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Cardinals Kasper & Ratzinger Engage In Dialogue
About "Friendly Disagreement"
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has engaged recently in a highly publicized disagreement in print with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, about the relationship of the universal church to the local churches.
Cardinal Kasper, who will deliver the Fourth Annual Catholic Common Ground Initiatve lecture in June, is a well-known German theologian and one of the founders of Communio. He was bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart in Germany from 1989 until 1999 when he was appointed to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal in February 2001 and shortly afterwards he succeeded Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy as the president of the council.
Cardinal Ratzinger, another well-known German theologian who was an advisor to Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne at the Second Vatican Council, taught dogmatic theology at the University of Regensburg from 1969 until his appointment by Pope Paul VI as Archbishop of Munich-Freising in 1977. Later that year he was made a cardinal, and in 1982 Pope John Paul II named him prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
While these theologians have expressed disagreement for some time, their discussion became more public when Cardinal Ratzinger presented an address entitled “The Ecclesiology of the Church, Lumen gentium, Vatican II,” at a symposium in Rome, November 2000.
In that talk, Cardinal Ratzinger states that the council fathers wanted the church to be considered within discourse about God, to offer a truly “theo-logical” view of the church. He laments the loss of this perspective in many post Vatican II discussions, and specifically in reflection on the church as “the People of God” and, later, as communio. Both of these images in his view became too horizontal in understanding and lost their core reference to God.
Although Cardinal Ratzinger clearly says that he does not identify the “universal Church with the Roman Church, or de facto with the Pope and the Curia,” he states, “This ontological precedence of the universal Church, the one Church, the one body, the one bride, over the concrete empirical realizations in the particular Churches seems to me so obvious that I find it hard to understand the objections to it.”
Cardinal Kasper wrote an immediate response which was published in a German Jesuit magazine and later in America (April 23-30, 2001) and The Tablet (23 June 2001) in separate English translations. His reflections begin in his pastoral experience as bishop of a large diocese, rather than with systematic theology.
He says, “Many Catholics and their clergy can no longer understand certain rules imposed by the universal Church and hence disregard them. This applies both to moral questions and to questions of sacramental and ecumenical practice, such as the admission of remarried divorcees to Communion or the extension of eucharistic hospitality. Faced with this situation, a bishop cannot stand idly by.”
In the article Cardinal Kasper agrees that the notion of the pre-existent church is scriptural and important, but he notes that it is a theological understanding which should not be applied to concrete historical situations. Rather, it is precisely this pre-existent universal church that also exists in local churches. “The theological basis for the validity of these principles is the doctrine that a local church is not a province or a department of the universal Church: it is rather the Church in that particular place. The bishop is not a delegate of the pope but rather a representative of Jesus Christ: he enjoys his own sacramentally-based individual responsibility.”
Cardinal Kasper goes on to highlight the ecumenical importance of clarifying Catholic understandings of church. If Catholics believe that the aim is to restore Christian unity by bringing all other churches into uniformity under the one Roman church, the other churches will resist “reconciliation.” On the other hand, if the goal is “a matter of the Churches remaining Churches but nevertheless increasingly becoming one Church” in mutual communion, Christian unity is a possibility. Such an understanding, Cardinal Kasper contends, corresponds to the “inner meaning” of the Petrine ministry of strengthening the bishops and thereby local churches and holding them in unity.
The editors of America invited Cardinal Ratzinger to respond in turn.,which he did in the November 19, 2001 issue. He decided to continue the “friendly exchange,” despite some reluctance, because readers needed more background information to understand the disagreement and also because “pointing up the progress made in this debate strikes me as significant.”
The disagreement, Cardinal Ratzinger asserts, goes back to a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church as Communio,” published by the CDF on June 28, 1992. That letter contains the principle “that the universal church (ecclesia universalis) is in its essential mystery a reality that takes precedence, ontologically and temporally, over the individual local churches.”
Soon afterwards, Cardinal Kasper issued a sharp critique of that statement in an article in a German festschrift: “The formula becomes thoroughly problematic if the universal church is being covertly identified with the church of Rome, and de facto with the pope and the Curia. If that happens, the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith cannot be read as an aid in clarifying communio-ecclesiology, but as a dismissal of it and as an attempt to restore Roman centralism.”
In his America article, Cardinal Ratzinger notes that he agrees with Cardinal Kasper’s clarification of the theological principle that “The local church and the universal church are internal to one another; they penetrate each other and are perichoretic.” Nonetheless, Cardinal Ratzinger wonders aloud, “why does this same association keep coming up everywhere, even with so great a theologian as Walter Kasper? What makes people suspect that the thesis of the internal priority of the one divine idea of the church over the individual churches might be a ploy of Roman centralism?” He answers the question by noting that the term “universal church” is often understood to refer to the pope and the curia, while the deeper theological meaning is dismissed as a pure abstraction.
The article concludes with Cardinal Ratzinger’s presentation of arguments from scripture and the church’s sacramental practice (e.g. Catholics have always understood that we are baptized into the one church, not into the parish or diocese) to support his understanding of the precedence of the universal church over local churches.
The exchange exemplifies productive, respectful dialogue among two cardinals who are also theologians with strongly held, differing views on an issue of crucial pastoral importance. Cardinal Kasper’s pastoral experience as a bishop, as well as his participation in such dialogue—intrachurch as well as ecumenical—promises a rich contribution to the Initiative lecture series.
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