Vatican turns from lion to mouse in dialogue
Episcopal News Service. January 24, 1992 [92024]
The Rev. J. Robert Wright
The great promise of a closer ecumenical relationship with the Roman Catholic Church came in with a lion's roar in 1982 with the final report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC 2), but that same promise, with the release of the Vatican's long-awaited response in December, has gone out with the squeak of a mouse.
Now that this response has at last been made (see ENS December 11, 1991) and since I am no longer a member of that commission, I can speak openly of my growing pessimism about its prospects as the pontificate of John Paul II moves forward in time, a pessimism that is confirmed by the Vatican text.
The "shell" of the Vatican response is guardedly positive, speaking of "remarkable progress" and seeing the report as "a significant milestone."
Yet its substantial content is essentially negative, failing to modify in any significant way the basically negative evaluation that the Vatican was already given shortly after its release in the spring of 1982.
The final report presents two challenges, presumably addressed to those chosen by the Roman Catholic Church to represent it in international ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Communion:
- To achieve further "clarifications" to the ARCIC 1 statements on Eucharist and on ministry and ordination, while generally affirming the extent of the agreements already reached;
- To meet the interpretations of official Roman Catholic texts on the infallibility and universal primacy of the bishop of Rome as they are now delineated in the Roman Catholic response.
As regards the Vatican's demands for further "clarification" of the ARCIC 1 statements on Eucharist and on ministry and ordination, the response constitutes a rejection of that body's claim already to have reached "substantial agreement." But the document at the same time recommits the Roman Catholic Church to continue the ecumenical journey with the Anglican Communion and together to study these and all other points of "divergence" that remain.
The authoritative status of the report is unclear. At one point it "is the fruit of a close collaboration between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity," but it has been released in technically anonymous form, signed by no individual or department within the Vatican.
Nonetheless, the document does claim to be the "definitive response of the Catholic Church" and an "official response." As a whole, I find it to be remarkably shallow and wooden, inaccurate in some of its documentation, lacking in theological sophistication, with its release shrouded in leakages and false predictions of dates. It is clumsily handled with little respect for the Roman or Anglican ecumenical authorities outside of the Vatican and England, and its text is quite undistinguished in view of the extraordinarily long time that it took the Roman Catholic Church to produce it.
This extension of time amounted to three extra years from the summer of 1988, when it was first promised. This document is not worthy of the theological acumen of Cardinals Ratzinger and Cassidy, the heads of the Vatican departments that prepared the text, and it is noteworthy that the names of these two cardinals are nowhere attached to it.
As regards the ARCIC 1 statements on authority, especially with regard to the papacy, this "definitive" or "official" response can only be interpreted as a call for the Roman Catholic Church in the future to be represented in ecumenical meetings solely by delegates who can and will hold as a minimum the following positions (slightly paraphrased):
| a. | That "the universal primacy of the pope is a permanent institution directly founded by Jesus during his earthly life." |
| b. | That in the apostolic succession there is "an unbroken line of episcopal ordination from Christ through the apostles down through the centuries to the Roman Catholic bishops of today, as well as an uninterrupted continuity in Christian doctrine from Christ to those today who teach in union with the pope and other Roman Catholic bishops," and that these "unbroken lines of episcopal succession and apostolic teaching stand in causal relationship to each other." |
| c. | That "the historical-critical method is not sufficient for the interpretation of Scripture, since this interpretation must not be separated from the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church." |
| d. | That "any church outside of communion with the Roman pontiff must by that very fact be lacking something more than merely the visible manifestation of unity with the Church of Christ, which subsists in the Roman Catholic Church." |
| e. | That there is "a guaranteed gift of divine assistance in judgment necessarily attached to the office of the bishop of Rome by virtue of which his formal decisions can be known to be immune from error even before they are received or accepted by the faithful." |
Notice is, in effect, served by this response that other churches in ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Orthodox and Lutherans and Methodists, need have no hope of claiming any "substantial agreement" with the Roman Catholics that does not at least meet these positions.
The standards now demanded are "identity" and "complete agreement," and the credibility of the members of ARCIC 1 is thereby questioned. Remarkably, very little is said in the document about the ordination of women, nor does it answer at all the second question originally posed by the Vatican's Unity Secretariat, "whether the report offers a sufficient basis for taking the next concrete step towards the reconciliation of our churches grounded in agreement in faith."
Thus, although there is absolutely no evidence that the position against women's ordination so emphasized by Pope John Paul II has changed, still the document as a whole does not suggest that without women's ordination any next step would have been regarded as possible.
Some Roman Catholic ecumenists, trying to make the best of a wretched piece of work, are already claiming that the process of responding to an ecumenical report represents "a new experience" for the Roman Catholic Church, but the fact is that this experience is no more "new" for them than for the Anglican Communion.
The poor quality of their response combined with the length of time it took does not encourage anyone to commend the papal primacy on grounds of centralization, or efficiency, for the sake of mission.
Some Anglican ecumenists, privately hoping for better times and regretting that the Roman church is in the clutches of a conservative papacy fighting a rearguard action, will no doubt attempt to place a more positive interpretation on the response. I do not believe this is honestly possible. The only ray of light I see at the end of the tunnel is the immense and enormously positive ecumenical good will that has been built up among Roman Catholic laity, priests, and theologians in this country over the years since the Second Vatican Council.