THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH AND THE PAPACY HOW THE DIALOGUE IS GOING
“I would like to share one observation I made over my ten years of participation in the WCC and other inter-Christian dialogues. Today, the Christian world is more clearly divided into two groups. On one hand is the group of Churches which insist on the need to follow Church Tradition: this group includes, mainly, the Orthodox Churches, the pre-Chalcedonian Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. On the other end of the spectrum are those Protestant communities in which following Tradition was never the norm, in which there is a rapid liberalization of doctrine, of moral principles and church practice. The latter group includes in particular, the majority of Protestant communities of the North. The chasm between the “churches of Tradition” and the churches of a “liberal bent” is now so significant, and it is widening so quickly, that it is difficult for me to foresee how this “inter-Christian collegiality” can be preserved in the near future.
Yves Congar OP wrote:
We are convinced that the reform begun by St Leo IX (1040-54) and continued with vigour by St Gregory VII (1073-81) represents a decisive turning point from the point of view of ecclesiological doctrines in general and of the notion of authority in particular. We know that this reform not only aimed, like all reforms, to purify the Church….but also to deliver the Church from the power of laymen. It aimed to rid itself of its identification with political society, an identification indicated by the word Ecclesia itself which meant both the mystical Body and the Empire with no distinction made between them. In short, it meant Christian society. To bring this about, Gregory VII claimed for the Church the completely autonomous and sovereign system of rights proper to a spiritual societyThe foundation of the ecclesiastical edifice was the pope whose authority emanated directly from a positive divine institution. Gregory VII claimed the sovereign rights of this authority not only over the Church but also over kings and their kingdoms.
At first it was a strategy, a way of keeping order in the Church in the midst of political chaos.. One indication of that is St Peter Damian (1007-1072) , born in Ravenna with its wonderful Byzantine churches and a Camaldolese hermit, whose writings for monks could have been written by one of the Greek Fathers, and who obviously had an organic, sacramental view of the Church. Yet he was a canonist and one of the main architects of the Church interpreted primarily in terms of jurisdiction. He clearly saw no conflict between them, holding both simultaneously, but regarding the latter as necessary for Church reform.
To show you what was meant by the Church as a perfect society and its implications I shall give you a passage from New Advent. The fact that it comes from a modern internet publication shows that there are still Catholics whose understanding has in no way been influenced by Vatican II:
Apostolicity
The Apostolicity of the Church consists in its identity with the body which Christ established on the foundation of the Apostles, and which He commissioned to carry on His work. No other body save this is the Church of Christ. The true Church must be Apostolic in doctrine and Apostolic in mission. Since, however, it has already been shown that the gift of infallibility was promised to the Church, it follows that where there is Apostolicity of mission, there will also be Apostolicity of doctrine. Apostolicity of mission consists in the power of Holy orders and the power of jurisdiction derived by legitimate transmission from the Apostles. Any religious organization whose ministers do not possess these two powers is not accredited to preach the Gospel of Christ. For “how shall they preach”, asks the Apostle, “unless they be sent?” (Romans 10:15). It is Apostolicity of mission which is reckoned as a note of the Church. No historical fact can be more clear than that Apostolicity, if it is found anywhere, is found in the Catholic Church. In it there is the power of Holy orders received by Apostolic succession. In it, too, there is Apostolicity of jurisdiction; for history shows us that the Roman bishop is the successor of Peter, and as such the centre of jurisdiction. Those prelates who are united to the Roman See receive their jurisdiction from the pope, who alone can bestow it. No other Church is Apostolic. The Greek church, it is true, claims to possess this property on the strength of its valid succession of bishops. But, by rejecting the authority of the Holy See, it severed itself from the Apostolic College, and thereby forfeited all jurisdiction. Anglicans make a similar claim. But even if they possessed valid orders, jurisdiction would be wanting to them no less than to the Greeks.
It is the universal jurisdiction of the Pope and not the sacraments that unifies because sacraments can be validly performed both inside and outside the Church as long as the individual has the power to perform them and the recipient to receive them, though they can only be legitimately performed under papal jurisdiction.
Following this reasoning, “the Orthodox Churches and the pre-Chalcedonian Churches” are not real churches at all because, although they have apostolic succession in so far as there are individuals with the sacramental “powers” of bishops and priests, what really holds a church together, what makes a church a church, is jurisdiction which can only be received from the Pope.
I do not believe Rome was thinking of the Eastern churches, nor were they the target of those who first explained the unity of the Church in terms of papal jurisdiction. There are many occasions down the ages in which popes and other Catholic authorities have recognised Eastern churches as churches, but also times when their ecclesial reality has been ignored.
The theory of a perfect society took the shape it did as the Latin Church battled it out with western civil authorities, who were much more problematic, and of whom they were much more aware. European emperors, kings and barons were often semi-civilized , semi-Christian, self-seeking warmongers who often tried to mould the Church to serve their own ends, and who often opposed much needed reforms. Local churches strove to put themselves under immediate papal supervision and sought the privilege of having their bishops appointed by the pope because this protected them from being bullied by the local war lord who liked to use ecclesiastical positions as a way to give their younger sons something to do, or as a cheap way to reward services rendered to them by their followers; and the Church had to strengthen its institutional ties so that the frequent wars and quarrels would not spill out into schisms.
Fortunately, the Church could play on the tremendous respect that all, even the semi-literate lords, had for Roman Law. They explained the Church in a language that both Church and State had in common. In doing so, they brought about a secularization of their understanding of the Church and church authority because its unity was explained in terms of the Roman legal tradition which was a secular rather than a Christian reality.
Secular jurisdiction and every earthly system of law depends on power to back it up; and it depends on people who have the right to exercise that power. In its secularised form, much emphasis in the Church was given to the powers of popes, bishops and priests, and their rights to use these powers.
In New Testament and patristic thinking, all functions of the Church work sacramentally in the sense that they are charged with the Holy Spirit who demands humble obedience from the minister that permits Him to work in and through him or her. A Christian always has people over him that he must obey; because only in that way can he imitate Christ. The humbler the Christian’s obedience, the more effectively can Christ work in and through him. Christian power needs humility in the person exercising it: worldly power needs the ability to use force. This basic difference between Christian power and worldly power became obscured. Hence, Ives Congar OP wrote about the papal title “Vicarius Christi“:
- The use of this title has continued but its meaning has changed. Its older sense in Catholic theology was that of a visible representation of a transcendent or heavenly power which was actually active in its earthly representative. The context and atmosphere surrounding this idea were those of the actuality of the action of God, Christ and his saints working in their representative. This is a very sacramental, iconological concept, linked to the idea of constant “presences” of God and the celestial powers in our earthly sphere. It is this quality of actuality and of a vertical descent and a presence which has its source in Luke 10: 16, “Qui vos audit, me audit; qui vos spernit, me spernit.”
All these texts and titles lost their iconographical interpretation in favour of a legalist interpretation: the pope, instead of being an icon of Christ who is present in his papal activity, a role that demands humble obedience to Christ on his part to be effective, as well as a humble recognition of and respect for Christ’s role in others and is summed up in Pope Gregory the Great’s chosen papal title “Servus Servorum Dei”, under the new emphasis on the Church as an institution, the pope became a sovereign in spiritual things, in exactly the same way as the emperor was a sovereign in earthly things, the same kind of authority demanding the same kind of obedience in Christ’s name; and the force that he wielded was the power of the keys.From being an icon of Christ’s presence, the pope was reduced to being the legal representative in Christ’s absence. It is a lesser dignity, but one that does not depend on his humble obedience to Christ in order to function: his action is legally valid or not; and his moral situation has little to do with it. Only that kind of authority would allow him to stand up to the Emperor. However, it was at a cost: the cost of distancing Christ from the day to day life of the Church. It was as though Christ ascended into heaven, leaving behind an authority in his place, supernatural in origin but exercised in a completely wordly way.
The same secularised concept of power influenced our understanding of the priest when he presides at Mass and the other sacraments in loco Christi. For St Thomas Aquinas, echoing Tradition, the priest is the instrumental cause of the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass. If you use a pen to write a letter, you are the author and the pen is the instrumental cause. It cannot write the letter by itself, but needs the presence of its user to wield it. When we think of Christ’s Real Presence in the Mass, we think automatically of his presence in the bread and wine, but not his presence in the priest presiding, in the reader in his act of reading, in the community in its praying and singing, all this is edited out of our thinking. Indeed a priest can wield his priestly power as though it is his own, even consecrating a crate of champagne outside of Mass, just by using the right words. A bishop can ordain anyone he likes, for whatever motive, in whatever circumstance, even if he himself has apostatised. The concept of the bishop and priest as icons of Christ’s presence, of instrumental causes, where Christ is the real celebrant of the sacraments, has been forgotten in favour of a concept in which bishops and priests possess a supernatural power they can use independently of Christ’s will in spite of the fact that he is meant to be the main cause. This is only possible because the sacraments have been abstracted from the liturgy, their proper context, and their proper understanding has been reduced to an understanding of their “Matter” and “Form” the prayer of the Church, and examined in abstract as matter and form. the double fact that they are actions of Christ in the Church and actions of the whole Church in Christ through the ministry of the priest or bishop has been forgotten in favour of an exercise of sacramental powers individually possessed by the minister and over which he has complete control.
“The Holy Spirit shall come upon you and the Most High shall cover you with his shadow, and for this reason, your Son shall be called “Son of God”.”Mary replied, “I am the Lord’s slave. May it be done to me according to his will.”
In this passage we see the basic structure of salvation. Mary receives a vocation infinitely above her capabilities, one which can only be accomplished by the Holy Spirit working through her humble obedience to achieve in her the will of God. St Luke’s “I am the Lord’s slave, may it be done to me according to his will” can be replaced by “Amen”: it is her humble assent. In order to become Mother of God, in order to have that relationship with the Blessed Trinity that the Church would enoy later, she need to receive the Holy Spirit in humble obedience and to do what was expected of her. Thus her vocation of motherhood has a divine dimension that was essential even to her natural existence as mother.
In the Gospel of St John she continues to live out that vocation, and it is at the foot of the cross that she was mandated to become what was implicit in her role as Mother of God, Mother of all the living, the New Eve.
Thus too, the Church became what it is with the coming down of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and her basic rule is of humble acceptance of the Spirit and obedience to Christ. It is in the liturgy in general and in the Eucharist in particular that the Church becomes what she is: there is the coming down of the Holy Spirit at the obedient prayer of the Church in which Christ prays on our behalf through the words of the priest, the Church identifying itself with Christ’s sacrifice; and all are taken up into this Mystery when the priest, messenger of the Lord, declares to each communicant, “The Body of Christ”, to which comes the reply, “I am the slave of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word,” or “Amen”.
Of all things, the liturgy is the product of the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church, and it has both divine and human dimensions, where the human role is to humbly obey and the divine role is to enable, just as it was with Mary. Hence, Pius XI wrote that the liturgy is the primary organ of the ordinary magisterium of the Church. Vatican II went further:
10. Nevertheless the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows. For the aim and object of apostolic works is that all who are made sons of God by faith and baptism should come together to praise God in the midst of His Church, to take part in the sacrifice, and to eat the Lord’s supper.
The liturgy in its turn moves the faithful, filled with “the paschal sacraments,” to be “one in holiness” [26]; it prays that “they may hold fast in their lives to what they have grasped by their faith” [27]; the renewal in the Eucharist of the covenant between the Lord and man draws the faithful into the compelling love of Christ and sets them on fire. From the liturgy, therefore, and especially from the Eucharist, as from a font, grace is poured forth upon us; and the sanctification of men in Christ and the glorification of God, to which all other activities of the Church are directed as toward their end, is achieved in the most efficacious possible way.
According to universal ecclesiology, the Church is a single organic whole, including in itself all church units of any kind, especially those headed by bishops. The organic whole is the Body of Christ or, to return to Catholic theological terms, the Mystical Body of Christ….Usually the church units are regarded as parts of the universal Church….The basic principles of the world-wide theory of the Church were formulated by Cyprian of Carthage…All the local churches are the one and only Body of Christ, but the empirical Church is the sum of its separate parts: ecclesia por totum mundum in multa membra divisa. The Church is one because the “throne of Peter is one”…every bishop is St Peter’s successor, but only in so far as he is part of the episcopate Episcopatus unus est, cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur. Just as the Church of Christ is divided into many members throughout the world, so the episcopate is expanded into a multiplicity of many bishops united in concord. According to Cyprian, every bishop occupies the throne of Peter, but the see of Rome is Peter’s throne par excellence. The Bishop of Rome is the direct heir of Peter, whereas the others are heirs only indirectly, and sometimes only by the mediation of Rome. Hence Cyprian’s insistence that the Church of Rome is the root and matrix of the Catholic Church…The see of Rome was for him ecclesia principalis unde unitas sacerdotalis exorta est.
This pattern of universal ecclesiology became general in East as well as in the West. Afanassieff writes:
In the Russian ecclesiological system of out time, the episcopal church (the diocese) forms one part of the autocephalous Russian Church. The Moscow Council of 1917-18 decided that “the diocese is defined as one part of the Russian Orthodox Church, when governed by a bishop according to canon law.
Later, Afanassieff argues that the logic of the universal system requires a universal head, and that most of the arguments against the papacy by those who share the view that a diocese is part of the Church are illogical. However, the Orthodox instinct, even without realizing it is in favour of a eucharistic ecclesiology, where the Catholic Church is identified with the eucharistic assembly in each place.
This means that each local bishop under its bishop is the physical manifestation of the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church”; and, just as each consecrated host is Christ, and all the consecrated hosts in the whole world are Christ, neither more nor less, each eucharistic assembly is the body of Christ, and its unity with every other eucharistic assembly is one of identity, each and all together being the body of Christ.
If each eucharistic assembly is Christ’s body, he argues, then no one can have power over it, because no one can have power over Christ. The only primacy possible is one not based on power. The primacy that St Irenaeus accorded to Rome in the second century was one of witness. It is possible for local eucharistic assemblies (or local churches) to deviate and thus cease to be identical to the others. A guide they can always follow is that of Rome, because it was founded by SS Peter and Paul, and because it is in touch with Christianity world-wide. If a local church is identical in belief and Christian life to what happens in the Roman church, then it is identical to the rest and, therefore, a manifestation of the Catholic Church in one place.
Afanassieff quotes considerably from St Ignatius of Antioch and it is this saint who gives the essay its title: “The Church which presides in love.” When St Paul says to the Corinthians, “You are the body of Christ,” he is addressing a local church. In fact, the word “church” normally means the local church, which is also the “body of Christ”. All Christians in heaven and on earth are united in each eucharistic celebration; the visible community being like the tip of an iceberg, while the rest of the Church is invisible. Afanassieff writes:
When the Apostle Paul wrote to tell the Corinthians that they were the Body of Christ, he surely could not have helped thinking of the liturgical formula, “This is my Body,” which he quotes in the same epistle…..When the Eucharist is celebrated, the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and by the bread the partakers become the Body of Christ…. “For as much as the loaf is one, we are one body, many though we be; for we are all partakers in the one loaf.” The close tie between the loaf of bread and the Body of Christ comes out very clearly here.
The conclusion of Afanassieff is that: THE LOCAL CHURCH IS AUTONOMOUS AND INDEPENDENT, BECAUSE THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST DWELLS IN ITS FULLNESS. IT IS INDEPENDENT BECAUSE ANY POWER, OF ANY KIND, WOULD BE EXERCISED OVER CHRIST AND HIS BODY. IT IS AUTONOMOUS BECAUSE FULLNESS OF BEING BELONGS TO THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST, AND OUTSIDE IT NOTHING IS, FOR NOTHING CAN HAVE BEING OUTSIDE CHRIST.
Of course, if that conclusion was the inevitable conclusion of his premise that the Church in its fullness exists because of the Eucharist which contains its fullness, then it would have been put to one side. However, in spite of its shortcomings, this gave an exciting new paradigm by which Orthodox and Catholic theologians could reach a better understanding of the Church and could even come to understand one another.
It seems that his teaching needed to be revised. These are a few questions that needed an answer. What if St Ignatius and St Cyprian were not teaching rival doctrines on the Church, but were merely responding to a different set of problems? What if it is possible to understand St Cyprian in the light of St Ignatius and vice versa? Can the empirical reality of the Church be dismissed so summarily as irrelevant to the theological question? Is not the empirical a dimension of reality, even ecclesial reality? If Afanassieff’s teaching on the autonomy of the local church were carried to its logical conclusion, would we not end up with a congregationalist ecclesiology rather than a Catholic or Orthodox one? Has he really established the necessity of bishops or showed how they can have power over parishes where the Eucharist is celebrated?
Perhaps the greatest name to take up the torch of eucharistic ecclesiology on the Orthodox side has been John Zizioulas, once a Professor of Systematic Theology at Glasgow University, now Metropolitan of Pergamon in Greece. He is a friend of Pope Benedict and is much admired by Pope Francis.
To get a feel of his theology here is a short passage:
One of the peculiarities of St Basil’s teaching, compared with that of St Athanasius and certainly of the Western Fathers is that he seems to be rather unhappy with the notion of substance as an ontological category and tends to replace it… with koinonia. Instead of speaking of the unity of God in terms of His one Nature, he prefers to speak of it in terms of the communion of persons: communion is for Basil an ontological category. The nature of God is communion.
In ecclesiology, all this can be applied to the relationship between the local and the universal Church. There is one Church as there is one God. But the expression of this one Church is the communion of the many local Churches. Communion and oneness coincide in ecclesiology.
He agrees with Afanassieff that each Church is the whole Church in one place and that the fundamental unity of each Church with the others is identity, because all partake of the same Eucharist; but he disagrees that each is autonomous because he applies to each and all the category of communion: they can only exist as local churches because they are in communion with the others, communion being a fundamentally ontological category. Hence the need for synodality, this arising out of the nature of the Church, internally as each local Church and externally as being “churches-in-communion”. He also argue that synodality requires a “protos”, a primate who can call a synod together and who acts as its centre of unity. He quotes canon 34 of the Apostolic Canons
The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account to him as their head, and do nothing of consequence without his consent. But each may do those things only which concerns his own parish and the country places which belong to it. But neither let him, who is the first, do anything without the consent of all, for so there will be unanimity, and God will be glorified through the Lord in the Holy Spirit.
This is true at every level because communion is the fundamental category by which all church functions can be judged. He hold out the possibility of the necessity for the papacy in Orthodox ecclesiology, but not the kind that acts alone, above communion. As it stands, the Vatican I definition where it is stated about papal use of infallibility “Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable” must be rejected. This goes completely against the spirit of Article 34 in the Apostolic Canons and against the nature of the Church as fundamentally communion, flowing, as it does, from our partaking of the Eucharist. He says that, by the power of the Holy Spirit:
The whole Church, the Catholic Church was present and incarnate in every eucharistic community. Each eucharistic community was, therefore, in full unity with the rest by virtue not of an external, superimposed structure, but of the whole Christ represented in each of them. The bishops as heads of these communities come together in synods only expressed what Ignatius, in spite of – or perhaps because of – his eucharistic ecclesiology wrote once, “the bishops who are in the extremes of the earth are in the mind of Christ.” Thanks to a eucharistic vision of the Catholic Church” the problem of the relationship between the “one catholic Church” in the world and the “catholic Churches” in the various local places was resolved apart from any consideration of the local Church being incomplete.
…Another fundamental consideration is that no ministry in the Church can be understood outside the context of community. This should not be explained in terms if representativeness and delegation of authority, for these terms being basically juridical finally lead to a separation of the ordained person from the community: to act on behalf of the community is to act outside it because it means to act in its place. …There is no ministry that can act outside or above the community.
1) To have a better understanding of the role of the Pope we must express our faith in non-legal language, in terms if communion.
2) We must recognise that the fullness of Catholicism becomes ours through our participation in the Eucharist.
3) It follows that other churches, like the Orthodox churches, the Oriental Orthodox churches and the Assyrian Church are “true and proper churches of orthodox faith” and are also participators in the fullness of Catholicism because Christ is the fullness of Catholicism. The Mass is Christ, and the Mass is the Church.
4) This makes it even more necessary to obey Christ and become one, because we are one. However, this step is one on which we do not agree. However, the correct answer lies deep within the Tradition of each one of us. In finding agreement, we are learning about our own Tradition, and the objections of the other churches correspond to problems we find in our own churches.
5) Metropolitan Zizioulas is a model in this regard.
Source: http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-nature-of-church-and-papacy-how.html
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