By Veronica A. Arntz
In Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis from 1943, we are given
a beautiful description of the Church as Christ’s Mystical Body here on earth,
born out of love from his sufferings on the Cross. Toward the end of the
encyclical, the Pope offers a heartfelt exhortation to love the Church:
Let this be the
supreme law of our love: to love the Spouse of Christ as Christ wished her to
be and as He purchased her with His blood. Hence not only should we cherish the
sacraments with which Holy Mother Church sustains our life, the solemn
ceremonies she offers for our solace and our joy, the sacred chant and liturgy
by which she lifts our souls up to heaven, but the sacramentals too and all
those exercises of piety which she uses to console the hearts of the faithful
and gently to imbue them with the Spirit of Christ (art. 102).
For Pius XII, the Church is
deeply sacramental and liturgical, for, by her very being, she is turned toward
the Lord, anticipating with hope Christ’s second coming. In loving the Church,
we love her liturgies and her sacramental life, for these things are part of
her very being and essence. How much these words are needed for the Church in
our own time! In a time when the sacraments are frequented less and less, piety
is disregarded as being “individualistic,” and, most especially, the liturgy is
viewed as a theatrical act by the priest rather than the eternal sacrifice of
Christ on the Cross, we are in desperate need of a reminder of the true nature
of the Church. In our time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has helped us to
understand the true nature of the Church as Eucharistic and liturgical,
oriented toward communion with God. To understand Ratzinger’s ecclesiological
vision, let us first understand what the Church is not.
In the late 1990’s and early
2000’s, a lively debate occurred between Cardinals Walter Kasper and Joseph
Ratzinger over the relationship of the universal and particular Church. From
Kasper’s perspective, as the bishop of a diocese, he had noted a growing gap
between the regulations of the Vatican and the actual pastoral practice of the
individual churches. In a 1999 article entitled
“On the Church,” he writes, “A large portion of our people, including priests,
could not understand the reason behind the regulations coming from the center;
they tended, therefore, to ignore them.” (NB: It is interesting to see that
Kasper has been keenly interested in Communion for the divorced and remarried
for a considerable amount of time: “The adamant refusal of Communion to all
divorced and remarried persons and the highly restrictive rules for Eucharistic
hospitality are good examples”). The bishop, although he is part of the
universal episcopal college and therefore responsible for defending the
Catholic truth, he is also the head of his diocese, which means he must “take
care of his own people, respond to their expectations, and answer their
questions.” For this reason, Kasper upholds that the bishop should have a
certain freedom over his diocese to “make responsible decisions in the matter
of implementing universal laws.” For Kasper, the particular Church is the
“church at a given place,” not a department of the universal church. In a
certain way, Kasper believes that the particular Church is prior to the universal
Church, because it is the bishop’s decision how to implement certain universal
rules. If Kasper had his way (which, as we have seen within the last two years,
he very well might), then it would be up to the bishop to decide whether the
divorced and remarried can receive Communion.
Kasper then cites the nature of
the early Church to show the truth of his proposal that the local Church exists
prior to the universal Church. He explains, “The early church developed from
local communities. Each was presided over by a bishop; the one church of God
was present in each. Because the one church was present in each and all, they
were in communion.” Furthermore, “They existed within the network of a
communion of metropolitan and patriarchal churches, all of them bonded together
as the universal church.” According to Joseph Ratzinger, however, this approach
to understanding the relationship of the universal and particular Church
diminishes the importance of the universal Church. In his book, Called to Communion: Understanding the
Church Today (Ignatius Press, 1996), he explains, “The ancient Church never
consisted in a static juxtaposition of local Churches” (p. 83). Indeed, the
ancient church did not exist as Kasper understands it, for, as Ratzinger
explains, “the apostle is not the bishop of a community but rather a missionary
for the whole Church” (Ibid.). As such, Kasper’s proposal seems to imply that
the local churches existed separately, so that they combined to form the
universal church. As we shall further show in looking at Ratzinger’s
ecclesiology, this is not the proper way to understand the universal Church.
Furthermore, Ratzinger says that
the Church cannot “become an end in herself” (p. 145). He points to a modern phenomenon
that, the more ecclesial activities one participates in, the more “Christian”
he or she is considered. As Ratzinger further explains, “We have a kind of ecclesiastical
occupational therapy; a committee, or at any rate some sort of activity in the
Church, is sought for everyone” (Ibid.). While it is good and necessary for
Catholics to desire to belong to the Church, this is a false kind of belonging.
Being Christian is not about the activities one does in the Church, although
those things are certainly important for forming a Christian community. Yet,
according to Ratzinger, “there can be people who are engaged uninterruptedly in
the activities of the Church associations and yet are not Christians” (Ibid.).
Such a Church becomes more about human activity rather than the divine activity
of God working through the Church. If we place the local church above the
universal Church, we can see this becoming a problem, for then the activities
of the people become the main purpose of the Church’s existence.
Lastly, Ratzinger writes, “In the
Church, the atmosphere becomes cramped and stifling when her office-bearers
forget that the sacrament is, not an allocution of power, but dispossession of
myself for the sake of the one in whose ‘persona’ I am to speak and act” (p.
146). In advocating for the primacy of the bishop in ruling about certain
universal principles of the Church, Kasper is thinking primarily of the power
of the office. If the bishop has the power to rule his diocese as he wishes,
then he should be able to exercise that power. Without denying the importance
of the bishop and his particular diocese, Ratzinger shows that the bishop is
not merely an advocate for his own interests. Rather, the bishop stands at the
head of the diocese, his flock, in order to promote the good of something
higher than himself, that is, the Bride of Christ and God’s laws. If the bishop
becomes concerned about his own power, his local church becomes separate from
the universal flock of Christ.
What, then, ought to be the
character of the relationship of the particular and universal Church? As
Ratzinger explains in Principles of
Catholic Theology (Ignatius Press, 1987):
Belief in the Trinity
is communio; to believe in the
Trinity means to become communio.
Historically, this means that the “I” of the credo-formulas is a collective
“I”, the “I” of the believing Church, to which the individual “I” belongs as
long as it believes…this “I” utters itself only in the communion of the Church (p. 23).
The doctrine of the communion of
the Trinity, therefore, serves as the basis for understanding the Church
herself. When each of us individually professes our belief in God, we are
professing our belief in the Church. It is the whole Church—the whole communio of the Church—who believes in
the holy Trinity. As Maximilian Heinrich Heim explains in Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and Living Theology (Ignatius
Press, 2007), “Because the ‘I’ of the believer exists only as a result of the
‘we’, the profession of the triune God in the ecclesial communio constitutes the faith of the Church” (p. 148). And
furthermore, “The individual always believes by believing along with the whole
Church” (p. 149). Thus, unity of faith is essential for forming the unity of
the Church.
In the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith’s Letter to the
Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood as
Communion, promulgated
by Joseph Ratzinger during the time that he was Prefect, we find that there are
two foundations for the communion of the Church: the Eucharist and the
Episcopate. First, we read concerning the Eucharist, “It is precisely the
Eucharist that renders all self-sufficiency on the part of the particular
Churches impossible” (11). How is this the case? As the document explains,
“From the Eucharistic center arises the necessary openness of every celebrating
community, of every particular Church; by allowing itself to be drawn into the
open arms of the Lord, it achieves insertion into his one and undivided Body”
(Ibid.). The Eucharist forms the communion of the Church, and this gift of
Christ’s Body and Blood prevents the particular churches from becoming juxtaposed
to the universal Church. For the Church is the Body of Christ, as St. Paul
explains, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all
partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17 RSV). And again, as St. Paul
asks, “Is Christ divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:13). If God is one, how could
Christ’s very own Body be divided? Therefore, the Eucharist is the universal
principle that shapes the universal Church.
Second, the body of the universal
Church requires a head, found in the Episcopate. This is found both in the
Roman Pontiff and in the bishops over the particular churches: “The Bishop is a
visible source and foundation of the unity of the particular Church entrusted
to his pastoral ministry” (13). While Kasper is right in arguing that the
bishop necessarily makes decisions for his diocese, these decisions cannot be
made in a vacuum. “For each particular Church to be fully Church, that is, the
particular presence of the universal Church with all its essential elements,
and hence constituted after the model of
the universal Church, there must be present in it, as a proper element, the
supreme authority of the Church” (Ibid). The particular Church, therefore, must
be modeled after the universal Church. The particular does not exist separately
from the universal Church, but rather, in communion with her and the Pontiff,
the supreme authority over the universal Church. This is seen in the following:
“The ministry of the Successor of Peter as something interior to each particular Church is a necessary expression of
that fundamental mutual interiority
between universal Church and particular Church” (13). Thus, the Pope is not an
“extrinsic” principle or distant from the particular churches, making isolated
rules and laws from the Vatican; rather, he acts with the Bishop for the good
of each particular Church. This is how there can be a fundamental communion
between the universal and particular Church.
As such, the document rightly
proclaims concerning the universal Church, “It is not the result of the
communion of Churches, but, in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to
every individual particular Church” (9).
Kasper objected to this particular statement, thus prompting his own
interpretation of the communion of the Church. But, as we have shown in
Ratzinger’s theology, the universal Church guides the actions of the particular
churches, meaning that the individual churches must be submissive to the
guidance of the universal Church. In other words, Kasper’s proposal falls
through: it would be impossible for the bishops of a local church to “choose
responsibly” how they would like certain universal pronouncements to be carried
out in their diocese without the guiding hand of Holy Mother Church.
In our own time, we can see the
problems with the local Church wanting to make particular decisions regarding
universal principles with the recent discussion over celebrating the liturgy ad orientem. While the Vatican itself
has not explicitly asked for the liturgy to return to an ad orientem orientation, Cardinal Robert Sarah has asked local churches to return to a universal principle, a
principle for the liturgy that was in place until the aftermath of Vatican II.
Yet we have some bishops refusing
to celebrate the liturgy ad orientem¸
while others are in complete agreement
with the proposal. Ultimately, however, the universal Church is to be a
liturgical community. As Ratzinger explains in Principles of Catholic Theology, “The Church is not merely an
external society of beliefs; by her nature, she is a liturgical community; she
is most truly Church when she celebrates the Eucharist and makes present the
redemptive love of Jesus Christ” (p. 50). Thus, the communio of the Church finds its “source and summit” (Lumen gentium 11) in celebrating the
Eucharist. If the Church is truly communio,
then it will follow that she is also a liturgical community—a community that is
defined by its liturgical actions and its celebration of the Eucharist. Not
only is Christ at the center of the Church, but he is more importantly at the
center of her worship and defines her very action. This means that, in our very
worship, we ought to be centered on Christ by celebrating the liturgy ad orientem. All Catholics—the whole
Church—would be oriented toward Christ. It seems that this is one of the best
ways to show that the Body of Christ truly is universal and not divided.
To properly understand the Church
as communio, in the Holy Trinity, the
Eucharist, and the Episcopate, we need the mindset of Pius XII from the quote
in the beginning of this essay. The way we celebrate the liturgy, our devotion
to sacramentals, and our respect for the Church’s liturgical gifts all point to
communion with the Body of Christ. If particular churches choose to act in
their own way, especially in these liturgical and sacramental gifts, they risk
losing unity with the universal Church. For the universal Church is not merely
giving out rules and regulations for the sake of doing so, but rather, for the
sake of reverencing Christ’s own body. Therefore, it is fitting that we follow
the pronouncements of the universal Church, for the Church “does not exist in
order to keep us busy and to support herself
but in order to break free into eternal life in all of us” (Called to Communion, p. 147).
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