If it’s not one pope, it’s another.
Pope John XXIII’s ecumenical initiatives shook my young faith to the core. Pope Benedict XVI’s faith initiatives are shaking my adult ecumenism to the core.
Sister Catherina — my beloved first grade teacher who, if she had told me my blue eyes were actually green, I would have believed her — had warned us about Protestants. She said they don’t go to the true church, and, she added with tears, they’re all going to hell.
One year after hearing her say that, Pope John XXIII — whose picture had been on the front wall, above the chalkboard, near the crucifix in Sister Catherina’s classroom — launched the Second Vatican Council. Three years into their work, the Council announced that those “infidel” Protestants now ought to be considered “separated brethren.”
Within months, my town’s local clergy (minus the Baptist minister) organized a community-wide, mid-week, ecumenical worship service. Here I was, a fourth grader, shivering in fear as I sat in the pew of Redeemer Lutheran Church, sure that I was going to die within the hour and descend immediately to hell.
Six years later, I committed my life to Christ in, of all things, a Baptist Church. Ever since, I have served God in Protestant circles. But through the past 40 years, these two major traditions have pursued greater mutuality, as John XXIII had hoped.
Consider how much these two traditions have mutually mentored each other over these last four decades. Protestants have rediscovered liturgy. Catholics have rediscovered the Bible. Protestants have elevated the creeds. Catholics have elevated their preaching. Protestants have been practicing contemplation. Catholics have learned to sing. And, by erasing the anathemas we once pronounced upon one another, our witness to the reconciling power of the gospel has been strengthened.
Along comes Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, a/k/a Pope Benedict XVI, and the ecumenical world quivers in fear. What will he do?
In April 2005, on the day after his election as pontiff, he delivered a speech stating that God will judge him for what he does to promote Christian unity. However, both prior to, and after his inauguration, his approach to unity has been erratic.
Joseph Ratzinger emerged on the world scene when at Vatican II he served as a young, scholarly priest-theologian-advisor. Since then he has interpreted the Council in change-resistant terms.
From 1981-2005 he served as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and he put shivers into all innovative theologians in his church. Some of those theologians were banned from pulpit and classroom.
In 2000, the CDF published Dominus Iesus, which affirmed the tension, ” … on the one hand, that the Church of Christ, despite the divisions that exist among Christians, continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church, and on the other hand, that ‘outside of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth,’ that is, in those Churches and ecclesial communities that are not yet in full communion with the Catholic Church.”
Then this past June, he published the CDF document, “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church,” which again affirms papal primacy, stating that non-Catholic communities cannot be called churches per se. Nevertheless, it quotes Vatican II, stating that those communities are not “deprived of significance or importance in the ministry of salvation.” Indeed, the document says that the Spirit of Christ does use such persons and fellowships as “instruments of salvation.”
Put those reports together and it’s clear that Pope Benedict XVI is a formidable theologian who has been wrestling with his church’s core beliefs, exclusive as they are, in the complicated, denominational, ecclesiastical context we face today. He recognizes the sincerity of faith among us Protestants. But he is perplexed by the way we separate ecclesiology from Christology, how we elevate the body of Christ in Nazareth’s nativity but diminish the body of Christ in the community of the faithful.
One thing is for sure: greater ecumenical progress will take a lot of work. May the ecumenical councils redouble their efforts to engage in mutual affirmation and mutual admonition, ever keeping an eye toward Jesus’ prayer, “that they may be one.”
In the meantime let’s not lose heart. In spite of the mixed signals and complicated propositions that have come from the likes of John XXIII and Benedict XVI, we no longer need to worry that each others’ “church” doubles as a chute to hell.
— JHH
