Churches, proper and otherwise

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a document aimed at clarifying the distinction between the concepts of ‘Church' and ‘ecclesial community'. But it is difficult to see how this latest document harmonises with the key texts of the Second Vatican Council

On 10 July, L'Osservatore Romano published a statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), entitled "Responses to some questions regarding certain aspects of the doctrine on the Church". I have no idea why the document has been produced, nor where these "questions" come from. It is, in fact, dated 29 June. Perhaps publication was delayed so that it could come out under the smokescreen created by the long-awaited appearance of the motu proprio by which the Pope, overriding the authority of the episcopate (although he denies that he is doing this) has given widespread permission for the use of the unreformed Missal of 1962.

The fifth and last of the questions addressed in the document runs as follows: "Why do the texts of the Council and those of the Magisterium since the Council not use the title of ‘Church' with regard to those Christian communities born out of the Reformation of the sixteenth century?"

The answer given is that, "according to Catholic doctrine, these communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church". Accordingly, these ecclesial communities "cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called ‘Churches' in the proper sense". The authority for that final clause is given, correctly, as the highly contentious declaration Dominus Iesus, which the CDF issued, over the signature of Cardinal Ratzinger, in June 2000.

The expression does not, however, occur in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. It should make any theologically trained nose twitch suspiciously, because if a community is "properly" called "ecclesial", churchly, then that community must surely be in some sense properly called "church". As I shall indicate in more detail later on, it is at the very heart of traditional Catholic doctrine, as expressed in the documents of Vatican II, that concepts central to our attempts to give expression to the mystery of God, and of God's relationships with humankind, are not reducible to the kind of tight and tidy definition with which the officials of the CDF seem most at ease.

The distinction between "Churches" and "ecclesial communities" occurs in the title of the third chapter of the Council's Decree on Ecumenism, "Unitatis Redintegratio": "Churches and Ecclesial Communities Separated from the Roman Apostolic See". The distinction is intended, as a note in Abbott's edition of the conciliar documents puts it, to convey "the idea that the more a Church has of the essential structures of the Catholic Church, the more it approaches the ideal of the Church".

The key conciliar text on Catholic doctrine on Church structures is, of course, the third chapter of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, "Lumen Gentium". I have long insisted that the central doctrinal achievements of Vatican II are to be found in the sequence of chapters of its two Dogmatic Constitutions, on Revelation and on the Church.

Where the latter is concerned, the subject of the first chapter is "The Mystery of the Church". It is a marvellously biblical and patristically rich meditation on the irreducibility of the mystery of the Church, the mystery of God's gathering of sinful scattered humankind into communion with him, to any single model, image or description.

The second chapter does, nevertheless, relatively privilege one such image or description in treating of "the People of God". The selection of this theme ensures that the Council's teaching on the Church is both historical and eschatological: we are a people on the way, a people whose finishing began at Calvary and at the empty tomb, but which still lies ahead of us in the consummation of the kingdom. Of central importance is the Council's treatment, in articles 13 to 16, of the theme that all of humankind is called by God to be this people, to be this gathering, ecclesia, of which that which we usually call the Church is the already symbolically realised expression or (as Chapter One had put it) "sacrament".

The account of the ways in which different kinds and conditions of people already live within this "People's" scope runs all the way from those, "fully incorporated into the society of the Church who, possessing the Spirit of Christ, accept her entire system and all the means of salvation given to her, and through union with her visible structure are joined to Christ", through other Christians, "consecrated by baptism, through which they are united with Christ", and who "recognise and receive other sacraments within their own Churches or ecclesial communities", and so on to the Jews, the Muslims, and those who "have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, but who strive to live a good life, thanks to His grace".

Notice especially the expression, "possessing the Spirit of Christ" and "thanks to his grace". This is a description of humankind's relationship with God's gathering according to which the holy atheist is closer to being part of God's People than a wicked pope. The point should be obvious, but may still be worth making.

Against the sweep of these articles, it is easy to see why the late Bishop Christopher Butler was never tired of insisting that the heart of the Council's teaching on the Church was well captured in an expression of the Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov: "We can say where the Church is, but not where she is not." (Incidentally, in his contribution to a learned collection of essays on "Lumen Gentium", L'Eglise de Vatican II. Etudes autour de la Constitution conciliaire sur l'Eglise, edited by Y.M.-J. Congar and published in 1966, Bishop Butler suggested that "ecclesial communities" should be thought of as not merely "Churches by desire", but true extensions of the Church, although seriously defective.)

Only in the third place, after these two doctrinally rich chapters, did the Council treat, in Chapter Three, of "The hierarchical structure of the Church, with special reference to the episcopate".

Structures matter. Structures, in an incarnational and sacramental dispensation, are indispensable. From the standpoint of Catholic doctrine, other Christian traditions are, in widely varying degrees, structurally defective. But, according to Catholic doctrine, as represented by the Dogmatic Constitution "Lumen Gentium", structures do not come first, or even second, but third. The CDF claims that it is "clarifying the authentic meaning of some ecclesiological expressions", such as what it is to be, or not be, "Church". But to treat, for example, the distinction between "Churches" and "ecclesial communities" in complete abstraction from the context in which that distinction is shaped and figured by the rich teaching of the first two chapters of the Constitution is not to "clarify" Catholic doctrine but grossly to distort and misrepresent it.

By way of conclusion, a word on Anglican orders. What is the Catholic Church's view of their status? Here we confront a paradox. On the one hand, Leo XIII's encyclical Apostolicae Curae, of 1896, which denounced Anglican orders as "absolutely null and utterly void", has never been repealed. It would seem to follow that there must be some sense - for all I know a "proper" sense - in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is, as one Roman Catholic bishop put it in a letter to The Times in, I think, 1951, a letter exhibiting a tact and generosity worthy of the CDF, a "doubtfully baptised layman".

On the other hand, it is also the case that, for over 40 years, successive popes have received bishops and other dignitaries of the Church of England with richly symbolic gestures (and facts have their own logic) such as Paul VI's exchange of episcopal rings with Archbishop Michael Ramsey, John Paul II's gift of a priest's stole to Professor Henry Chadwick and, last November, the invitation to Archbishop Rowan Williams to celebrate the Eucharist at the high altar of the ancient basilica of Santa Sabina, a celebration at which the Gospel was read by a senior official of the Roman Curia.

Some day a pope, assisted by the other bishops of the Catholic Church, will have to sort things out, bang heads together. It seems unlikely, however, that this will happen during the present pontificate.