Last summer's document on the Church, released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on July 10 and published in Origins the following week (July 19), disturbed many Catholic and non-Catholic Christians alike.
Individuals in both groups interpreted the document (whether they actually read it or not) as a retreat from the ecumenical advances made by the Second Vatican Council and carried forward under Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.
For these individuals, one of the most troublesome aspects of the document was its insistence that no Christian community can be called a church if it lacks true sacraments, the priesthood, and the Eucharist. The latter two, it said, are rooted in apostolic succession.
As noted in a previous column, the document presents five questions on the Church and offers five brief answers, along with a commentary on each. I have previously focused on the first three questions and answers. We move now to the fourth and fifth.
Question #4 asks why Vatican II used the term "church" in reference to the Oriental churches separated from full communion with the Catholic Church.
The council did so, the CDF replies, because these churches do have true sacraments, the priesthood and the Eucharist. As such, they "merit the title of 'particular or local church' and are called sister churches of the particular Catholic churches."
Nevertheless, the CDF document continues, even these separated churches of the East "lack something in their condition as particular churches," namely, papal primacy.
Unfortunately, the document fails to acknowledge that Pope Paul VI also referred to the Anglican Communion as a "sister church."
Question #5 asks why the texts of Vatican II and of the magisterium following the close of the council in 1965 do not use the title of "church" for Christian communities born out of the 16th century Reformation.
According to the CDF, it is because "these communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of orders and are therefore deprived of a constitutive element of the church."
The paragraph continues: "These ecclesial communities that, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the eucharistic mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called churches in the proper sense."
The CDF claims thereby that all non-Catholic churches and ecclesial communities suffer from certain "defects" (Decree on Ecumenism, n. 3), namely, papal primacy (in the case of the separated churches of the East) and the priesthood and the Eucharist, as well as the primacy (in the case of Protestants and Anglicans).
The accompanying CDF commentary concedes, in line with Vatican II, that these separated churches and ecclesial communities contain "diverse elements of sanctification and truth" and "undoubtedly possess as such an ecclesial character and consequently a salvific significance."
What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the so-called "defects" are institutional, not spiritual or moral. All that the CDF and the council are saying is that the Catholic Church alone fully possesses all the elements that are essential to the institutional integrity of the Body of Christ.
Vatican II did not say that outside the Catholic Church there are only elements of the Body of Christ. "On the contrary," Father Francis Sullivan, S.J., currently at Boston College and for many years professor of ecclesiology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, writes in the June 2006 issue of Theological Studies, that the council "recognized the presence and salvific roles of churches and ecclesial communities that are not in full communion with the Catholic Church."
Richard Gaillardetz, chaired professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo, highlights the point in his recent article, "The Church of Christ and the Churches," in the August 27-September 3 issue of America magazine.
He cites a key observation by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity: "Only in this sacramental and institutional respect can the Council find a lack (defectus) in the churches and ecclesial communities of the Reformation. Both Catholic fullness and the defectus of the others are therefore sacramental and institutional, and not existential or even moral in nature...."
In other words, the concept of "fullness" does not preclude the reality of non-Catholic churches and ecclesial communities also being an integral part of the Body of Christ, albeit in "varying degrees" of communion with the Catholic Church.
And the concept of "defect" does not mean that the Catholic Church is, in principle, morally and spiritually superior to non-Catholic communities. On the contrary, specific non-Catholic communities can be --- and sometimes are --- more effective instruments of grace and salvation than comparable Catholic communities. Fr. Richard McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. |