The Doctrine on the Church:
Intramural Debate and Extramural Reactions
by Thomas Ryan, CSP
On Tuesday July 10,2007 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document reaffirming Catholic ecclesiology entitled "Responses to some questions regarding certain aspects of the doctrine on the Church". The succinct, three page document contains an introduction followed by five questions with five answers. In essence, it simply reaffirms the teaching of the Second Vati can Council regarding the theology of the Church (ecclesiology), as well as modern encyclicals and magisterial documents.
Why, an ecumenical colleague asked, did the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) feel it was necessary to restate these points, already expressed in Dominus Iesus in 2000? The short answer seems to be: to resolve an in-house disagreement.
The main drafter for Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Belgian theologian Gérard Philips, prophetically said that rivers of ink would be spilled on the change from is to subsists in with regard to the relationship between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church. He was dead right.
There has been an ongoing debate within the CDF itself around the meaning of “subsists in” which, in both classical and medieval Latin, signifies “to remain, to be perpetuated.”
As an example of the ongoing debate, in December 2005 the Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano carried a substantial article by one of the CDF’s consultors, Fr. Karl Becker, SJ, as to whether the change from is to subsists in meant that the council no longer maintained that the Church of Christ is identified with the Catholic Church, but recognized that it is also present, though less fully, in other Christian Churches, so that the Church of Christ extends beyond the limits of the Catholic Church. His answer is “no,” the council maintained the total identity between the two.
In the June 2006 issue of Theological Studies, Jesuit ecclesiologist Fr. Francis Sullivan of Boston College took him on in an article entitled “A Response to Karl Becker, S.J., on the Meaning of Substitit In”. Sullivan argues that “what motivated the approval of the change from est (is) to subsistit in was that it would make it possible for the council to acknowledge the fact that outside the Catholic Church are not only elements of the Church, but that there are churches and ecclesial communities.”
Subsequent conciliar teachings affirm this understanding. Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical That All May Be One said, “The elements of sanctification and truth present in the other Christian Communities, in a degree which varies from one to the other, constitute the objective basis of the communion, albeit imperfect, which exists between them and the Catholic Church. To the extent that these elements are found in other Christian Communities, the one Church of Christ is effectively present in them” (no. 11).
Ten years later, however, Becker was still unconvinced, ending his article by saying, “It is certainly now the duty of theology to clarify definitively the meaning of this phrase (subsists in).” So, to all appearances, the CDF, under the new leadership of Cardinal Levada, has sought to clear the air and move on. As one colleague said, “The problem the text addresses is not from Vatican II liberals; the problem is from Vatican II reactionaries. Ultimately, this is good news that just looks like bad news.”
The Up Side and the Down Side
There is an up side and a down side to the CDF document.
The Up side is that Responses clearly affirms “that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church.”
It further states that the expression “subsists in” was “adopted to bring out more clearly the fact that there are ‘numerous elements of sanctification and of truth’ which are found outside” the Catholic Church.
The down side, however, is that since the point of the exercise was to clarify the language earlier used, the same words which landed with a thud in earlier renderings reopened old wounds when brought forth once again.
Even Cardinal Kasper, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, in his book That All May Be One, regretted the CDF’s “insensitive language” in its declaration Dominus Iesus (2000) and observed that “the nerves here are raw and the pain threshold correspondingly low.”
Phrases like “we believe they suffer from defects” or “they cannot be called ‘Churches’ in the proper sense” are not likely to win friends and influence people to draw closer.
Lutheran Bishop Wolfgang Huber, a man who understands the importance of defining terms, reflected in a statement entitled "Lost Chance," that "it would also be completely sufficient if it were to be said that the reforming churches are 'not churches in the sense required here' or that they are 'churches of another type' — but none of these bridges is used" in the Vatican document.
The language of the document is necessarily theological and technical (most of the footnotes are in Latin), and one wonders whether there might be a more appropriate forum for its release than the general news media which, even in the best of cases, will look for the controversy, and possibly leave the Church looking silly.
As one friend wrote, “I first saw it in a small paragraph under International News. Next, it was joke in Conan’s opening monologue indicating the Pope says God loves us all but He likes me best. It escalated to an editorial cartoon with the Pope stating that ‘All other Christian communities are defective,’ and intensified when the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a fellowship of 75 million Protestants in more than 100 countries, issued a critical letter charging that the document took ecumenical dialogue back to the era before the Second Vatican Council.”
Unfortunately, some people who have not read the document believe the hype, while others experience concern and fear that the advances of the churches in relationship to one another have suffered a setback. As the editorial of the London Tablet queried, “Why chill the ecumenical atmosphere like this?”
An Invitation to Dialogue
In a statement the day after the release of Responses, Cardinal Kasper framed it as an invitation to dialogue: “The declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does nothing else than to show that we do not use the one and same word ‘Church’ completely in the same sense. Such a statement helps to clarify and to promote the dialogue.”
Speaking of dialogue, it would be wonderful to see the Catholic Church in this and other documents theologize about the development of dogma informed by ecumenical dialogue. Theologians engaged in the ecumenical dialogues have done consistent work over forty years and more broadly engaged the richness of a variety of theological traditions than have CDF theologians.
In other writings Kasper has stated that we have now reached the core of our differences—our institutional, ecclesiological differences. In the encounter with the ancient Oriental and Orthodox churches this is represented by the Petrine ministry as a sign and service to the unity of the episcopate and the local churches. In the encounter with the churches of the Reformation, it centers on the question of the apostolic succession of the episcopate.
According to Catholic understanding, both are constitutive for full church communion and, therefore, eucharistic fellowship depends on the solution of these questions. Because the Reformers did not maintain the apostolic succession in the episcopacy, the Catholic Church considers the communities issuing from the Reformation to be ecclesial communities but not “churches in the proper sense.”
Or, to say it in a more respectful way, they are churches of another type. When one looks at the historic record, it is clear that they have manifested a different understanding of the Church of Christ and have not exhibited a desire to be church in the Catholic sense. The historical picture suggests a widespread understanding among churches of the Reformation that unity only requires an agreement on the fundamental understanding of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments (baptism and eucharist), that different understandings of ministry are acceptable, as are different institutional forms and confessions of faith. Some of this terrain is shifting today due to the theological work of , for example, Churches Uniting in Christ.
The Catholic Church is obviously convinced that its institutional “elements”, such as episcopacy and the Petrine ministry, are gifts of the Spirit for all Christians, and it wants to offer them as a contribution, in a spiritually renewed form, to the fuller ecumenical unity of Christ’s Church.
Spiritually renewed form? We recognize that we, too, can learn from the Orthodox and Reformation traditions how best to integrate the episcopate and Petrine ministry with synodical structures. This is likely the only way in which an ecumenical consensus could be reached about the Petrine and episcopal ministries.
This does not mean the insertion of other Christians into a given “system” but mutual enrichment and the fuller expression and realization of the one Church of Jesus Christ in all the churches and ecclesial communities.
To this latest statement from the CDF there was agreement across the board on at least this: it was straight talk about an important subject.
Rev. Thomas Ryan, CSP, directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in Washington, D.C.
|
