Religion: Ecumenical Chill

John Paul II was the first Pope to worship at Anglicanism’s Canterbury Cathedral, the first to preach in a Lutheran church, and the first in a millennium to attend the Eucharist in Istanbul alongside Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarch. But despite these gestures of friendship, substantive progress toward Christian unity has nearly come to a halt during John Paul II’s reign. Last week a front-page editorial in the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, seemed to signal that there is no prospect of structural reunion of the churches so long as this Pope’s views prevail.

The editorial vigorously rejected a 1984 German book, Unity of the Churches –Real Possibility, co-authored by the late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and Father Heinrich Fries of the University of Munich. The attack was signed by French Dominican Daniel Ols, who teaches at the Pontifical Angelicum University in Rome. Such an editorial does not carry the weight of a Vatican pronouncement, but Ols says that he was asked to write his piece “by the hierarchy,” which would mean by key aides of the Pope or even by John Paul himself.

The Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism declared that continuing church division “openly contradicts the will of Christ.” Rahner and Fries, making liberal use of Vatican II’s concept of a “hierarchy of truths,” proposed a unification based upon the Bible and the doctrines from the first two ecumenical councils. That would exclude such later Roman dogmas as the universal primacy and infallibility of the Pope.

Ols’ editorial accused the two Germans of “grave errors” and espoused the most conservative interpretation of Vatican II. He wrote: “The Church of Christ exists in the Catholic Church and the fullness of grace and of truth are the patrimony of the Catholic Church so that only she possesses the complete means for salvation.” Reunion cannot occur, he maintained, without other churches’ “assent to all and every one of the dogmas” professed by Rome. Vatican II did not explicitly make such a demand, which would exclude not only Protestants but also the Eastern Orthodox, reunion with whom has long been considered a prime personal interest of John Paul’s. If nothing else, Ols’ declaration will heighten interest in the special Bishops’ Synod called by the Pope for next fall to reexamine the work of Vatican II.