SOUL FOOD:Church’s points of contention are still profound

Let the pope speak and people grumble. It’s more predictable than the weather or Paris Hilton.

Most recently they groused when Benedict XVI issued a clarifying statement on the Second Vatican Council, which is commonly said to have “modernized” the Roman Catholic Church. The statement — let loose on the world at the end of last month — elicited a flurry of protest.

Reports on the document did what ecumenical or interfaith dialogues as a rule avoid. They scrutinized every turn of phrase that might be used to foster division and friction.

Words like “defects” and “separated” were set in quotes apart from their context. Hot-button expressions, such as “only true path” and “only ‘true’ church” were employed, though they appear nowhere in the Vatican statement.

The headline at the top of page B2 in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times announced, “Vatican actions worry some in other faith traditions.” A kicker added, “Documents released in recent days raise fears that the pope is steering his church away from interfaith dialogue that opened up in the 1960s.”

These were par for the course. The Indianapolis Star alerted folks that “Papal arrogance may cause flight from church” and the Detroit News that the “Pope’s one true church edict provokes battle.”

Foss Farrar, a reporter for the Arkansas City Traveler, apparently missed the news. He was in Rome for the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29 when the them’s-fightingwords decree was released.

Back home, on July 13, he wrote, “Pope Benedict XVI is following the lead of his predecessor in his continuing efforts to help bring about Christian unity.” Poor deluded guy.

Meanwhile, other media found non-Catholics and Roman Catholics alike who were ringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over the pope’s assault on Christian unity. According to the Los Angeles Times, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, issued a statement on the Vatican statement that called it “troubling,” saying, “What may have been meant to clarify has caused pain.”

Joseph Prabhu, a Roman Catholic and professor of philosophy and religion at Cal State Los Angeles told Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson that the release of the Vatican document puzzled him. “I’m saddened more than anything else,” he said.

In Knoxville, reporter Mike McCarthy dug up some solace for those wounded by the notion of their church being “second best.” Fr. Ragan Shriver, who told McCarthy he thought the statement sounded “very arrogant,” assured him, “There’s no way someone could condemn someone for their way of following the path of Christ.”

Layman Kevin Connors agreed. Never mind followers of Christ.

“All other religions are just as valid. We just choose to be Catholic,” he said.

After reading the 2,018-word document titled “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church,” I’ve got to say it takes some spelunking between its lines to find injury in it. That clearly was not its purpose. It was intended to settle disagreements among Catholics stemming from what Benedict believes to be misinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council. It focuses on five questions, as the statement itself explains, “referred to the attention of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” The first question being: “Did the Second Vatican Council change the Catholic doctrine on the Church?” And, no, it didn’t.

“The Second Vatican Council neither changed nor intended to change this doctrine, rather it developed, deepened and more fully explained it,” the new document says. In support of this answer, it quotes Pope John XXIII, who opened the Second Vatican Council.

“The council wishes to transmit Catholic doctrine, whole and entire, without alteration or deviation,” John XXIII said at the time.

The statement also notes that Pope Paul VI later wrote, “There is no better comment to make than to say that this promulgation really changes nothing of the traditional doctrine. What Christ willed, we also will. What was, still is. What the Church has taught down through the centuries, we also teach. In simple terms, that which was assumed is now explicit; that which was uncertain is now clarified; that which was meditated upon, discussed and sometimes argued over is now put together in one clear formulation.”

The other four questions address the nature of the Papal Church and its relationship with non-Roman Catholic Christian communities, in particular the “oriental churches” and those “born out of the Reformation of the 16th century.” That these communities are viewed as separate should come as no surprise.

It’s a two-way street. The Eastern, or oriental, churches define themselves apart from Roman Catholicism. And so, also, do those churches beholden to the Reformation.

They were profound theological differences — quarrels, if you will — that rent the unity of Christians. It wasn’t for pettiness that Martin Luther, in 1517, nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The Roman Catholic Church, by its very nature, finds the churches “born out of the Reformation” defective. But Luther didn’t compose his 95 theses to sing the Catholic Church his praise.

That 16th-century rupture created one of the reformed churches’ defects. In the separation, the reformers lost apostolic succession.

Apostolic succession is a lineage of bishops that can be traced back to Christ’s apostles, much the way a family’s ancestry can be traced in its genealogy. Without it, Christian communities may, according to the Vatican’s statement, have “numerous elements of sanctification and of truth.”

Yet apart from apostolic succession they cannot have what the Vatican describes as “the sacramental priesthood” and “genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery.” Therefore, in the scheme of Catholic doctrine, they also cannot be regarded as churches “in the proper sense.”

The point is, these points of contention and others (remember, Luther formulated 95 theses objecting to various doctrines and practices of the Papal Church) are just as present and real today as they were then. And they are every bit as profound and as reasoned.

But this is not 1517. Ours is an age in which all religions expect unquestioned respect, to be accepted as equally valid without reason or evidence.

This recent Vatican statement was not countered with reason and theses but with pouting and crocodile tears.