with more bread?" or "where did the new bread come from?"

For me, I don't need to go beyond answering the concrete questions. I draw in whatever external questions and answers are needed to answer the question I'm faced with. That may result in me pulling in a framework.

For St. Thomas Aquinas, it did. He pulled in Aristotle, patched it up, married it to Catholic theology, and used that.

I don't have to. I go through this process much more shallowly. The best analogy is that I use lazy evaluation of such questions, and you seem to think with fully eager evaluation. Almost as if it were an inherent necessity.