I’m honestly surprised the cardinals have chosen Ratzinger to be the next pope. I knew he was the favorite going in, but I also knew that the conclave had a history of making surprising, unexpected choices. To pick the favorite on the fourth ballot on the second day was not what I had anticipated at all.
Conservative Catholic intellectuals — the sort who agree with everything in First Things — must be on cloud nine today.
I just spoke with a colleague of mine, an older man who was once a Catholic priest but left three decades ago. "Shocking… disgraceful… I can’t believe it", he said. "What will I say to my Protestant and Jewish friends?" He’s not as troubled by the new Benedict XVI’s conservative theology as much as he is by his assertion that non-Catholic churches are, in a very real sense, "deficient." It was Ratzinger who wrote Dominus Iesus (2000), that has this troubling line:
If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.
Still, Ratzinger is a remarkable intellectual force. The church has chosen a bright and able theologian to be its leader, and presuming that his health holds, we can expect a significant and interesting output in terms of papal encyclicals over the next few years.
But he was not the man I was hoping for, even if my middle name is Benedict.
Hmm. I’m a Protestant and I guess I don’t really see anything troubling about that line from Cdl. Ratzinger/Pope Benedict. What would be strange to me would be for a Catholic to not think that his church had something that other Christian communions (or other religions) lacked.
Lee, there’s a difference.
I think my fiancee is an amazing woman, the best woman in the whole world, frankly. I love her more than I have loved anyone else. But I can love my fiancee above all others without declaring all other women to be “gravely deficient”! One can be committed to one person, or one tradition, without disparaging others. Dominus Iesus disparages.
I’m not sure the analogy holds, though. If the purpose of a church is to provide people with the means of salvation and the best way to do that (indeed the only way) is by the grace which comes from Jesus Christ, then anything less than the means which (Catholics believe) Christ entrusted to the church would be gravely deficient.
By contrast, there’s no standard or overarching purpose by which one woman could be judged to be more or less “deficient.”
(I mean, I obviously don’t agree that the non-Catholic churches are deficient in the means of grace, but I don’t know how you could buy Catholic ecclesiology and not believe that.)
In fairness, though, I haven’t read Dominus Iesus, so I should withold judgment.
I am not too crazy about his anti-gay statements which in effect say that while the Church doesn’t advocate violence, allowing gays civil liberties will encourage violence against gays. This is a lot like the Nuremberg files guy who posts home addresses of abortion docs and crosses them off minutes or hours after they have been killed by sniper, AND BEFORE THE NEWS MEDIA BROKE THE STORY. This is a lot like Dobson the radio preacher, who basically said that Matthew Shepard got what he deserved, although the next day he backtracked and said, no, I don’t advocate violence (wink, nudge). Also, Ratzinger said that EVEN IF CELIBATE LIFELONG, gays suffer from a tendency to intrinsic moral disorder. In other words, bad seed. Ratzinger has been the author of the most important Church statements on homosexuality in the JP2 papacy. JP2 of course endorsed those statements, but Ratzinger wrote them.
Lee, the point is that a healthy ecumenism avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of utter relativism on the one hand and triumphalism on the other. That’s the spirit in which most ecumenical dialogue had taken place from Vatican II onwards — plenty of Catholics had done this quite successfully. Dominus Iesus is a step backwards, and was very hurtful to many Protestants active in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement.
Well, as a Traditional Catholic who attends mass at a FSSP chapel, I guess I shouldn’t be suprised that we disagree; and I am heartily overjoyed at having His Holiness Benedict XVI at the helm.
I hope that:
1. I make it to 78
2. I get a nice promotion at 78, because lord knows I’ll probably need a job at that age when the republicans are through with my country. Maybe I should convert.
As I’ve said elsewhere, with regard to your former priest colleague, I don’t expect the Catholic Church to make decisions on personnel or doctrine with Jewish interests in mind, but that you can’t expect me, as a Jew, to ignore those interests when I respond to the Church, its doctrines, actions and personnel.
Why are you so disappointed with the decision? Who were you hoping would get the job?…
Oh, I’d have loved to see Danneels, or Castillon Hoyos, or Hummes of Brazil.
Lee just posted excerpts on his blog about Ratzinger’s opposition to the Iraqi war and his questioning of the possibility of just war at all. So perhaps The First Things crowd (whose journal supported the war, I believe) shouldn’t be on Cloud Nine after all.
Setting aside our political or theological concerns with the statement Hugo quoted, what the heck does it mean? It seems impossibly mealy-mouthed. I mean, either those others can go to heaven or not. Which is it? What is the practical manifestation of their ‘grave deficiencies’, and if there are none, what could it possibly mean? This seems like a statement carefully constructed to appeal do two different theological camps, or at least not offend either, rather than express a theological position. If my cynical reading is correct here, it must also be noted that the strategy apparently worked.
Hugo,
Hmn…I’m glad I asked, now I really feel like I don’t know anything. I’m afraid all those names are unfamiliar to me.
No, no, a thousand times, no. This is wonderful news. You have wrenched a piece from Dominus Iesus out of context, and applied it to non-Catholic churches. In fact, it applies to non-Christian religions. You advocate the papering over of difference, where Ratzinger wants to face and deal with it. I’ve got a more detailed response on my blog, and a link to a CT editorial on the subject, called “Honest Ecemunicalism”.
So John, as a Pentecostal, you’re good with this from DI:
“…the ecclesial communities which have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery, are not Churches in the proper sense…”
How do you feel about not worshipping in a church in the proper sense?
I agree with Hugo Dominus Iesus ignored years of hard work in overcoming centuries of triumphalism by theologians and lay folk on the ground who were working from a place that the fullness of the Church subsists in the Roman Catholic Church. And that that fullness can subsist in other Christian traditions as well.
The document was dropped like a bomb on Protestant and Anglican communities quite unexpectedly and not too soon after a Concordat was reached whereby the heart of Luther’s theology, salvation by grace, was affirmed and a real shift looked underway–also ++Benedict XVI’s doing, and brilliantly achieved. So a trust issue has been renewed because on the one hand he worked hard to achieve a move toward reunion and yet dropped this so unexpectedly.
Absolutely. I disagree with it, of course. But it is an honest statement of a long-standing Catholic doctrine. Reunion will never come without honesty, and Ecemunicalism, as I say on my blog, without Truth is no Ecemunicalism at all. My position is the same as Christianity Today’s, who welcomed Dominus Iesus below:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/012/31.28.html
What Jonathan Dreser said–you can also tell your friend, Hugo, that Jews are probably not at all surprised. John Paul II was a blip of tolerance in centuries of anti-Semitism.
I’m also not at all surprised that Ratzinger was chosen; the Church has a huge presence and a very conservative one in developing countries, and the desires of the comparatively liberal US Catholic community are not high on the Vatican’s list. I’d think the presence of Bernard Law in recent ceremony says volumes about the Vatican’s opinion of the American church.
He’s a little dicey. I was hoping for a move away from staunch theological conservatism. He was also elected really, really fast. I think it means one of two things:
1. The new Pope was so well thought of by the other cardinals that they quickly ushered him into leadership.
2. That the conservative bishops that JPII brought in over the past 20+ years are in such lock-step that they voted for the guy the were “supposed” to vote for in order to maintain power.
For the sake of the church, let’s hope it was the former and not the latter.
Hugo,
I don’t see Ratzinger’s comment as “triumphalism” at all. Even though I disagree with it, I find it logical that Roman Catholic teaching holds that other Christian churches are “gravely deficient” when Roman Catholicism upholds a teaching magisterium and a means of grace (i.e., the Eucharist in the sense of transubstantiation) that other bodies don’t.
“Gravely deficient” is a term of concern, not triumphalism. From the Roman Catholic POV, we’re missing out on some gifts that God wants to give us, and we’re missing out on a divine source of guidance. If I believed what Roman Catholics did about the Eucharist and the teaching magisterium, among other doctrines, I think the only intellectually honest thing to do would be to join them.
Peace of Christ,
Chip
But Chip, the way I read it, gravely deficient is not just in reference to missing out on some gifts — we’re deficient in terms of the “fulness of means of salvation”, which is more problematic. If he had just said “it’s nice to have a teaching magisterium, and you Protestants and Anabaptists don’t know what you’re missing” that would have been fine. It’s when he brings salvation into it that I’m troubled.
Yeah, Hugo, I guess I expect that from the Roman Catholic church. After all, if from their perspective we’re not receiving means of grace (i.e., the literal body and blood of Christ)that keep us in or (when we fall) restore us to a state of grace, and if it’s necessary to be in a state of grace when we die to go to heaven, then we are “gravely deficient” in the sense of salvation. And if we don’t have the teaching magisterium, then we’re not just missing out on something nice; we’re missing out on obedience to Christ.
Of course, that’s not to say that Roman Catholicism holds that you must be Roman Catholic to go to heaven; they have a view similar to Lewis’ view about other religions. Still, to be without those things makes us “gravely deficient.”
“…the ecclesial communities which have not preserved the valid Episcopate and the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery, are not Churches in the proper sense…”
I don’t see why this is so controversial- remember, the Catholic Church is a very firm believer in the Apostolic Succession. That’s why it recognizes the ordinations of priest converts from the Anglican Church, even when those priests are married (setting aside the different issue of the Anglican priestesses for now), because, even though the Anglicans are in schism, they have maintained the Apostolic Succession of their bishops. Similarly with the schismatic Eastern Orthodox churches, including those that have come back into the fold as Eastern Rite Catholics.
It’s similar to the situation with the Society of St. Pius X (the schismatic traditionalist movement started by the excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre)- the masses are valid, but illicit.
Pentecostals (and many other protestant groups) have broken this Succession, so their services aren’t “going to church” in the sense that the Church means it, but rather are groups of people praying together, which isn’t sufficient for the Church’s view of the Sunday Obligations.
Oh, and with that, AVE ATQUE SALVE, PAPA BENEDICTE XVI.