Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology

By Joseph Ratzinger

This work features the most discussed topics of the life of the Church, treated with unique frankness and depth by the Church's spiritual and theological leader. In this collection of essays, theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, tackles three major issues in the Church today-the nature of the Church, the pursuit of Christian unity, and the relationship of Christianity to the secular/political power.

The first part of the book explores Vatican II's teaching on the Church, what it means to call the Church "the People of God", the role of the Pope, and the Synod of Bishops. In part two, Ratzinger frankly assesses the ecumenical movement-its achievements, problems, and principles for authentic progress toward Christian unity. In the third part of the work, Ratzinger discusses both fundamental questions and particular issues concerning the Church, the state and human fulfillment in the Age to come. What does the Bible say about faith and politics? How should the Church work in pluralistics societies? What are the problems with Liberation Theology? How should we understand freedom in the Church and in society?

Beneath a penetrating analysis on these important topics by this brilliant teacher and writer, both concise and also surprising, is revealed the passion of a great spiritual leader. The result is an exciting and stimulating work, which can be provoking, but never boring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681491011

Joseph Ratzinger

Joseph Ratzinger (Alemania, 1927-2022) se doctoró en Teología por la Universidad de Múnich en 1953, dos años después de haber sido ordenado sacerdote. Tras participar en el Concilio Vaticano II como teólogo consultor del arzobispo de Colonia, prosiguió su carrera académica y se convirtió en vicerrector de la Universidad de Ratisbona. Fue nombrado cardenal y arzobispo de Múnich en 1977 por Pablo VI, y prefecto de la Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe en 1981 por Juan Pablo II, cargo que desempeñó hasta su elección como Papa —Benedicto XVI— el 19 de abril de 2005. Tras su renuncia en febrero de 2013, ostentó el título de Papa Emérito. Falleció el 31 de diciembre de 2022 y está enterrado en las grutas del vaticano.

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FOREWORD

The lectures and papers collected here form a sort of second volume to the ecclesiological essays that I published in 1969 under the title Das neue Volk Gottes (The New People of God). The basic themes have remained the same: the question of the nature of the Church and her structure, the questions of ecumenism and of the relation between the Church and the world. In many respects, however, the emphases have shifted, and it has become necessary to ponder these issues anew. The growing number of ecumenical joint declarations has made the dialogue among the Churches and ecclesial communities concrete in a way that was unforeseeable twenty years ago [that is, in the 1960s]. At the same time, the fact that all this consensus has still not brought about unity makes it necessary to give careful thought to the fundamental questions: Where does ecumenism stand, and how should it proceed? The problem of Christian service to the world, which was formulated in rather general terms at the Council, has come to a head dramatically—due in particular to the theologies of liberation—raising urgent questions about faith and politics, about the relationship between liberation and redemption.

Thus the controversy about Christian ecumenism and current efforts to establish the right relation between faith and politics figure in the foreground of the reflections in this volume. Some of the articles reprinted here sparked lively debates when they were first published, to which I have responded by means of explanatory notes or newly added postscripts. I hope that this expedient makes clear the dialogical character of these essays, which seek, through listening to one another, to hear better the One who is the Word and the Truth in person.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Rome, Solemnity of All Saints, 1986

PART ONE

ON THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF THE CHURCH

1

THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

Shortly after the First World War, Romano Guardini coined a phrase that was soon winging its way through German Catholic circles: A process of immense significance has begun: the Church is awakening in people’s souls. Vatican II was the fruit of this awakening; it expressed in its documents and presented to the whole Church as a patrimony the knowledge that had matured through faith during the four decades from 1920 to 1960, which were so full of ferment and hope. In order to understand Vatican II, therefore, we must take a look at this period and try to discern, at least in broad outline, the trends and influences that led to the Council. I intend to proceed by beginning each section with the thoughts that people were thinking during those years, so as to develop then from those ideas the basic elements of the Church’s conciliar teaching.

I.   THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST

1. The image of the Mystical Body

The Church is awakening in people’s souls. This statement by Guardini was very carefully formulated, for what mattered to him was precisely the fact that the Church was now being recognized and experienced as something interior that does not stand opposite us like some sort of equipment but, rather, is alive within us. Whereas until then the Church had been viewed mainly as a structure and an organization, now it dawned on Catholics: We ourselves are the Church; she is more than an organization, she is an organism of the Holy Spirit, a living thing that encompasses all of us from within. This new awareness of Church found verbal expression in the term Mystical Body of Christ. In this formula is expressed a new and liberating experience of the Church, which Guardini formulated once again at the end of his life, in the year when Vatican II promulgated the Constitution on the Church, as follows:

[The Church] is not an invented and constructed institution. . . , but a living being. . . . She lives on through time, in the process of becoming, like every living thing. She changes and yet essentially she is always the same, and her inmost core is Christ. . . . So long as we regard the Church as merely an organization. . . , as a governing body. . . , as a federation [that is, an association]. . . , we do not have the right relation to her. She is a living being, and our relation to her must itself be a vital one.¹

It is difficult to convey the enthusiasm, the joy, accompanying such an insight. In the age of liberal thought, lasting until World War I, the Catholic Church had been considered a fossilized apparatus that was stubbornly opposed to the achievements of the modern age. In theology the question of the primacy had been so much in the forefront that the Church essentially appeared to be a centrally governed institution that one tenaciously defended yet that somehow encountered one only in an external way. Now it was evident again that the Church is much more, that we all carry on her life together in faith, just as she carries us. It had become evident that she is an organic growth and development through the centuries that is ongoing even today. It had become evident that through her the mystery of the Incarnation continues to be present: Christ walks on through the ages. If we ask, therefore, which elements from this initial ferment remained in existence and influenced Vatican II, we could say that the first one is the christological definition of the concept of Church. J. A. Möhler, the great reviver of Catholic theology after the devastation of the Enlightenment, once said that a certain false theology could be caricatured and summed up in the sentence: In the beginning Christ established the hierarchy, and that is enough to care for the Church until the end of time. We must contrast this, he said, with the truth that the Church is a Mystical Body, that is, that Christ himself founds her anew again and again; that he is never merely her past, but he is always and above all her present and future. Church is the presence of Christ, our contemporaneity with him, his simultaneousness with us. She lives by the fact that Christ is present in the hearts of the faithful; from there he forms the Church for himself, and not vice versa. That is why her first word is Christ, and not herself; she is healthy in the measure in which all her attention is directed toward him. Vatican II magnificently placed this insight at the very head of its deliberations by beginning the foundational document on the Church with the words: Lumen gentium cum sit Christus—Because Christ is the light of the world, there is also the mirror of his glory, the Church, which reflects his radiance. If you want to understand Vatican II correctly, you must begin again and again with this first sentence. . . .

The second thing from these beginnings to which we should hold fast is the aspect of interiority and the aspect of the communio character of the Church. Church grows from within toward the outside, not vice versa. Above all this means the most intimate communion with Christ; she is formed in the life of prayer and in the sacramental life, in the fundamental attitudes of faith, hope, and love. Therefore, when someone asks, What must I do in order that Church may come about and advance? the answer has to be: Above all you must strive so that there may be faith, so that hope and love may flourish. Prayer builds up the Church and the communion of the sacraments, in which her prayer comes to meet us. This summer I met a parish priest who told me that when he was appointed pastor he was especially depressed by the fact that for decades his congregation had not produced a single vocation to the priesthood. But what was he supposed to do? One cannot make vocations; only the Lord himself can grant them. But do we have to throw up our hands? He decided to make on foot each year the long and difficult pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in Altötting for this intention and to invite everyone who shared his intention to go along and pray with him. The number increased from year to year, and this year, to the immense joy of the whole village, they were able to celebrate, for the first time in living memory, the First Mass of a newly ordained priest. . . . Church grows from within—that is what the message about the Body of Christ tells us. Precisely because this is true, however, it also includes another truth: Christ has formed a Body for himself, and I must fit into it as a humble member; otherwise I cannot find or have him, yet in this way he is entirely mine, because I have become his member, his organ in this world and thus for eternity. The liberal idea that Jesus is interesting but the Church is an unsuccessful business automatically ruled out this insight. Christ exists only in his Body, never merely as an ideal. That means: he exists with the others, with the community that is continually walking through the ages, which is this Body of his. The Church is not an idea, but a Body, and the scandal [Ärgernis] of the Incarnation, which was the downfall of so many of Jesus’ contemporaries, continues in the troubles [Ärgerlichkeiten] of the Church; but here, too, the saying holds true: "Blessed is he who takes no offense [nicht ärgert] at me" [Mt 11:6].

Yet this communio character of the Church necessarily implies her we character as well. The Church is not somewhere or other; we ourselves are the Church. Of course, no one can say, I am the Church; everyone must and may say: we are the Church. And furthermore this we is not a group that isolates itself, but rather one that remains within the whole communion of all Christ’s members, the living and the dead. But in that way a group can really say: We are it. Church is there, in this open we that breaks down barriers—social and political, but also the boundary between heaven and earth. We are the Church—from this grew shared responsibility, but also the privilege of personal collaboration; from this resulted, then, a right to criticize as well, which, however, must always and in the first place be self-criticism. For Church, we repeat, is not just somewhere or someone else: we ourselves are the Church. These ideas, too, developed right into the Council; everything that was said about the common responsibility of the laity and everything that was instituted by way of juridical forms, so that it might be implemented meaningfully, proceeded from these ideas.

Finally, this is the place for the idea of development and thus of the historical dynamism of the Church: a body maintains its identity by the fact that it constantly becomes new in the process of living. For Cardinal Newman, the idea of development was the real bridge to his conversion to the Catholic faith. I believe that this idea is indeed one of the critical basic concepts of Catholicism on which there still has not been sufficient reflection, although here, too, the Second Vatican Council is to be credited with having formulated the idea for the first time in a solemn magisterial document. Anyone who wants to cling exclusively to the wording of Scripture or to the formulas and structures of the patristic Church banishes Christ to yesterday. The result is, then, either a completely sterile faith that has nothing to say to today or else an arbitrariness that skips over two thousand years of history, tosses it onto the scrap heap of failed enterprises, and now decides to figure out what Christianity should really look like according to the Scriptures or according to Jesus. But that can only amount to an artificial product of our own making that has no inherent stability. There is real identity with the origin only when there is at the same time a living continuity that unfolds it and thereby preserves it.

2. Eucharistic ecclesiology

But now we must return once more to the developments of the pre-conciliar period. The first phase of the interior rediscovery of the Church centered, as we have said, on the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ, which was developed from Paul’s writings and highlighted the ideas of Christ’s presence and the dynamism of a living organism. Further investigations led to new knowledge. Henri de Lubac, especially, demonstrated in a magnificent work of wide-ranging scholarship that the expression corpus mysticum originally referred to the Most Holy Eucharist and that for Paul and the Church Fathers the idea of the Church as the Body of Christ was inseparably connected with the idea of the Eucharist, in which the Lord is present in a bodily manner and gives us his Body to eat. So now a eucharistic ecclesiology developed that many like to refer to also as communio ecclesiology. This communio ecclesiology actually became the centerpiece of Vatican II teaching on the Church, the new and yet thoroughly primordial thing that this recent Council wanted to give us.

Now what is meant by eucharistic ecclesiology? I will try very briefly to suggest just a few of the crucial points. The first is that Jesus’ Last Supper can now be recognized as the real act of founding the Church: Jesus gives to his disciples this liturgy of death and of his Resurrection and thus bestows on them the feast of life. In the Last Supper he renews the covenant of Sinai, or rather: what was then only a symbolic start now becomes total reality—the communion of blood and life between God and man. When we say this, it is clear that the Last Supper anticipates the Cross and Resurrection and at the same time necessarily presupposes them, for otherwise everything would remain empty gestures. That is why the Church Fathers could say, in a very beautiful image, that the Church sprang from the Lord’s wounded side, from which blood and water flowed. In reality that is the same thing, merely expressed from a different perspective, as when I say that the Last Supper is the beginning of the Church. For it still means that the Eucharist joins human beings together, not only with one another, but also with Christ, and that in this way it makes people into the Church. At the same time this already determines the fundamental constitution of the Church: Church lives in eucharistic communities. Her worship service is her constitution, for by her very nature she is service of God and therefore service of men, the service that transforms the world.

The liturgy is her form—this means that within her there is a proper relation between multiplicity and unity that occurs nowhere else. In every celebration of the Eucharist, the Lord is entirely present. He is, of course, risen and dies no more, and so one can no longer divide him, either. He always gives himself whole and undivided. That is why the Council says:

This Church of Christ is really present in all legitimately organized local groups of the faithful, which, in so far as they are united to their pastors, are also quite appropriately called Churches in the New Testament. For these are in fact, in their own localities, the new people called by God, in the power of the Holy Spirit and as the result of full conviction (cf. 1 Thess 1:5). . . . In these communities, though they may often be small and poor, or existing in the diaspora, Christ is present through whose power and influence the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is constituted. (LG 26)

This means that from this approach of eucharistic ecclesiology follows that ecclesiology of local Churches which is characteristic of Vatican II and represents the inner, sacramental basis for the teaching about collegiality, which we have yet to discuss.

First, however, we must look still more closely at the Council’s formulation in order to assimilate its teaching correctly. For in this passage Vatican II simultaneously encounters suggestions from Orthodox and Protestant theology, which the passage nevertheless integrates into a larger Catholic view. Indeed, the idea of eucharistic ecclesiology was stated first of all in the Orthodox theology of exiled Russian theologians and, furthermore, was set in opposition to the alleged Roman centralism: Every eucharistic community—so they said—is already wholly Church, because it has Christ wholly. Therefore, external unity with the other communities is not a constitutive element of the Church; therefore, unity with Rome cannot be constitutive for the Church—so they reasoned. Such unity is good, because it represents externally the fullness of Christ, but it does not actually belong to the essence of the Church, because, after all, one cannot add anything to the wholeness of Christ. From another point of departure, the Protestant notion of the Church led in the same direction. Luther could no longer recognize in the universal Church the Spirit of Christ; indeed, he viewed her as nothing less than an instrument of the Antichrist. Nor could he consider the Protestant state churches that resulted from the Reformation as churches in the proper sense: these were only socio-politically necessary pragmatic arrangements under the leadership of the political powers, nothing more. For him the Church withdrew into the congregation: only the assembly that hears the Word of God at any particular place is Church. That is why he completely replaced the word Church with the word congregation or community; Church became a negative concept.

If we turn again now to the conciliar document, we will notice some nuances. It does not simply say, The Church exists wholly in every community that celebrates the Eucharist; rather it formulates it as follows: "[The] Church . . . is really present in all legitimately organized local groups of the faithful, which, in so far as they are united to their pastors, are. . . called Churches. Two elements are important here: the community must be legitimately organized in order to be Church, and it is legitimately organized inasmuch as it is united to their pastors. What does that mean? It means, first, that no one can make himself Church. A group cannot simply come together, read the New Testament, and say: Now we are Church; after all, the Lord is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. One essential element of Church is receiving, just as faith comes from hearing and is not the product of one’s own decisions or reflections. For faith is an encounter with something I cannot devise or bring about by my own efforts; instead, it is something that has to come to meet me. We call this structure of receiving, of encountering, sacrament". And this is precisely why it is also part of the basic structure of the sacrament that it is received and that no one administers it to himself. No one can baptize himself; no one can confer priestly ordination on himself; no one can absolve himself of his sins. Another consequence of this encounter structure is the fact that perfect contrition, by its very nature, cannot remain interior but longs for the encounter structure of the sacrament. Therefore, it is not merely an offense against external canonical regulations when people pass the Eucharist around or when someone takes it for himself; rather, it is a violation of the intrinsic structure of the sacrament. The fact that in this one sacrament the priest is allowed to administer the sacred Gifts to himself points toward the mysterium tremendum to which he is exposed in the Eucharist: acting in persona Christi and thus simultaneously representing Christ and being a sinful man who lives entirely on the reception of Christ’s Gifts.

Church cannot be made but only received, that is to say, received from a source where she already exists and really exists: from the sacramental communion of his Body as it makes its way through history. But there is another consideration that helps us to understand this difficult expression, legitimately organized local groups: Christ is whole everywhere: that is the one very important thing that the Council formulated in common with our Orthodox brethren. But he is also only one everywhere, and therefore I can have the one Lord only in the unity that he himself is, in the unity with the others who are also his Body and are supposed to become it ever anew in the Eucharist. Therefore, the unity among themselves of the communities that celebrate the Eucharist is not an external addition to eucharistic ecclesiology; rather, it is its inner prerequisite: only in unity is the One. In this respect, the Council exhorts the communities to be responsible for themselves and yet rules out all self-sufficiency. It sets forth an ecclesiology in which catholicity, that is, the fellowship of the believers of all times and places, is not an external organizational feature, but rather a grace that comes from within and at the same time is a visible sign of the power of the Lord, who alone can bestow unity across so many boundaries.

II.   THE COLLEGIALITY OF THE BISHOPS

Very closely connected with eucharistic ecclesiology is the idea of episcopal collegiality, which is likewise one of the principal pillars of the ecclesiology of Vatican II. This idea, too, was developed from research into the liturgical structure of the Church. If I am correct, the first one to formulate it clearly, thus opening the door for the Council in this matter, was the Belgian liturgist Bernard Botte. This is important, because here, too, the connection with the liturgical movement of the period between the two world wars becomes evident—a movement that provided the fertile soil that nurtured most of the insights presented thus far. And it has more than just historical importance, because it illustrates the inner connection between these ideas, which is indispensable to understanding them correctly. The debate about collegiality is not a quarrel about the division of power in the Church between the pope and the bishops, although it can very easily degenerate into such a quarrel and the interested parties must repeatedly ask themselves whether they have taken the wrong road. It is not really an argument about juridical forms and institutional structures, either; instead, collegiality is essentially ordered to that service which is the real service of the Church in the first place: the worship service. Bernard Botte derived this concept from the oldest liturgical orders that have come down to us and defined it in their terms. This was also used as an argument during the Council against the opponents of collegiality, who pointed out that in Roman law and in the laws governing associations in the early modern period, collegiality has a meaning that cannot be reconciled with the Church’s constitution. In fact, this touches upon a possible understanding of the notion of collegiality that would distort the meaning of ecclesial service. Therefore, it is important to return again and again to the core concept so as to guard it from such distortions.

What does it mean, then? In his studies, Botte pointed out two levels of the idea of collegiality. The first level consists of the fact that the bishop is surrounded by the collegium of the priests. This fact reveals what we have already mentioned in passing: that self-sufficiency of individual congregations was unknown to the early Church. For the priests who serve them are in fellowship with one another; together they make up the bishop’s council. The communities are held together by the priests in fellowship and are inserted by the bishop into the larger unity of the whole Church. The priesthood always includes a kind of fellowship and also affiliation with a bishop, which is at the same time affiliation with the Church as a whole. But this already implies that the bishops, for their part, cannot work by themselves in isolation; instead, they form together the ordo of bishops—as it was formulated with Roman legal language, which divided society into various ordines [orders]. Later the word ordo became the official name for the sacrament of consecrating clergy; thus one essential component of that sacrament is entrance into a communal service, into the we of the ministers. The word ordo, moreover, alternates with collegium: both express the same thing in the liturgical context: The bishop is bishop, not alone, but solely in the catholic communion of those who were bishops before him, who are bishops with him, and who will be bishops after him. For the dimension of time is also implied by this word: Church is not something we make today; rather, she is something we receive from the history of believers and hand on as something incomplete that will be fulfilled only at the Lord’s Second Coming.

The Council fused this idea with the other basic concept of the sacrament of episcopal consecration, that is, with the idea of apostolic succession, into an organic synthesis. It recalls the fact that the apostles, too, after all, formed a communion. Before they received the name apostles, they are referred to as the Twelve. The calling of twelve men by the Lord has a symbolic character that every Israelite understood: it recalls the twelve sons of Jacob, from whom Israel came about as a people made up of twelve tribes. Twelve is therefore the symbolic number of the People of God; when Jesus calls twelve, then this symbolic gesture declares that he himself is the new Jacob-Israel and that now, with these men, he is inaugurating a new People of God. Mark depicts this very clearly in his Gospel by couching the event of the calling in these words: He appointed twelve (Mk 3:14). Moreover, everyone knew that twelve was also a cosmic number, the number of the signs of the zodiac that divide up the year—the time of man. Thus the unity of history and cosmos was underscored, the cosmic character of salvation history: the Twelve are supposed to be the new signs of the zodiac of the definitive history of the universe. But let us stay with the topic that immediately concerns us: The apostles are what they are only in the fellowship of the communion of twelve, which is therefore completed and filled up once more after Judas’ betrayal. Consequently, one becomes a successor of the apostles by entering into the communion of those in whom their ministry is being continued. Collegiality is an essential part of the episcopal ministry; it can be lived and carried out only in the fellowship of those who at the same time represent the unity of God’s new people.

When we ask ourselves what this means in practice, the first answer we should give is that the catholic dimension of the episcopal ministry (and of priestly ordination and of all congregational life as well) is very expressly emphasized. Attempts to particularize contradict the idea of collegiality from the outset. Collegiality, as the Council defined it, is itself not immediately a canonical structure, although it is clearly a theological datum of the first rank, both for Church law and for pastoral activity. The canonical form that represents the most immediate expression of the theological reality collegiality is the ecumenical council. Hence in the new Code of Canon Law [CIC], the ecumenical council is the only other thing discussed within the context of the article concerning the college of bishops in particular (cann. 336-41). All other applications [of collegiality] cannot be derived from it directly but can only amount to attempts at a secondary mediation of this great fundamental principle in everyday reality. They must always be measured by the extent to which they correspond to the basic content that is at issue here: surpassing the local horizon and entering into the shared element of catholic unity, which has always entailed also the dimension of the history of the faith from the beginning until the Lord comes again.

III.   CHURCH AS PEOPLE OF GOD

In our discussion of the ideal of collegiality we finally mentioned the catchphrase for which you have surely been waiting: Church as the People of God. But what does it involve? Again, in order to understand it, we must go back to the developments that preceded the Council. After the initial enthusiasm of discovering the idea of the Body of Christ, more profound interpretations and corrections gradually followed along two lines. We have already looked at the first correction; it is found especially in the studies by Henri de Lubac, who developed the concept of the Body of Christ in more concrete terms that lead to eucharistic ecclesiology and, thus, opened it up to the practical questions of the Church’s juridical order and of interdependence of local Church and universal Church. The other type of correction began in the late 1930s in Germany, when various theologians observed critically that, with the idea of the Mystical Body, the relation between the visible and the invisible, between law and grace, between order and life ultimately remained unclear. Therefore they suggested the concept People of God, which is found especially in the Old Testament, as a more comprehensive description of Church, which incidentally can be more easily conveyed in sociological and juridical terms, whereas the Body of Christ remains an image that is important but, they said, does not satisfy the theological demand for conceptual development.

This initially rather superficial critique of the Body of Christ idea was then rounded out from various aspects, which produced the positive content with which the People of God concept entered into the conciliar ecclesiology. The first important point was the controversy about Church membership that arose in connection with the encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ that Pope Pius XII promulgated on June 29, 1943. At