Dangerous trends evident in Catholic ecumenism

Op-ed by Rev. Andrew Britz, OSB

Strange and, I think, dangerous changes are taking place in the ecumenical world.

Ecumenism for Catholics was radically transformed at the Second Vatican Council when we went from seeing the church as a perfect society to accepting it as a pilgrim on its way to perfection in the kingdom.

This fundamental change caused us to stop talking about churches coming back to the one, true, perfect church. We began speaking instead about the restoration of the unity of Christians. Pope John Paul II was very careful in his use of this new language.

Relations with Anglicans took a great leap forward in 1966 when Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey visited the Vatican. Pope Paul VI gave him his episcopal ring and promised to come visit Canterbury.

As a result of the archbishop’s visit, formal ecumenical relations, centred round the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), were established between the two churches.

ARCIC I (1969 - 1982) did serious work on the eucharist and on the authority of ecumenical councils. It also began study of authority and its relationship to the priesthood.

ARCIC II, instituted in 1983, has subsequently worked on the major church-dividing issues between the two communions. This renewed ecumenical group has studied the nature of salvation, our communion in Christ, the teaching authority of the church and the role of Mary.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) has been very slow responding to the documents from ARCIC II, and in its latest report seriously questioned the language used. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the head of CDF and now Pope Benedict XVI, complained that since traditional language (Catholic language?) was not used, his Vatican congregation was unable to tell whether the challenge of these outstanding church-dividing issues had been successfully addressed.

But it appears things have changed greatly in the last year or so. Our current pope has invited a dissident group of Anglicans “back to full union with the Roman Catholic Church” without any stipulations concerning the issues that ARCIC has been struggling with. Their faith now appears to be sufficient for union with Rome — no questions asked.

The long-standing concerns which ARCIC studied are quite different from the two issues that divide these dissident Anglicans from their mother church. These are, first, the ordination of women and, second, the acceptance of active homosexuals, especially to the priesthood.

It would appear that only these two issues now deeply trouble Rome in Anglican-Catholic relations. Neither of them has a long, continuous theological history in the two churches.

Regarding the ordination of women, there has been scant theological talk throughout church history about women’s unacceptability for priestly ordination. What our tradition is constant about concerns something much more generic, the inferiority of women — and I seriously doubt that Rome is about to dig up the embarrassing statements made by our church fathers concerning the misbegotten birth of women.

The second issue, homosexuality, is something quite recent in all the churches — less than 250 years. We are not even at the point whereby we can distinguish what is reliable theological opinion, what comes from a fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture — Pope Pius XII said we must carefully discern the literary forms used if we are to obtain an authoritative interpretation — and what is simply the result of social bias and prejudice.

It would seem to be a very strange world indeed if suddenly these two issues — so dear to a small, but extremely vocal, fraction of people in both churches — were to become the church-dividing issues between Anglicans and Catholics. The trend in Catholic ecumenism has become strange and dangerous indeed.

Britz is the former editor of the Prairie Messenger.