The Mind of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI

The Uniqueness of Catholic Christianity: His Ecclesiology

By Msgr. Michael J. Cantley

This topic, treating of the uniqueness of Catholic Christianity follows closely upon the Christological topic we discussed in the first of this series of lectures.  In Christology we affirmed our faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the eternal Son of God made man: true God and true man.  We recalled from divine revelation, using the words of the Creed that the Son of God became man “for us and our salvation.”  There is no other Mediator of salvation but Jesus.  While salvation is possible outside the visible boundaries of the Church, those who are saved, even though through no fault of their own they never acknowledged Jesus, are nevertheless saved by him.  Now our assertion may seem even bolder, it is that all of the saving grace of Christ is made available throughout history by means of the Church he founded.  There is, therefore, both a Christological and an ecclesial event present in every individual and collective story of salvation.  The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ,[1] his continued ministry through all space and time.  The Church is not a new incarnation of God’s Son, that will never happen again since God has spoken His Word definitively in Jesus.  The Second Vatican Council expresses this truth: “by an excellent analogy, this reality [the relationship of the Church and the Mystical Body of Christ] is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word.”[2]  A foot note in explanation states: “The Church as a mystery (or divine reality appearing in visible form) is in some way comparable to Christ Himself, whose visible presence on earth both manifested and cloaked His divinity.”[3]  The key word is “analogy”.  The primary analogate is Jesus the Son of God; the secondary analogate is the Church, very human and even sinful but still the place where God’s work is most surely visible.  The Church manifests the saving work of Jesus while cloaking it in too many scandals, sins and other foibles, but the holiness of its Word, Sacraments and many of its members is still present.

            Jesus did not establish a ‘club’ or some other sociologically definable grouping.  Rather, he “constituted the Church as a salvific mystery: he himself is in the Church and the Church is in him.[4]  Therefore, the fullness of Christ’s salvific mystery belongs also to the Church, inseparably united to her Lord.  Indeed, Jesus Christ continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church and by means of the Church[5] which is his body.[6]  And thus, just as the head and members of a living body, though not identical, are inseparable, so too Christ and the Church can neither be confused nor separated, and constitute a single ‘whole Christ.’”[7]

            Given these facts, the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) tells us that “in connection with the unity and universality of the salvific mediation of Jesus Christ, the unity of the Church founded by him must be firmly believed as a truth of the Catholic faith.”[8]  Hence, as there is no salvation apart from Christ, so also all salvation will have an ecclesial connection.  Moreover, “The Catholic faithful are required to profess that there is an historical continuity – rooted in the apostolic succession[9] -- between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church.”[10]  Again, “the society furnished with hierarchical agencies and the Mystical Body of Christ are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things.  Rather they form one interlocked reality which is comprised of a divine and human element…This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in union with that successor, although many elements of sanctification and of truth can be found outside of her visible structure.”[11] Again, a useful footnote is given to explain that: “the Church of Christ survives in the world today in its institutional fullness in the Catholic Church, although elements of the Church are present in other Churches and ecclesial communities…”[12]

            The expression subsists in found in the phrase already quoted “The Church…subsists in the Catholic Church” places two doctrinal facts in harmonious relationship to each other: the Church of Christ continues to exist fully in the Catholic Church, even though Christianity has been substantially divided by its divisions in the 11^th and the 16^th Centuries; and that outside of her visible structure real elements for salvation do exist in separated Churches and ecclesial communities.[13]  Yet, again, it has to be stated that “they derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church.”[14] 

            This, then, becomes the place to discuss in detail the issue of the necessity of the Church for salvation.  The CDF Declaration quotes Vatican Two: “the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is mediator and the way to salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church.  He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk. 16:16; Jn. 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door.”[15]  This we may call prescriptive necessity.  The CDF Declaration goes on, in the same place, to state: “This doctrine must be set against the universal salvific will of God (cf. 1 Tim. 2:4); ‘it is necessary to keep these two truths together, namely, the real possibility of salvation in Christ for all mankind and the necessity of the Church for salvation.’”[16]  The command of Christ is clear, but if unfulfilled through no culpable personal decision; failure to comply will not lead to damnation. 

            However, in addition to perceptive necessity, our quotations also include another truth that the Church is necessary with necessity of means for salvation.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church interprets Mark 16:16: “they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.”[17]  And Vatican Two teaches: “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.”[18]  Somehow, and here is an open field for theological speculation to explain ‘how’, the Church, for the innocent non-member, is still the means to salvation.

            This doctrine does not minimize the urgency of Christ’s precept that all be members of the Church, nor does it modify the character of the Church as means to salvation.  It reveals the merciful will of God to accept the implicit will of the sincere non-baptized, seeing him/her within the embrace of the Church, even anonymously so.  CDF expresses it this way: “For those who are not formally and visibly members of the Church, ‘salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace that which, does not make them formally a part of the church, but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation.  This grace comes from Christ…it has a relationship with the Church.”[19]  The Magisterium does not teach about the “way” or “how” this grace is given.  Again, theologians are encouraged to investigate this issue.  There is, however, a caution!  All speculation is wrong-headed that would conclude that the Church is one way to salvation alongside and equal to other ways available in other religions.  Starting with the Catholic truth that Jesus is the one and only source grace and that his grace is mediated in and through the Church, theologians may ask how this happens for those who through no fault of their own are not baptized, but theologians are not correct if they offer substitute theories that conclude to the existence of grace apart from Christ or mediated apart from the Church. 

            Today, there is a crisis of faith with regard to the Church.  What has led to this crisis?  Cardinal Ratzinger answers: “My impression is that the authentically Catholic meaning of the reality ‘Church’ is tacitly disappearing, without being expressly rejected.  Many no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord Himself.  Even with some theologians, the church appears to be a human construction, an instrument created by us and one which we ourselves can freely reorganize according to the requirements of the moment.”[20] Such a concept of Church, the Cardinal goes on to say: “cannot [even] be called Protestant in the ‘classical sense.’”  What, then, is it?  An attitude, perhaps not formally articulated, that the Church is a human construction to be reshaped like any other human organization to meet current needs.  The Protestant Reformers never though that.  They were convinced that the Church, as it empirically existed in their time, had lost its divinely given direction and hoped to recover it.  Ratzinger ties this new and questionable attitude, at lest as it can be discerned among Catholics, to an over-emphasis on the Church as the “People of God.”  The Second Vatican Council did recover this rich but formerly neglected concept, but balanced it with other images in order to complete its meaning. Among these other images is that of the Mystical Body of Christ where, Cardinal Ratzinger says: “the Church receives her New Testament character more distinctively.”[21]  He continues by reminding us that it is through Baptism and the Eucharist that one is incorporated into Christ, “not through a sociological adherence, but precisely through incorporation in the Body of the Lord,”[22] the Church.  Ratzinger’s strongest comment follows: “Behind this concept of the Church as the ‘People of God,’ which has been so exclusively thrust into the foreground today, hide influences of ecclesiologies which de facto revert to the Old Testament; and perhaps also political, partisan and collectivist influences.  In reality, there is no truly New Testament, Catholic concept of Church without a direct and vital relation not only with sociology but first of all with Christology.  The Church does not exhaust herself in the ‘collective’ of the believers: being the ‘Body of Christ’ she is much more than the simple sum of her members.”[23]  The Church’s “deep and permanent structure is not democratic but sacramental, consequently hierarchical.”[24]  In any way that the Church should need reform, the reformer has to be aware that it is God’s creation and not the reformer’s that is at issue.

            What those issues are that seem to stand in need of reform may, for most, revolve around the affirmations in the Creed expressing belief in the “holy Catholic Church.”  Empirical evidence suggests that both of these modifying adjectives are not realized in the historical experience we may have of the Church.  Catholic means universal and is not yet verified since there are still “many other sheep that are not part of this fold.” And Vatican II reminds us that the Church is “sinful.” [25]

These limitations about the historical experience of the Church may well be a reason keeping many from the Church.  Each of these modifying characteristics of the Church must be understood in their proper meaning if they are to be appropriate witness to the faith expressed in the Creed.  Ratzinger writes: “[I]n all…statements of faith the word ‘holy’ does not apply in the first place to the holiness of human persons but refers to the divine gift which bestows holiness in the midst of human unholiness.”[26]  The Church is not holy because each and all of its members in this world are holy, “the holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in it in spite of human sinfulness.”[27] The holiness is not contingent on our response but on the outpouring of divine love that never ceases to invite, but never forces itself on the unwilling.  The Church is holy in its Founder, its sacramental instruments of grace, its members beyond time, Mary and the Saved who have already received the world of their fidelity to God’s will, and even in many still in this pilgrim state of life who are the saints among us.  The Church will never be utterly deprived of holiness, though at any historical moment it may be more-or-less holy, depending on the fidelity of its pilgrim members, ourselves.  

            The “catholicity” of the Church also looks beyond the empirical and sees it at Christ’s founding of the Church as the gathering of disciples of all times and places, excluding no one who will accept his call.  More limitedly, it describes the institutional reality, the community gathered around the bishop and all bishops united with Christ’s vicar believing and worshiping with a single faith: “the Church is not to be deduced from her organization; the organization is to be understood from the Church.  But at the same time it is clear that for the visible Church visible unity is more than ‘organization’.  The concrete unity of the common faith testifying to itself in the word, and in the common table of Jesus Christ, is an essential part of the sign which the Church is to erect in the world.  Only if she is ‘catholic,’ that is, visibly one in spite of all her variety, does she correspond to the demand of the Creed.”[28]

            Cardinal Ratzinger’s ecclesiology is Eucharistic.  He teaches: “The Church is Eucharist.  This implies that the Church has her source in death and resurrection: Jesus’ reference to giving up his body would have remained idle talk if his words had not really anticipated the real act of giving it up on the cross, whereas the real enactment of these words in a sacramental memorial would be a cult of the dead, a portion of our mourning over the omnipotence of death, if Resurrection had not transformed this body into a ‘life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45).”[29]  He continues: “the Church is the dynamic process of horizontal and vertical unification.  It is vertical unification, which brings about the union of man with the triune love of God, thus also integrating man in and with himself.  But because the Church takes man to the point toward which his entire being gravitates, she automatically becomes horizontal unification as well: only by the impulse power of vertical unification can horizontal unification, by which I mean the coming together of divided humanity, also successfully take place.”[30]

            The early Church’s self-designation is expressed in the enriched Greek word εκκλησία.  While it translates the Hebrew qahal (assembly of the people) it allows the implication of the Hebrew to continue to invest the Greek word as the Church uses it.[31] The Greek ecclesia meant the assembly of enfranchised citizens (which excluded women and children).  The Church’s use envisions all, enfranchises all, and makes all members of Christ’s body.  As ecclesia embraces all men, women and children, so it embraces the local Church within the universal Church: “It signifies not only the cultic gathering but also the local community, the Church in a larger geographical area and, finally, the one Church of Jesus Christ…all of them hang on the Christological center that is made concrete in the gathering of believers for the Lord’s Supper.”[32]

            An issue of importance arose with the publication by America magazine of back-to-back articles by Cardinals Walter Kasper and Joseph Ratzinger on the relationship between the universal Church and the local Churches.[33]  Behind this ‘debate’ between these two Cardinal-theologians is the Motu proprio of Pope John Paul II Apostolos suos: On the Theological and Juridical nature of Episcopal Conferences of 1998.  Kasper finds the document intrusive on the rights of a local bishop, and as a result a setting for the diminished respect for central authority as local Churches may be tempted to ignore what is promulgated if it conflicts with the needs and practices of the local Church.  He offers two examples: “the adamant refusal of Communion to all divorced and remarried persons and the highly restrictive rules for Eucharistic hospitality.”  He feels that the local bishop is in the better position to judge exceptions since he is closer to the issue and, without violating doctrine which is always sacrosanct, can best rule on a local case.  Apostolos suos was the occasion for his opinion essay in 1999 and a response from Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000 entitled “On the Ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council.”  The America articles continue their discussion.

            Until 1999, Walter Kasper was bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and is now in Rome, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.  In his America article he avers that he takes pastoral experience as his starting point, that of a Shepherd of a local Church.  He indicates that his argument proceeds inductively, placing him in the philosophical camp of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.  Cardinal Ratzinger, he states is more Platonist and argues deductively from the abstract and universal to the conclusion that local Churches derive from and are subject to the Universal Church.  Ratzinger will assert that Kasper’s real target is not the universal Church per se; but the centralizing of power and authority in the pope and curia.  Kasper argues from history pointing out that the earliest Christian communities were local Churches as Paul seems to signify with the titles of his epistles.  Kasper offers a brief but accurate history of the development of Church polity leading to the position accorded to Rome, certainly by the 2^nd Century as the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch demonstrates.  But he seems to weaken his own argument, where history is the core of his demonstration, when he chides the use Ratzinger makes of history pointing out, approvingly, that historical arguments are not all that clearly probative.  Cardinal Kasper has two practical concerns: one is pastoral regarding issues proper to the local Church; the other is ecumenical, fearing that the insistence in concentrating authority in Rome will retard the ecumenical movement toward the unity of all of the Christian Churches.  He is correct in stating: “The local Church is neither a province nor a department of the universal Church…The local bishop is not the delegate of the pope but is one sent by Jesus Christ… [therefore] the local Churches are not mere extensions or provinces of the universal Church, so the universal Church is not the mere sum of the local Churches.”

            Cardinal Ratzinger, on the other hand, asserts the ontological primacy of the universal Church.  This is more than extolling Rome (which is itself a local Church).  Rather, Ratzinger is asking about the ultimate reality, the entity that Jesus created in founding his Church.  He agrees with Kasper “The local Church and the universal Church are internal to one another; they penetrate each other and are perichoretic.”  There is no local Church in isolation.  The local Church exists “in and from” the one Church established by Jesus, that is the universal Church.  The sentence that Cardinal Kasper objected to stated: “in its essential mystery, the universal Church is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual Church.”  Cardinal Ratzinger points out that Kasper fears: 1) that the CDF Declaration covertly identifies the universal Church with the pope and curia; and 2) if that is the case, CDF does not clarify communio ecclesiology but dismisses it in favor of Roman centralism.  At first, Kasper’s expression of his fears is presented hypothetically, but later in his article he drops the hypothetical and directly charges that such centralism is exactly what CDF is advocating.   Ratzinger comments: “the problem of centralism and the role of the local bishop…lies at the root of Cardinal Kasper’s reaction.”  Cardinal Ratzinger, however, is looking, theologically, at the plan of Jesus for his Church which he desires to be at one, united, one flock and one shepherd.  How that works out in time, under the inspiration and direction of the Holy Spirit, is exactly what Ratzinger is expressing.  The plan of God is the ontological (Ratzinger is willing to change this word to teleological) universal Church in which local Churches exist and which exists in local Churches.  It is the Word of God which is ONE for the entire Church, which precedes and is above the Church, and which gathers the whole Church together and builds it up. 

            This discussion between two brilliant theologians is important if theology is to clarify our understanding of the ecclesial mystery.  Given the papal ministry that has now been given to Cardinal Ratzinger, I believe that it maps out for us the course of this papacy.  It tells me that Pope Benedict XVI is entirely sensitive to discovering the will of God; that he is clear, having repeated the phrase a number of times in many of his writings, that the Church is not his own or ours but Christ’s creation to which we are bound to submit; that there is a clear structure to the Church with a servant, not a dominative purpose; and that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ in and through which all saving grace is communicated, even to the saved who, through no fault of their own are not formally its members.  When one is baptized, it is not into a parish Church, a diocesan Church, a national Church but the Church of Christ.  This is important ecumenically since it tells us that one who has been validly baptized and seeks entry into the Catholic Church is not re-baptized since he/she is already incorporated into Christ.  Surely this supports the conclusion of Cardinal Ratzinger that the Universal Church of Christ is not merely the sum of its parts, but a reality given historical visibility in the Eucharistic Community that celebrates his death/resurrection for our salvation.  The Church is Eucharistic, the concrete gathering of believers for the Lord’s Supper.