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August 14, 2001
From Our Sunday Visitor, 8/12/01
Authority Reconsidered: Who's in charge here?
(Which is first, the universal church or local churches? The debate between Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper
By RUSSELL SHAW
Although sometimes likened to the argument about the chicken and the egg, a debate between two influential German theologian-cardinals concerning the universal Church and the local churches particular churches, raises some of the most critical issues in contemporary Catholicism.
The central question is the distribution of authority in the Church. And while people have argued about that for years, not to say centuries, this may be the first time two cardinals have debated the question quite so frankly in public. The matter is one that may influence the choosing of the next pope and almost certainly will carry over into his pontificate.
The principal parties to the dispute, carried on in Church journals and lecures, are Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, president of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of its Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Other notable figures lately have joined the argument, including Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., a prominent American theologian, and Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.EM. Cap., of Denver.The immediate question is whether or not the universal Church is, as Cardinal Ratzinger contends, "ontologically and temporally prior to" the local churches. Cardinal Kasper says the local, or particular, churches come first. "Particular church" in theological language, usually means a diocese - although the term also sometimes is used to refer to a national church.
More concretely, this argument raises issues about papal authority and episcopal authority: Who makes which decisions, who has the final say, how much diversity is acceptable?
STRIKING A BALANCE
The problem is to strike a balance between papal primacy, as taught by the First Vatican Council (1869-70), and the collegiality of bishops, taught by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65)."Collegiality" signifies that the world's bishops form a body or college which, under the headship of the pope; share in teaching and governing the Church.
Cardinal Ratzinger's views are found especially in a "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood As Communion," published by his doctrinal congregation in 1992. The letter says the Church of Christ is the universal Church, present in diverse "persons, times and places.' Among these are the particular churches, each entrusted to a bishop.
This is a rejection of the idea that Christ's Church exists first in the particular churches - or even, as the Orthodox, and today some Catholics, would have it, in each congregation celebrating the Eucharist - and only secondarily and in a derivative way in the universal Church.
The letter stresses that the universal Church is not a federation of local churches. The universal Church comes first, it says - "ontologically" because, as Church Fathers said, it "gives birth" to particular churches, "temporally" because the Church brought into being by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost preceded any local church.
Theoretical as all this is, it has important practical implications involving, in Cardinal Kasper's words,"ethical issues, sacramental discipline- and ecumenical practices.'
The meaning of that is clearer when it is borne in mind that as bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart from 1989 to 1999, Cardinal Kasper joined two other German bishops in proposing that some divorced and remarried Catholics be allowed to receive the sacraments without a declaration of nullity - a judgment by the Church that their first unions were invalid. The Vatican vetoed the idea.
Such clashes between local Church authorities and Rome have had numerous counterparts in the United States over the years.
In one widely publicized instance, the Vatican recently backed conservative Catholics seeking to block Archbishop Rembert Weakland's plan for renovating the Milwaukee cathedral. In another, a Vatican document on liturgical translations implicitly sided with critics of translations prepared by the International Commission for English in the Liturgy and approved by the U.S. bishops.
ECUMENICAL IMPLICATIONS
The debate also has a large ecumenical dimension. The concentration of authority in Rome unquestionably is an obstacle to unity - though hardly the only one - with the Orthodox, the Anglicans and other Christian churches. Pope John Paul II, in 1995, invited discussion of new ways of exercising papal primacy for the sake of ecumenism.
In an article last December in a German Jesuit review, Cardinal Kasper accused the Vatican of pushing "centralization" contrary to the intention of Vatican II.
'The right balance between the universal Church and the particular churches has been destroyed" he claimed. The article appeared in the United States, in the Jesuits' America magazine, and in Great Britain - in an allegedly less polemical translation - in The Tablet of London.
Supporting that view, also in The Tablet, was Jesuit Father Ladislas Orsy, a Georgetown University canon lawyer who translated the disputed version of the Kasper article published by America., He likened contemporary critics of episcopal collegiality to opponents of change whom Blessed Pope John XXIII castigated at the start of Vatican II as "prophets of doom."
Cardinal Dulles, a specialist in ecclesiology, nevertheless declared Cardinal Ratzinger the winner of the Ratiinger-Kasper debate. "The Catholic Church must be on guard against degenerating into a loose federation of local or national, churches,' he wrote in the June issue of Inside the Vatican magazine.
Also siding with Cardinal Ratzinger was Archbishop Chaput, in a July 30 article in America magazine. Declaring the cardinal's concerns about Church unity "well-founded," he called "excessive pluralism, local particularism and religious nationalism" real current threats, along with the tendency of bishops and bishops' conferences to "abdicate their responsibility" by letting Rome take the heat for handling problems they should address.
"In such an environment, the one thing we don't need is more fragmentation," he said.
These issues were part of the backdrop for the consistory of the cardinals in Rome last May, and will play the same role for the world Synod of Bishops taking place there in October on the role of bishops in the Church.
Almost certainly, this discussion is helping to set the stage for the conclave - whenever it takes place - at which the cardinals will choose Pope John Paul's successor, as well as for the pontificate of whomever they elect.