Interesting interpretation of Pope Benedict’s latest appointments to the College of Cardinals. Seems to me that the problem with the Roman Catholic church has always been it is more Roman than Catholic, so it should come as no surprise that PB XVI wants to keep it that way. But this article, obviously, doesn’t understand just how profound that observation, theologically, really is, and is whining more about geography than theology. Obviously, is is extremely irritating, to say the least, to the liberals in the Catholic Church who want to see it conform to the Western modernist theological agenda. These appointments will go a long way toward preventing that from happening.

Pope Benedict’s cardinals: more Roman, less ‘catholic’

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By David Gibson — ENInews/RNS

9 January (ENInews)–Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement on 6 January of 22 new cardinals shows that he is continuing a pattern of stacking the College of Cardinals with Europeans (mainly Italians) and with leaders of the Roman curia, the papal bureaucracy whose officials are often considered more conservative than prelates in dioceses around the world.

This trend goes against the push by Benedict’s predecessors, notably the late John Paul II, to “internationalize” the College of Cardinals and make it more representative of the global church, Religion News Service reports.

It also runs counter to the inexorable demographics of the church, which shows the number of Catholics growing in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, even as the faith barely treads water in North America and declines in Europe. The 22 churchmen will be installed at a Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on 18 February.

“This suggests an upside-down church,” Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for The Tablet, a Catholic weekly in London, said of the pope’s appointments. “It doesn’t reflect where the church is going.”

The numbers tell the story. Since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, his three batches of new cardinals have favored Europeans and those who work with him in Rome over bishops from other countries.

Eighteen of the 22 cardinals in this latest round of appointments are under the age of 80 and thus eligible to vote in the conclave, or gathering, that elects a pope. (The red hats given to the four octogenarians are the church equivalent of lifetime achievement awards.) Of those 18 new electors, seven are Italians, five others are from Europe, and a total of 10 are Vatican officials.

Just three of the new cardinals — from Brazil, Hong Kong and India — are from outside the West, and in the biggest surprise, none are from Africa, where the church is experiencing its greatest growth, followed by Asia. Half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics live in the Americas.

That means Italians will form the largest national block and account for one-quarter of the 126 cardinal-electors (several will age out this year), up from 16.5 percent in 2005. In addition, 35 percent of the cardinal-electors will come from the Roman curia — up from less than a quarter when Benedict was elected in 2005.

John Paul II, who was Polish and the first non-Italian pontiff in 450 years when he was elected in 1978, deliberately sought to internationalize the College of Cardinals and the Roman curia, though he also brought in a number of fellow Poles to help run his administration.

Why has Benedict largely reversed that trend? Vatican-watcher John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter noted that before he was elected pope, Ratzinger spent nearly 25 years working in Rome and his appointments are “perhaps a product of his comfort level with Italian ecclesial culture.”

The other major factor is that Benedict is at heart an Old World, old-fashioned Bavarian Catholic, and both he and the cardinals who elected him believe that Europe remains the birthplace of Catholic culture. In that view, Benedict represents the best — and perhaps last — chance to restore that culture and use it to evangelize the rest of the world.

But in light of this latest round of cardinal appointments, and given growing concerns about Benedict’s health — he turns 85 in April — this set of electors may well be the men who eventually choose Benedict’s successor. Their numbers suggest they may be just as likely to look to Europe once again rather than to the future church in the global South.

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Purgatory is a complete, and total, false doctrine, and a potentially damning error of faith. Join the Reformation!

Please read the transcript below the video very carefully and you will see the horrendous heresy and apostasy that is inherent in Rome’s doctrine of purgatory. This is very, very serious stuff, folks, and precisely why the Church of Rome and the Pope is, in deed, the very Antichrist at work to this day.

Here is the transcript of the video. Please read this carefully.

October 30, 2011. (Romereports.com) According to recent reports, there are roughly 1.18 billion Catholics worldwide. But, some consider the number to be even higher. The Catholic Church, here on earth is also know as the ‘Church Militant.’ But there are two other categories as well. The first is ‘Church Triumphant,’ which refers to those who died and went to heaven. The second, is ‘Church Expectant,’ which includes souls in the purgatory.

Fr. Marcello Stanzione
Author, ’365 giorni con le anime del Purgatorio’
“Souls suffering in the purgatory need our prayers. When these souls go to heaven, they will remember our prayers.”

According to Catholic doctrine, the purgatory, just like heaven or hell, is not a physical place, but rather a state of the soul. To go to heaven, sins have to be forgiven, to purify the soul.

Fr. Marcello Stanzione
Author, ’365 giorni con le anime del Purgatorio’
“Those souls in the purgatory are Christians who have died in the grace of God. But during their life on earth they weren’t atoned for their sins, therefore they can’t enter paradise, because only those with completely cleansed souls can enter.”

Italian priest Marcello Stanzione published a book, which translates to “365 days with the souls of the Purgatory.”It includes daily prayers from saints, popes and theologians that reflect on the souls of the purgatory.

Fr. Marcello Stanzione
Author, ’365 giorni con le anime del Purgatorio’
“For every day of the year I collected thoughts of saints such as St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Faustina Kowalska. Also reflections of popes, especially from their encyclicals. In addition there are also traditional Catholic reflections.”

So now this book paves the way, so that people can remember and pray for the souls of the purgatory, every day of the year.

And lest anyone get a bit too carried away with PB XVI, we need to remember that he is still very much Roman Catholic and reflects the false and potentially damning doctrine of this church body in these remarks, on a visit to a Marian shrine, and we recall why we must, with a heavy heart and deep sorrow, continue to assert: papam ipsum verum antichristum est.

Pope Benedict: address at Etzelsbach Marian Shrine

Friday evening Pope Benedict XVI lead a congregation of hundreds in the celebration Vespers at the Wallfahrtskapelle, or Pilgrimage Chapel of the Shrine, located in the small hamlet of Etzelsbach, outside the city of Erfurt. Here are his remarks:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Now I am able to fulfil my wish to visit Eichsfeld, and here in Etzelsbach to thank Mary in company with you. “Here in the beloved quiet vale”, as the pilgrims’ hymn says, “under the old lime trees”, Mary gives us security and new strength. During two godless dictatorships, which sought to deprive the people of their ancestral faith, the inhabitants of Eichsfeld were in no doubt that here in this shrine at Etzelsbach an open door and a place of inner peace was to be found. The special friendship with Mary that grew from all this, is what we seek to cultivate further, not least through this evening’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

When Christians of all times and places turn to Mary, they are acting on the spontaneous conviction that Jesus cannot refuse his mother what she asks; and they are relying on the unshakable trust that Mary is also our mother – a mother who has experienced the greatest of all sorrows, who feels all our griefs with us and ponders in a maternal way how to overcome them. How many people down the centuries have made pilgrimages to Mary, in order to find comfort and strength before the image of the Mother of Sorrows, as here at Etzelsbach!

Let us look upon her likeness: a woman of middle age, her eyelids heavy with much weeping, gazing pensively into the distance, as if meditating in her heart upon everything that had happened. On her knees rests the lifeless body of her son, she holds him gently and lovingly, like a precious gift. We see the marks of the crucifixion on his bare flesh. The left arm of the corpse is pointing straight down. Perhaps this sculpture of the Pietà, like so many others, was originally placed above an altar. The crucified Jesus would then be pointing with his outstretched arm to what was taking place on the altar, where the holy sacrifice that he had accomplished is made present in the Eucharist.

A particular feature of the holy image of Etzelsbach is the position of Our Lord’s body. In most representations of the Pietà, the dead Jesus is lying with his head facing left, so that the observer can see the wounded side of the Crucified Lord. Here in Etzelsbach, however, the wounded side is concealed, because the body is facing the other way. It seems to me that a deep meaning lies hidden in this representation, that only becomes apparent through silent contemplation: in the Etzelsbach image, the hearts of Jesus and his mother are turned to one another; they come close to each other. They exchange their love. We know that the heart is also the seat of the most tender affection as well as the most intimate compassion. In Mary’s heart there is room for the love that her divine Son wants to bestow upon the world.

Marian devotion focuses on contemplation of the relationship between the Mother and her divine Son. The faithful constantly discover new dimensions and qualities which this mystery can help to disclose for us, for example when the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is seen as a symbol of her deep and unreserved loving unity with Christ. It is not self-fulfilment that truly enables people to flourish, according to the model that modern life so often proposes to us, which can easily turn into a sophisticated form of selfishness. Rather it is an attitude of self-giving directed towards the heart of Mary and hence also towards the heart of the Redeemer.

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28), as we have just heard in the Scripture reading. With Mary, God has worked for good in everything, and he does not cease, through Mary, to cause good to spread further in the world. Looking down from the Cross, from the throne of grace and salvation, Jesus gave us his mother Mary to be our mother. At the moment of his self-offering for mankind, he makes Mary as it were the channel of the rivers of grace that flow from the Cross. At the foot of the Cross, Mary becomes our fellow traveller and protector on life’s journey. “By her motherly love she cares for her son’s sisters and brothers who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home” (Lumen Gentium, 62). Yes indeed, in life we pass through high-points and low-points, but Mary intercedes for us with her Son and conveys to us the strength of divine love.

Our trust in the powerful intercession of the Mother of God and our gratitude for the help we have repeatedly experienced impel us, as it were, to think beyond the needs of the moment. What does Mary actually want to say to us, when she rescues us from our plight? She wants to help us grasp the breadth and depth of our Christian vocation. With a mother’s tenderness, she wants to make us understand that our whole life should be a response to the love of our God, who is so rich in mercy. “Understand,” she seems to say to us, “that God, who is the source of all that is good and who never desires anything other than your true happiness, has the right to demand of you a life that yields unreservedly and joyfully to his will, striving at the same time that others may do likewise.” Where God is, there is a future. Indeed – when we allow God’s love to influence the whole of our lives, then heaven stands open. Then it is possible so to shape the present that it corresponds more and more to the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then the little things of everyday life acquire meaning, and great problems find solutions. Amen.

Here is a transcript of Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks at the Augustinian Cloister in Erfurt. Following a brief video. The church you see at the beginning of the video is the church at the cloister, where Luther took his monastic vows. He was ordained a priest at the Erfurt cathedral (if I may correct the pope), the room you see toward the end of the video is the “chapter room,” where the monks would gather regularly to review their order’s rules and attend to matters concerning their life together. Say what you want about this Pope, but he knows and understands Luther’s theology much better than most of the so-called “Lutherans” in the mainline/liberal Lutheran churches today. What I’ve always appreciated about Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is that he has never compromised Rome’s doctrinal position, and has invited serious conversation and dialogue based on clear confession, something that can rarely be said about the leaders of any of the large liberal member churches of the Lutheran World Federation. Whenever an invitation for dialogue based on honest confession is offered, it is an important opportunity to bear witness to Christ and His Gospel.

September 23, 2011. (Romereports.com) (-ONLY VIDEO-) Behind closed doors the pope met with representatives of Germany’s Evangelical Church. In a powerful speech the pope spoke about Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reform.  He encouraged the ecumenical dialogue to continue so both groups can strengthen their relationship even more.

Benedict XVI recalled the question once asked by Martin Luther, which gave rise to Lutheranism: “what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God.?” The pope went on to say,  that this question is still relevant. It’s a question, he said, that each person should ask themselves.

FULL SPEECH:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As I begin to speak, I would like first of all to thank you for this opportunity to come together with you. I am particularly grateful to Pastor Schneider for greeting me and welcoming me into your midst with his kind words. At the same time I want to express my thanks for the particularly gracious gesture that our meeting can be held in this historic location.

As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting representatives of Council of the Lutheran Church of Germany here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. This is where Luther studied theology. This is where he was ordained a priest in 1507. Against his father’s wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. On this path, he was not simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey. “How do I receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For him theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God.

“How do I receive the grace of God?” The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make an impression on me. For who is actually concerned about this today – even among Christians? What does the question of God mean in our lives? In our preaching? Most people today, even Christians, set out from the presupposition that God is not fundamentally interested in our sins and virtues. He knows that we are all mere flesh. Insofar as people today believe in an afterlife and a divine judgement at all, nearly everyone presumes for all practical purposes that God is bound to be magnanimous and that ultimately he mercifully overlooks our small failings. But are they really so small, our failings? Is not the world laid waste through the corruption of the great, but also of the small, who think only of their own advantage? Is it not laid waste through the power of drugs, which thrives on the one hand on greed and avarice, and on the other hand on the craving for pleasure of those who become addicted? Is the world not threatened by the growing readiness to use violence, frequently masking itself with claims to religious motivation? Could hunger and poverty so devastate parts of the world if love for God and godly love of neighbour – of his creatures, of men and women – were more alive in us? I could go on. No, evil is no small matter. Were we truly to place God at the centre of our lives, it could not be so powerful. The question: what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God? – this burning question of Martin Luther must once more, doubtless in a new form, become our question too. In my view, this is the first summons we should attend to in our encounter with Martin Luther.

Another important point: God, the one God, creator of heaven and earth, is no mere philosophical hypothesis regarding the origins of the universe. This God has a face, and he has spoken to us. He became one of us in the man Jesus Christ – who is both true God and true man. Luther’s thinking, his whole spirituality, was thoroughly Christocentric: “What promotes Christ’s cause” was for Luther the decisive hermeneutical criterion for the exegesis of sacred Scripture. This presupposes, however, that Christ is at the heart of our spirituality and that love for him, living in communion with him, is what guides our life.

Now perhaps you will say: all well and good, but what has this to do with our ecumenical situation? Could this just be an attempt to talk our way past the urgent problems that are still waiting for practical progress, for concrete results? I would respond by saying that the first and most important thing for ecumenism is that we keep in view just how much we have in common, not losing sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task. It was the error of the Reformation period that for the most part we could only see what divided us and we failed to grasp existentially what we have in common in terms of the great deposit of sacred Scripture and the early Christian creeds. The great ecumenical step forward of recent decades is that we have become aware of all this common ground and that we acknowledge it as we pray and sing together, as we make our joint commitment to the Christian ethos in our dealings with the world, as we bear common witness to the God of Jesus Christ in this world as our undying foundation.

The risk of losing this, sadly, is not unreal. I would like to make two points here. The geography of Christianity has changed dramatically in recent times, and is in the process of changing further. Faced with a new form of Christianity, which is spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism, sometimes in frightening ways, the mainstream Christian denominations often seem at a loss. This is a form of Christianity with little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability. This worldwide phenomenon poses a question to us all: what is this new form of Christianity saying to us, for better and for worse? In any event, it raises afresh the question about what has enduring validity and what can or must be changed – the question of our fundamental faith choice.

The second challenge to worldwide Christianity of which I wish to speak is more profound and in our country more controversial: the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith. God is increasingly being driven out of our society, and the history of revelation that Scripture recounts to us seems locked into an ever more remote past. Are we to yield to the pressure of secularization, and become modern by watering down the faith? Naturally faith today has to be thought out afresh, and above all lived afresh, so that it is suited to the present day. Yet it is not by watering the faith down, but by living it today in its fullness that we achieve this. This is a key ecumenical task. Moreover, we should help one another to develop a deeper and more lively faith. It is not strategy that saves us and saves Christianity, but faith – thought out and lived afresh; through such faith, Christ enters this world of ours, and with him, the living God. As the martyrs of the Nazi era brought us together and prompted the first great ecumenical opening, so today, faith that is lived from deep within amid a secularized world is the most powerful ecumenical force that brings us together, guiding us towards unity in the one Lord.

A very interesting article in National Catholic Reporter and, on the whole, balanced and fair. Link here.

Snippet from the article:

Back in 1966, a young German Catholic theologian penned a commentary on the final session of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), expressing some fairly strong reservations about what he saw as the overly optimistic and “French” tone of its concluding document, Gaudium et Spes, the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” The document’s lofty humanism, this theologian charged, “Prompts the question of why, exactly, the reasonable and perfectly free human being described in the first articles was suddenly burdened with the story of Christ.” He worried that concepts such as “People of God” and “the world” were given an uncritically positive spin, reflecting naiveté about the corrupting effects of sin. Along the way, this writer offered an arresting aside. Gaudium et Spes, he opined, breathes the air of Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit, but not enough of Martin Luther, the German father of the Protestant Reformation. Saying so required a certain ecumenical chutzpah, given that Pope Leo X’s 1520 condemnation of Luther’s ideas as “heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears and seductive of simple minds, and against Catholic truth” remained on the books. That’s an irony worth recalling, given that the young theologian in question is today Pope Benedict XVI, and that in two weeks he’ll be heading back to the Land of Luther for his first official state visit.

I’m a bit late to this party, but last Friday there was a wonderful editorial in the Wall Street Journal, written by that Lutheran maven of media, Mollie Ziegler-Hemingway. I thought it pretty much drove the nails into the coffin and put away the media nonsense over the non-story that Michelle Bachmann used to belong to a Lutheran congregation that is part of a church body that is Lutheran and actually teaches what Lutherans have always taught about the power and authority of the papacy. And, yes, yours truly was quoted in the article, but in spite of that it is a very fine piece of writing, don’t you think?

Here’s a bit of the article, with the rest available via the read more link at the bottom.

American political reporters aren’t known for their vocal support of Roman Catholic teachings. But when they discovered recently that Minnesota Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was once a Lutheran, they began defending the papacy as if they were the Vatican’s own Swiss Guard. They asked with concern, could Catholics even vote for a former Lutheran?

Ms. Bachmann’s former church, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, hasn’t followed the mainline Protestant church practice of regularly revising its doctrines. The Lutheran confessions, or statements of faith, are found in the Book of Concord, first published in 1580. They explain the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone. Accordingly, they don’t believe the pope’s authority comes from God.This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the Reformation, but it hit the press hard.

“Michele Bachmann leaves church accused of anti-Catholic bias,” the Los Angeles Times reported. The Atlantic Monthly: “Michele Bachmann’s Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist.” From the Washington Post, we learned that the Lutheran Confessions use “unfortunate wording.” To be sure, the “antichrist” rhetoric is strong. Found in Martin Luther’s Smalcald Articles, such language is part of a tradition that reaches back into the 10th century.

As a National Council of Churches Committee has written, “Not only dissidents and heretics but even saints had called the bishop of Rome the ‘antichrist’ when they wished to castigate his abuse of power. During the Reformation, Catholic statements against Lutheran beliefs were similarly strong. The Council of Trent’s canons declared that anyone who believed in justification by faith alone was to be “anathema,” or cut off from the church. These words shock modern ears. But in the Reformation era “there was a much greater degree of rough and tumble in the way Christians addressed issues and those with whom they disagreed,” explained the Rev. Paul McCain, publisher of a 2005 reader’s edition of the Book of Concord.

You may have noticed numerous news reports about the beatification of Pope John Paul II. What are we Lutherans to make of this? The short answer is simply: we do not recognize, nor can we accept, any of the theology or practice surrounding the Roman Catholic Church’s “cult of the saints” as it is known in our Lutheran Confessions.

Here is what the Augsburg Confession, Art. 21 has to say about the Roman system of saints:

The memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling, as the Emperor may follow the example of David in making war to drive away the Turk from his country. 2] For both are kings. But the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor. 3] He is to be prayed to, and has promised that He will hear our prayer; and this worship He approves above all, to wit, that in all afflictions He be called upon, 1 John 2:1: 4] If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, etc.

If you would like to read what we Lutherans believe, teach and confess about this issue, please read the following articles from the Book of Concord: The Apology [Defense] of the Augsburg Confession, Article 21; and The Smalcald Articles, Invocation of the Saints.

The practice of beatification is premised on the fact that we can never know, for a certainty, in this life whether or not a person was ever actually saved by God’s grace. This “monster of uncertainty” plagues both the Roman communion and, ironically, is the basis for many of the “decisions for Christ” that we witness among Evangelicals, who lack the concrete assurance of God’s grace, because they simply do not trust and believe that the objective promises of the Gospel are actually given, conferred, bestowed [use whatever word you want] on the individual Christian. We know that God does this through His Holy Word and Sacraments.

It is good for us to understand what “beatification” means in the Roman communion. Here is how the Vatican explains it, on their web site:

Throughout her history, the Church has always celebrated holiness as an expression of the “wonderful things” the Lord works in the life of his People. In response to sensibilities and historical contexts, the Church has paid special attention to the liturgical forms and procedures in which praise to the Most High is expressed and new life given to the faith and piety of the faithful.

These procedures and the significant wealth of such rites have also been carefully studied by the Church in light of the most recent ecclesial knowledge for a more incisive understanding and a more cogent effect of the very nature of holiness, which the Church celebrates with the rites of Beatification and Canonization.

To this end, the Holy Father Benedict XVI has introduced important new procedures for Beatifications.

Read more…

Pope Benedict XVI, in today’s general audience, during his catechesis presentation, praises the nemesis of the Lutheran Reformation after the death of Luther, Robert Bellarmine. It was against Bellarmine that Martin Chemnitz and Johann Gerhard directed much of their work in systematic theology.

This is just a reminder that some things have not changed.

If you, like me, are curious about the actual process of beatification and what is involved in the ritual, here is an interesting story.

I rarely read a truly honest and forthcoming assessment of what the Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Justification actually means and what it actually accomplished and achieved. The liberal Lutheran elements continue to point to the JDDJ as a “great breakthrough” when in fact, what they should say is that the JDDJ was a “great betrayal” of the Lutheran Reformation and the very Gospel itself. Here, in this fascinating blog post I found today at the First Things blog, a Roman Catholic priest carefully articulates why the JDDJ was not, in fact, any sort of reconciliation between Rome and Wittenberg. The most thorough and complete response to the JDDJ that dealt very honestly with its theological weaknesses and errors, came from The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. You can read all about that here, in this post. I put this post at the bottom of this post, so you would have this all together.

“You are heretics, but it might not be your fault.” In decades and centuries past, that posture of exculpatory condescension often represented the most we could achieve in ecumenical reconciliation. We may not be able to agree on anything else, but we might concede that Christians today are not fully responsible for the divisions of the sixteenth century.

The 1999 “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” issued by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church—both later joined by the Methodist World Council—took us a step beyond that minimal exculpation. The Declaration describes itself as achieving “a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification” and a demonstration “that the remaining differences . . . are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations.” Note the two principal achievements: a consensus, and the obviation of the Reformation-era condemnations.

I emphasize these two because the Catholic Church immediately in 1999 saw fit to qualify the Declaration’s self-understanding: The Church, represented by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, explained consensus as “a high degree of agreement,” but not the elimination of all divergences. The Church also reduced the obviation of the condemnations to a virtual tautology, saying that the condemnations no longer apply to matters of agreement, but they may yet “touch” points of divergence, especially the Lutheran formula simul iustus et peccator. If some Lutherans felt betrayed by the Church’s response to the Declaration, they may be forgiven.

But I do not want to engage in the treacherous ecumenism of those who denounce their own communions for the sake of dialogical agreement. The Church’s partial retraction is on its face true: We are not in full agreement, and disagreements over even tertiary elements of the doctrine of justification are at least potentially divisive.

It is said that no matter how many ecumenical documents we produce, if we lay them end to end, still they will never reach a conclusion, and the Catholic Church might seem to have confirmed this claim, but I’m optimistic: I think there is a way through the impasse—a way that does not require either communion to reject the virtues of its tradition. What we have here may be “a failure to communicate,” but it’s a failure that can be remedied.

The Declaration, perhaps succumbing to ecumenical dialogue’s characteristic vice of self-congratulation, credits its success to “our common way of listening to the word of God in Scripture,” and claims that such common listening led to new insights and developments that made the Declaration possible.

Maybe, but the reverse is equally plausible: that new insights and developments in our communions and among global cultures have led to a common appreciation for the meaning and import of Scripture, and therefore led also to the Declaration. Recent advances in hermeneutics, especially new insights into the way history and community shape our cognitive frameworks, helped both Lutherans and Catholics to approach their creedal and confessional trajectories with greater circumspection.

To put it crudely: The advent of postmodernism made this Declaration possible. Like a predator that consumes its own young, modernism—with its endless criticism upon criticism—has been cannibalizing the sophomoric rationalism of its own adherents.

In the English translation of his book on Christology, Cardinal Walter Kasper described historical-criticism, left to itself, as “an endless screw”—I imagine he was unaware of the double entendre in English—a endless screw that keeps threading deeper without changing anything, until the drillers recognize their futility. In just this way have many rationalists despaired of the Enlightenment. The decline of the modernist hegemony in academic and popular culture reduced the degree to which modernism threatened the Catholic Church, still somewhat shy about its pre-modern roots, and facilitated the Second Vatican Council’s new esteem for other expressions of the Christian faith.

At the same time, postmodern awareness of the limitations of reason have quieted the more virulent expressions of Lutheranism, born in a facile eagerness to overturn developed authority and discipline, and reaching pubescent frenzy in the wildly rationalistic biblical criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Christians of many communions manifest new interest in the pre-modern origins of the Christian faith, and we find new common ground in the tempered rationalism of the postmodern era. Postmodernism has sparked a new romance between estranged partners.

I’ve been painting with a very broad brush, so permit me to give two specific examples. One: In its response, the Catholic Church complained that the Declaration too easily conceded to the doctrine of justification a special status as the criterion of orthodoxy, whereas a genuinely Catholic approach requires integration of the doctrine of justification with the entire regula fidei—with Christology, Trinitarian theology, ecclesiology, and sacramental practice, among others.

While such a response served a purpose—it precluded certain misunderstandings within the Catholic communion—it missed the theological potential of the Declaration, which clearly sees all the truths of the faith as internally related to each other. All the divine mysteries implicitly embed each other—in fact, some representatives of the Eastern Churches rather frequently insist that all the faults of the Latin Church are easily attributable to the snowball effect of some small but ancient error in, say, Trinitarian theology.

If we Catholics recognize the circumincession of all the truths of faith, so that each one contains all the rest, we should warmly welcome those Lutherans who insist on the doctrine of justification as a synecdoche of the Gospel—for so it is, and to the extent we can reach agreement in matters of justification, we will also have reached agreement on the remainder of Christian doctrine. Thus an advance in epistemology—a recognition of the circumincession of divine truths—renders unnecessary any serious dispute about the doctrine of justification as the criterion for Christian teaching and practice.

Two: The Declaration takes up the question of human powerlessness, passivity, and cooperation in relation to justification, and observes that Catholics typically speak of graced co-operation with God’s grace, while Lutherans insist on human passivity and inability to merit justification. The Declaration invites speculation as to how Catholic and Lutheran anthropologies need not strictly contradict each other.

What Lutherans call “full personal involvement” in faith may perhaps embed what Catholics identify as active co-operation with grace—co-operation which is itself constituted by grace. When Catholics acknowledge that apart from grace, humans cannot move even ad iustitiam, which may be translated “toward justification,” they may concede that man, considered as an independent agent, is necessarily passive with respect to justification. These are not decisively reconciled teachings, but they may yet be reconcilable if we allow ourselves to think in terms of multiple layers of causality and effect. Once again, an allowance for nonparallel linguistic and philosophical frameworks may open up possibilities foreclosed by syllogistic, univocal readings of our theological formulae.

Those were my two examples, in evidence that the Declaration really did achieve a creditable degree of mutual recognition and agreement, aided by postmodern advances in epistemology. And therein lies the threat: If a new awareness of differentiated epistemologies makes it possible for us to accommodate serious differences between communions, that same awareness seems to invite all manner of dissent and relativism, in the name of postmodernism.

Because divisions internal to our communions are now as threatening as divisions between our communions, we dare not too glibly admit the legitimacy of other theological approaches. Such admissions may easily be exploited by relativists in a way that would further fragment our communions. I suspect that just such a fear lies behind many of the cautionary notes of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which does not want an accommodation of Lutheran doctrine to be invoked to justify a tidal wave of dissent within the Catholic Church. Yet, I think the skeleton of a genuine reconciliation has been assembled.

It remains to put flesh on that skeleton—to elaborate the implications of our “consensus” on the doctrine of justification for other elements of Christian faith and practice. I propose to you that the next logical step from justification is toward the atonement, a logical link between justification and the remaining elements of soteriology.

We share a common plight as Christians in a carelessly Pelagian world, where religion is routinely reduced to morality. Those of a secular mindset speak of the evolutionary utility of religion in taming man’s bestial appetites; those of a moralist bent telescope the Christian faith into the orthopraxis of social justice or sex. We desperately need to be reminded of the priority of grace offered through the Lord’s death and resurrection, and I hope that to cast ancient Christian doctrine of the atonement into contemporary and especially phenomenological terms may yet fuel just such a new evangelization.

Phenomenological considerations have shown potential to translate elements of pre-modern Christianity—such as metaphysical or natural law theory—into effective terms. In the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul’s Wednesday catecheses, from which what is now called the “Theology of the Body” emerged, achieved just such a translation. Our people and even our clergy might have much to gain from exploring our human experience of the proclamation of the Lord’s atoning death.

From my own stance as a Roman Catholic, I hope that ecumenical consensus on justification may lead to articulate agreement concerning the atonement, and hence also the priesthood and sacrifice of Christ, and thus at last to what for Catholics is the Holy Grail of ecumenism—literally, the Holy Grail, the Eucharist—the fullest and most visible expression of the life and unity of the Church. Cardinal Walter Kasper, speaking on Christian unity, recently remarked that “our goal must be full communion within the communion of communions that is the Church.”

This requires shared Eucharist. May God bring to speedy fruition the good work he has begun in the Joint Declaration.

Rev. David Poecking is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. “The Skeleton of Genuine Reconciliation” was given as one of three papers delivered at a retrospective observance of the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification sponsored by Bishop Kurt Kusserow of the Lutheran Synod of Southwestern Pennsylvania and Bishop Lawrence Brandt of the Catholic Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, held yesterday (Reformation Sunday). The Joint Declaration can be found here.

Continue reading for a thorough summary of the confessional Lutheran response to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.

Read more…

I ran across this link to a fascinating interview with the head of the Vatican’s “Department of Justice” [I'm using a term more easily understandable]. I think you will find this interview very interesting.

“A devotion written by Professor A.C. Piepkorn of St Louis* is an especially disturbing indicator of the dangers of the ‘High Church’ tendency. It is entitled ‘Blessed Art Thou Among Women’**, and is an attempt to set forth the true Lutheran position on Mary in opposition to the extremes of Roman Catholic cult of Mary (Marienkult) on the one hand and modern Protestantism’s ‘excessive downgrading of the Mother of God’ (Piepkorn’s words) on the other. This is indeed a worthy task, and the three Marian festivals set down in the old Lutheran church calendar, which are simultaneously Christological celebrations, provide ample opportunity to do this. But in light of these celebrations we must note that the position taken on Mary will always be a reliable indicator of the presence of a true or false understanding of the Gospel. In modern Protestantism the Nestorian denial of the doctrine of the Theotokos reveals that this position, even if it bears the name ‘Lutheran’, no longer understands the doctrine of the person of the God-man. On the other hand, the confession that Mary is indeed the Theotokos isn’t yet solid evidence of a true understanding of Christ – for it can be combined with the veneration of Mary, which is always a sin against the 1st Commandment and a challenge to the unique mediatorship of Christ. The cult of Mary (which also took root and grew among the Nestorians), along with the Marian doctrines which have grown from it, is most definitely to be rejected as being in contradiction to the Gospel***. Piepkorn, at the beginning of his devotion, mentions the Roman Catholic excesses of the cult of Mary, which as they developed clearly began to parallel the Christological doctrines until finally arriving at the doctrine of Mary as the mediatrix of all graces and the co-redemptrix (and also we mention the cult of Mary’s heart.) These things not only perplex some pious Catholics, but even Rome looks askance at them!**** But this is all the necessary outworking of the cult of Mary in the ancient and medieval church, which many people regard as harmless. Indeed, the poetic, beautiful and highly religious spirit of the simple Marian piety of the past was the road to Christ for many who came out of paganism, just as, for example, Arianism was the road to the orthodox Christian faith for the Germanic peoples; but this does not justify the cult of Mary, which is an aberration of the Christian faith. Our Lord himself rightly limited the veneration of Mary, which was beginning already in his time, when he responded to the woman in the crowd who blessed his mother with the words, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:27-28, cf. 8:21 & 2:19).”

From Hermann Sasse, Liturgy and Confession: A Brotherly Warning Against the High Church Danger, first published in Lutherische Blaetter, Christmas 1959.

* Arthur Carl Piepkorn (1907-1973), a scholar and theologian of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, sometime professor of historical theology at the Concordia, St Louis seminary, translator of some of the Lutheran confessional documents for the Tappert English edition of the Book of Concord, and an official participant in the early rounds of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue in the US. Piepkorn was a man of prodigious learning who served as a mentor to a number of LC-MS pastors who later styled themselves ‘Evangelical Catholics’, some of whom would convert to Roman Catholicism, notably Richard John Neuhaus.

** This devotion is available in the compilation of Piepkorn’s essays, ‘The Church, Selected Essays By Arthur Carl Piepkorn’, edited by Plekon and Weicher and available from the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau.

*** Why, in Sasse’s opinion, is Mariology and Marian piety in contradiction to the Gospel? Elsewhere, Sasse links the Marian doctrines and piety directly with synergism, the view that man co-operates with God’s grace in obtaining salvation. Sasse believed that the Roman and Orthodox churches, along with some Anglicans, held Mary up as a model of such co-operation.

**** It is difficult to know exactly what Sasse means here, since it would seem that Rome has seldom officially sought to quell the excesses of Marian devotion; perhaps he is thinking of private conversations with Roman prelates or theologians. Only five years after Sasse wrote this, Rome officially acknowledged the place of Mary as Mediatrix of graces in Catholic devotion:

“This motherhood of Mary in the order of grace continues uninterruptedly from the consent which she loyally gave at the Annunciation and which she sustained without wavering beneath the cross, until the eternal fulfillment of all the elect. Taken up to heaven she did not lay aside this saving office but by her manifold intercession continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation. By her maternal charity, she cares for the brethren of her Son, who still journey on earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home. Therefore the Blessed Virgin is invoked in the Church under the titles of Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix.” [Lumen Gentium (Nov 21, 1964), Ch 8, paras 61 & 62].

In this statement of Vatican II, one can clearly see the undertones of synergism that accompany the cult of Mary throughout history and which Sasse criticised elsewhere.

Every once in a while, when I read Lutherans gushing on about how wonderful it is to have a “Lutheran” Pope, because, Pope Benedict XVI is unquestionably the most well informed Pope since the Reformation when it comes to Lutheranism, and dare I say it, the most “Lutheran sounding” at many points, and at many times. This I do not deny. When what he says is true, I appreciate it. And because it is true, I can not disagree. Nobody in their right mind can. One does not have to adopt the posture of rejecting, out of hand, every word out of a Pope’s mouth, to maintain the Lutheran assertion that the Papacy is truly the office of Antichrist in the Church. That I affirm as well. Read about that point here.

And as a sobering reminder that PBXVI is very much the Roman Catholic Pontiff, one need only point out this prayer to Mary he offered in Fatima recently. I’ve heard Lutherans, who should know much better, sputtering on about the possibility of prayers to Mary and other such utter nonsense. Here then is the evidence, in case anyone needed it. Source: The Vatican.

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF POPE BENEDICT XVI
TO PORTUGAL ON THE OCCASION OF THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE BEATIFICATION OF JACINTA AND FRANCISCO,
YOUNG SHEPHERDS OF FÁTIMA

ACT OF ENTRUSTMENT AND CONSECRATION
OF PRIESTS TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY

PRAYER OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Church of the Most Holy Trinity – Fátima
Wednesday, 12 May 2010

Immaculate Mother,
in this place of grace,
called together by the love of your Son Jesus
the Eternal High Priest, we,
sons in the Son and his priests,
consecrate ourselves to your maternal Heart,
in order to carry out faithfully the Father’s Will.

We are mindful that, without Jesus,
we can do nothing good (cf. Jn 15:5)
and that only through him, with him and in him,
will we be instruments of salvation
for the world.

Bride of the Holy Spirit,
obtain for us the inestimable gift
of transformation in Christ.
Through the same power of the Spirit that
overshadowed you,
making you the Mother of the Saviour,
help us to bring Christ your Son
to birth in ourselves too.
May the Church
be thus renewed by priests who are holy,
priests transfigured by the grace of him
who makes all things new.

Mother of Mercy,
it was your Son Jesus who called us
to become like him:
light of the world and salt of the earth
(cf. Mt 5:13-14).

Help us,
through your powerful intercession,
never to fall short of this sublime vocation,
nor to give way to our selfishness,
to the allurements of the world
and to the wiles of the Evil One.

Preserve us with your purity,
guard us with your humility
and enfold us with your maternal love
that is reflected in so many souls
consecrated to you,
who have become for us
true spiritual mothers.

Mother of the Church,
we priests want to be pastors
who do not feed themselves
but rather give themselves to God for their brethren,
finding their happiness in this.
Not only with words, but with our lives,
we want to repeat humbly,
day after day,
Our “here I am”.

Guided by you,
we want to be Apostles
of Divine Mercy,
glad to celebrate every day
the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar
and to offer to those who request it
the sacrament of Reconciliation.

Advocate and Mediatrix of grace,
you who are fully immersed
in the one universal mediation of Christ,
invoke upon us, from God,
a heart completely renewed
that loves God with all its strength
and serves mankind as you did.

Repeat to the Lord
your efficacious word:
“They have no wine” (Jn 2:3),
so that the Father and the Son will send upon us
a new outpouring of
the Holy Spirit.
Full of wonder and gratitude
at your continuing presence in our midst,
in the name of all priests
I too want to cry out:
“Why is this granted me,
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Lk 1:43).

Our Mother for all time,
do not tire of “visiting us”,
consoling us, sustaining us.
Come to our aid
and deliver us from every danger
that threatens us.
With this act of entrustment and consecration,
we wish to welcome you
more deeply, more radically,
for ever and totally
into our human and priestly lives.

Let your presence cause new blooms to burst forth
in the desert of our loneliness,
let it cause the sun to shine on our darkness,
let it restore calm after the tempest,
so that all mankind shall see the salvation
of the Lord,
who has the name and the face of Jesus,
who is reflected in our hearts,
for ever united to yours!

Amen!

© Copyright 2010 – Libreria Editrice Vaticana

What to make of the horrible mess that continues to play out across the mass media? As I listen to reactions and read responses there is one response that I find particular and deeply troubling: attacking the liberal media, secularists, modernists, rationalists and any and all who are expressing outrage at the growing reports of the abuse of children across Roman Catholic institutions. I have read posts that are damning all such reactions as no more than an ongoing plot by anti-Christian forces to tear down the Church by going after the largest visible target available: the Pope in Rome and the Church He leads.

Now, is this happening? Of course it is! Are those opposed to Christianity using this as an occasion to attack the Christian Faith itself? Of course they are. Are they being unfair? Yes, of course. All the more reason not to give these people the very ammunition they are using to shoot the Church with!

The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church bears a large part of the blame for the media attacks. Through their systematic failure to deal adequately with the abuse of children and others in Roman Catholic institutions and parishes, and by offering “golden parachutes” to those who most directly covered up and denied justice for criminal activities, (I’m talking here about Bernard Law, for example), the Roman Catholic Church made itself a very easy target and is now paying the price for the mishandling of these cases. And let me be very quick to say that The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has learned through hard and bitter experiences of our own not to pass men along who engage in these kinds of behavior.

Here’s the point: It is precisely the wrong response to go on the attack against the media. The only response that should be made is to express total and complete outrage and complete and very public remorse for the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests. Period. And keep saying it. Over and over, ad naseum. Back the words up with actions and provide the proof of action. An absolute zero tolerance policy on these behaviors must be adopted everywhere and applied every time. The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church does not “get it” and continues to shoot itself in the foot with its reactions. For example, I’ve read Roman bishops comparing Benedict to Christ, unjustly being tormented, sharing in the sufferings of Christ, etc. The only message everyone, from the Pope on down to every parish priest should be sending is this: There has been across the Roman Catholic Church a widespread failure to deal with these situations, quickly and justly. The Church has preferred to harbor and protect child abusers rather than throw them out of office and turn them over to the local police for their crimes. Behind this is a good deal of false doctrine concerning the office of the priest, including the supposed “indelible mark” of ordination, and imposed celibacy on the clergy.

Here are some perceptive remarks I read elsewhere expressing concern about an impassioned Lutheran coming to Pope Benedict’s defense. These remarks were, and are, spot-on.

Who would have possibly imagined that the current crisis of systemic child rape and the responsive horror expressed by so many could be spun into yet another victim-status tome regarding the insular, malevolent and hyperbolic Modernist and Liberal forces. Meanwhile for 50 yrs we had the systemic rape of children in our hallowed institutions, a crime against humanity that should never been allowed to be perpetrated to even a fraction of the extent that it did. Does the NYT’s have anti-religion flavor? Sure. Is it hyperbolic? Yes, sometimes. But is also true that this insidious modernist religion-hating main-stream press (as well as plaintiff’s lawyers), led to less children being raped. Meanwhile the Church was dragged along and is still being dragged along. I hear the author’s frustration. But maybe it’s time to put down the sword, and take a step back for some serious self-reflection that just maybe this time there is more going on here. Or would such an honest accounting be considered too weak and too relativist……?

And, please take special note of this excellent summary of Peggy Noonan’s comments on this incident. Here’s a portion of Get Religion‘s coverage of Noonan’s remarks:

Noonan is the author of “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father,” a tribute to the late pope that was as much a journal of her emotional responses to his papacy as a volume about his remarkable life. At one point, Noonan states simply, “”John Paul walked into my life and served, unknowingly, as my spiritual father. He had led me like a light in the dark. …”

With that in mind, it is best to look at the end of her column first — before we get to the material that I think is so relevant to journalists and other GetReligion readers who are trying to figure out a way to aim criticisms (positive and negative) at the Vatican and the New York Times at the same time. What are we to make of the papacy during these decades — repeat decades — of scandal in which so many bishops actively hid priests who abused young children and many, many teen-agers (the vast majority of the latter males)?

Some blame the scandals on Pope Benedict XVI. But Joseph Ratzinger is the man who, weeks before his accession to the papacy five years ago, spoke blisteringly on Good Friday of the “filth” in the church. … The most reliable commentary on Pope Benedict’s role in the scandals came from John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, who argues that once Benedict came to fully understand the scope of the crisis, in 2003, he made the church’s first real progress toward coming to grips with it.

As for his predecessor, John Paul the Great, about whom I wrote an admiring book which recounts some of the scandals — I spent a grim 2003 going through the depositions of Massachusetts clergy — one fact seems to me pre-eminent. For Pope John Paul II, the scandals would have been unimaginable — literally not imaginable. He had come of age in an era and place (Poland in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s) of heroic priests. They were great men; they suffered. He had seen how the Nazis and later the communists had attempted to undermine the church and tear people away from it, sometimes through slander. They did this because the great force arrayed against them was the Catholic Church. John Paul, his mind, psyche and soul having been forged in that world, might well have seen the church’s recent accusers as spreaders of slander. Because priests don’t act like that, it’s not imaginable. And he’d seen it before, only now it wasn’t Nazism or communism attempting to kill the church with lies, but modernity and its soulless media.

Only they weren’t lies.

Before readers get to that part of the column, Noonan has already written a statement that could only have been made by someone who genuinely loves journalism and its valid, protected role in public life — public life wherever free speech, freedom of the press and religious liberty truly coexist in painful, but necessary, tension.

Catholic leaders, she argues, are in attack mode at the moment because they believe that journalists are in attack mode. Many Catholics are simply blaming the current crisis on media bias.

Now, read very closely. This next passage contains a statement that I believe simply must be made. To make sure that readers get it, Noonan says it twice.

… (T)his is not true, or to the degree it is true, it is irrelevant. All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press — the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe — has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn’t be saying j’accuse but thank you.

I hope that the blog’s many Catholic readers are still reading.

Noonan isn’t done yet. She argues that many mainstream journalists were actually reluctant to cover this story. Why spend years digging in this filth (the pope’s word), only to have thousands of Catholics accuse your paper of bias — no matter how accurate the coverage — and respond with protests or boycotts or both?

But, but ….

Without this pressure — without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts — the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer. …

An irony: Non-Catholic members of the media were, in my observation, the least likely to want to go after the story, because they didn’t want to look like they were Catholic-bashing. An irony within the irony: some journalists didn’t think to go after the story because they really didn’t much like the Catholic Church. Because of this bias, they didn’t see the story as a story. They thought this was how the church always operated. It didn’t register with them that it was a scandal. They didn’t know it was news.

It was the Boston Globe that broke the dam, winning a justly deserved Pulitzer for public service.

Yes, that needed to be said.

It’s one thing to criticize some of the current coverage — which I think deserves criticism. It’s something else altogether to ignore the heroic efforts that many journalists have made, for whatever motives, to uncover the filth (there’s that word again) in the offices of far too many shepherds.

Cardinal asks dialogue partners if an ecumenical catechism might work

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — A Vatican official has floated the idea of a shared “ecumenical catechism” as one of the potential fruits of 40 years of dialogue among Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and members of the Reformed churches.

“We have affirmed our common foundation in Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity as expressed in our common creed and in the doctrine of the first ecumenical councils,” Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, told representatives of the churches.

Opening a three-day symposium at the Vatican to brainstorm on the future of ecumenism, Cardinal Kasper said it is essential “to keep alive the memory of our achievements” in dialogue, educate the faithful about how much has been accomplished and prepare a new generation to carry on the work.

He said the members of his council “proposed an ecumenical catechism that would be written in consultation with our partners,” but “we do not yet have any idea how such a catechism could be structured and written.”

One thing for sure, he said, is that there is a need for “an ecumenism of basics that identifies, reinforces and deepens the common foundation” of faith in Christ and belief in the tenets of the creed. The churches may hold those positions officially, but if their members do not hold firmly to the basics of Christian faith, the dialogue cannot move forward, the cardinal said.

Cardinal Kasper, a theologian who will be 77 in March and has led the council for nine years, also said that ecumenical dialogue “is perhaps in danger of becoming a matter for specialists and thus of moving away from the grassroots.”

He called for “a people-centered ecumenism” that would support and give new energy to the theological dialogues.

The symposium was a follow-up to the publication in October of “Harvesting the Fruits,” a book complied by Cardinal Kasper and his staff summarizing the results of 40 years of official Catholic dialogue with the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

As for questions that still must be tackled in order for Christians to reach full unity and be able to share the Eucharist, the cardinal identified two basic areas: a common understanding of the church and its structure; and a common approach to applying the Gospel to modern social and moral concerns without falling into relativism.

Ethical issues, such as homosexuality and women’s equality, not only divide churches, he said, they raise more fundamental questions for modern and post-modern society, such as, “What is man, and what does it mean to be a man or woman in God’s plan?”

In the area of church structure and ministry, he said, the dialogues have seen progress toward a common agreement on the sacramental nature of ordination and on apostolic succession in the ministry of bishops, and have taken initial steps toward discussing the primacy of the bishop of Rome, the pope.

But on a more basic level, the dialogues must get into “not only what is the church, but where is the church? Has God given his church a specific structure or has he left the church to find its own structure, in such a way that a pluralism of structures is possible?” Cardinal Kasper asked.

The cardinal said the Vatican needs to better explain to its dialogue partners the Catholic conviction that “the Catholic Church is the church of Christ and that the Catholic Church is the true church,” even while “there exist many and important elements of the church of Christ outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church.”

The Catholic Church does believe “there are deficits in the other churches,” he said. “Yet on another level there are deficits, or rather wounds stemming from division and wounds deriving from sin, also in the Catholic Church.”

Ecumenical dialogue is the place where all Christians “learn to grow and mature in their faithfulness to Christ,” he said, and as each moves closer to Christ, they naturally will move closer to each other.

END