Notes on “Questions on the Doctrine of the Church”

In 2000 the Vatican promulgated the declaration Dominus Iesus, which, to the consternation of a good many ecumenists, officially directed Catholic bishops not to use the term “sister churches” in referring to Protestant denominations. This document, in continuity with Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution of the Church, made it clear that according to Catholic doctrine these churches lack a valid episcopate, hence the integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery, and are therefore not churches in the true sense of the term. Rather, they are “ecclesial communities” ambiguously related to the Church of Rome. In response the Touchstone editors, by my hand, noted,

The teachings articulated in these recent Vatican documents are constitutional. Any ecumenical approach to Rome must take full and honest cognizance of them. Protestants may think them wrong but are ill advised to treat them as un-Catholic, no matter how much they are encouraged to do so by Catholic revisionists, still brandishing their officially discredited interpretations of Vatican II. Nor can they be made to abate by moaning about how badly ecumenical feelings have been hurt by Cardinal Ratzinger [who, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, promulgated the declaration], who speaks here not only for [Pope John Paul II], but from the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of the character and identity of the Church.

The editors of Touchstone have no desire for Rome to surrender the integrity of its beliefs on the terms required by mainline ecumenism, for we cannot imagine it could, in that frame of mind, stand against the “progressive” Catholics who are trying with all their might to baptize their church in the same wallow of confusion, heresy, and immorality into which their Protestant counterparts have already introduced their own. It is this integrity from which Dominus Iesus issued. We hail the magisterium for not settling for worse, pray, with faithful Catholics, that the next papal administration be like the present one—or more so—and insist, as we always have in these pages, that progress toward unity must be progress in truth, no matter how hard or unwelcome the truth may be.

Cardinal Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI. In concert with Dominus Iesus, and once again to the consternation of many, he has recently ratified a document entitled Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.   Here it is vigorously reasserted that the Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change the traditional Catholic teachings on either the Eastern churches or Protestantism. Briefly put, the document states that the Eastern churches (meaning for the most part Eastern Orthodoxy), having a valid sacramental priesthood, thus valid sacraments, while defective in regard of lacking full communion with the See of Peter, are to be considered churches, while the Christian communities born of the Reformation, lacking a valid sacramental priesthood, cannot be called “churches” in the proper sense.

As I interpret these documents, language used of the Orthodox churches indicates a communion that is, if we may use the term, quantitatively greater, for their apostolic episcopate and validity of their Eucharist is added to recognition of the baptism which is granted to Protestants—all as “impelling toward Catholic Unity.”  But the communion is still "imperfect"--that is, qualitatively the same as that of Protestants in that it is “defective.” 

If this is so, John Paul II's analogy of the Roman and Eastern Catholic churches as the two lungs of the body of Christ is untenable.  It was a generous thing to say, and the sentiment behind it should be remembered and treasured, but it implies an equality between Rome and Orthodoxy that official Catholic dogma does not appear to support. Orthodoxy, like Protestantism, "derives its efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the [Roman] Catholic Church,” and so whatever about either of them is the Church, and—if being “Christian” implies membership in the Church, as I believe the Vatican documents do, whatever makes their members Christians—is derived from the Roman congregation in which the Catholic Church subsists.

The concept of subsistence as put forward here allows that Orthodoxy, with its sacramentally valid priesthood, has sufficient connection for its churches to be called churches and their members to be called Christians in a qualified but true sense, while the connection of Protestant churches does not suffice, properly speaking, for either. Protestant “churches” can in fact only be reckoned “ecclesial communities,” “honored with the name of Christian” (Lumen Gentium), whose members, when referred to as Christians in Catholic documents, are such only in the honorary sense that befits the status of their communities.

With regard to the communion that is the Church, Orthodoxy is deficient, but not so deficient as to withdraw the title of Church from its communions or Christian from its members. Protestant churches, measured by the same rod, are severely deficient, so much so that these religious communities are not churches properly speaking, and their members are only Christians (we must assume) to the degree that their churches are churches. If I read Lumen Gentium aright, no Catholic is obliged to call a Protestant a Christian, although he may, to do him honor—which I believe John Paul II consistently did. I will note that in general, Protestants have historically taken pretty much the same view of Catholics. Which is to say that nothing has changed--the whole point of the new Vatican document, which was clearly meant only to clarify something that should have been clear to any careful student of the matter in the first place.   

It is futile, I believe, to be offended by this, for as paltry a gift as this may seem to Protestants (who, when they have an honest look at Protestantism, taken as a whole, must admit they have little to boast about), from the context of Catholic belief it is not an ungenerous offering—the Catholics are giving all they can give and still be Catholics, and making the point clear. The exclusion of others from full communion who profess to believe in Christ, and yet who will not profess belief in the developed Petrine constitution of the Roman Church, accords with the deep logic of that Church, a logic resting on the office of Peter that makes what is constitutively Roman and Christian “official.”

What is not required of that logic, I suggest, is the inclusion that Rome grants to those who are estranged from full participation in that wholeness—the grace of any inclusion at all. That is why there remains submerged in that Church an ineradicable resistance to the ecumenical stance of Lumen Gentium, based firmly upon that deep, constitutive logic, similar to analogous logics within Protestantism and Orthodoxy (the former is common in the stronger strains of Protestant confessionalism, and I have seen the latter associated with certain influential monasteries) that would refuse to grant those who are not fully Roman any status as Christians whatever.