Aqua and I had the great pleasure of attending Fr. Hunwicke's talk in Manhattan's Old St. Patrick's Cathedral last night and speaking to him briefly afterwards. He is just as droll and witty as he is in his blogs. And BTW, the proper pronunciation of his last name, it turns out, is "Hunnick", without the 'w' sound.
His topic was 'Kasperism and the aspirations of episcopal conferences', and he came well-prepared with clippings from the back-and-forth between Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper between 1999-2001 on whether it is the universal Church or local (particular) churches that has/have ontological and temporal priority, as well as pertinent Vatican documents.
Christopher Blosser, who started the Ratzinger Fan Club site (eventually renamed the Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club) back in 2000 in the wake of the attacks against DOMINUS IESUS, has a compilation of all the articles in this debate-by-correspondence of sorts. They may be consulted at
http://popebenedictxvi.blogspot.com/2008/08/special-compilation-ratzinger-kasper.html)
Anyone who follows Fr. H's blogs will know exactly what he thinks about Cardinal Kasper and about episcopal conferences in general.
Kasperism, he said, last night, is the butcher's block on which the Body of Christ (the Church) is being chopped up.
As for whether the universal Church takes priority over local particular churches, he says reasoned consideration would easily show that it is the universal over the particular. That the universal Church is not a sum of Church A + B + C...,etc, but that local churches are - and should be - examples of the universal Church made concrete.
He quotes from a 1992 CDF document, cited very rarely though it deserves attentive reading, entitled 'LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE CHURCH UNDERSTOOD AS COMMUNION' signed by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by John Paul II which says, among other things:
The Church of Christ, which we profess in the Creed to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, is the universal Church, that is, the worldwide community of the disciples of the Lord, which is present and active amid the particular characteristics and the diversity of persons, groups, times and places....
Among these manifold particular expressions of the saving presence of the one Church of Christ, there are to be found, from the times of the Apostles on, those entities which are in themselves Churches, because, although they are particular, the universal Church becomes present in them with all its essential elements. They are therefore constituted "after the model of the universal Church", and each of them is "a portion of the People of God entrusted to a bishop to be guided by him with the assistance of his clergy"...
Indeed, according to the Fathers, ontologically, the Church-mystery, the Church that is one and unique, precedes creation, and gives birth to the particular Churches as her daughters. She expresses herself in them; she is the mother and not the product of the particular Churches.
Furthermore, the Church is manifested, temporally, on the day of Pentecost in the community of the one hundred and twenty gathered around Mary and the twelve Apostles, the representatives of the one unique Church and the founders-to-be of the local Churches, who have a mission directed to the world: from the first the Church speaks all languages.
From the Church, which in its origins and its first manifestation is universal, have arisen the different local Churches, as particular expressions of the one unique Church of Jesus Christ. Arising within and out of the universal Church, they have their ecclesiality in it and from it.
Hence the formula of the Second Vatican Council: The Church in and formed out of the Churches (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis), is inseparable from this other formula: The Churches in and formed out of the Church (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis)...
"The universality of the Church involves, on the one hand, a most solid unity, and on the other, a plurality and a diversification, which do not obstruct unity, but rather confer upon it the character of 'communion'". This plurality refers both to the diversity of ministries, charisms, and forms of life and apostolate within each particular Church, and to the diversity of traditions in liturgy and culture among the various particular Churches.
Fostering a unity that does not obstruct diversity, and acknowledging and fostering a diversification that does not obstruct unity but rather enriches it, is a fundamental task of the Roman Pontiff for the whole Church, and without prejudice to the general law of the Church itself, of each Bishop in the particular Church entrusted to his pastoral ministry....
In which, Fr. H notes, Cardinal Ratzinger liberally quotes from a document,
Lumen gentium, passed by 'a body whose authority no one will dispute', namely Vatican II.
He also quotes from Benedict XVI's homily on Pentecost Sunday in 2010:
Where there are divisions and estrangement the Paraclete creates unity and understanding. The Spirit triggers a process of reunification of the divided and dispersed parts of the human family.
People, often reduced to individuals in competition or in conflict with each other, when touched by the Spirit of Christ open themselves to the experience of communion, which can involve them to such an extent as to make of them a new body, a new subject: the Church.
This is the effect of God's work: unity; thus unity is the sign of recognition, the "business card" of the Church throughout her universal history. From the very beginning, from the Day of Pentecost, she speaks all languages.
The universal Church precedes the particular Churches, and the latter must always conform to the former according to a criterion of unity and universality.
The Church never remains a prisoner within political, racial and cultural confines; she cannot be confused with States nor with Federations of States, because her unity is of a different type and aspires to transcend every human frontier.
Fr. H argues: Since the Bishop of Rome has the ministry of sustaining the truths of the universal Church in the individual churches, and the diocesan bishop is the foundation of unity in his particular church fashioned after the universal Church, then episcopal conferences muddy the waters because they can be seen to be stealing power from the individual bishops who are members of these conferences, and from the pope who guarantees the unity of the universal Church.
He cites both Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Mueller, in their capacity as CDF Prefects, for having definitively stated that episcopal conferences have no canonical status and only limited doctrinal power. Mueller specifically warned about the danger of ECs taking power away from the pope and individual bishops, and the tendency to act like 'vice popes'.
[Of course, in Evangelii gaudium, JMB specifically articulates his intention to delegate doctrinal authority to local churches through episcopal conferences if they could be juridically allowed.]
Yet, as he pointed out earlier in his overview of Kasper's ecclesiology, Kasper has pointed to 'the growing gap between practices in the universal Church and in particular Churches', and his image of
'strict stern men at the barricades' of the universal church with "their adamant refusal of communion to everyone and their tight restrictive rules of eucharistic hospitality", whereby "bishops are pulled in two directions - to take into account the local community and its culture, as Vatican II enjoins, or to apply universal rules ruthlessly as his Roman superiors expect him to do.
Never under-estimate Kasper's capacity to plant a picture, Fr H warns. His language is such that 'it prejudices the discussion by making it seem that something important is not really important' and the other way around.
DOMINUS IESUS of 2000 really got Kasper's goat, he says, prompting him to propose:
"There is a solution [for the bishops]: they must have a vital space within which to decide for their own diocese." Freedom does not mean compromises, he adds, "BUT a broad field of ecclesiastical discipline is essentially changeable" [the rationale behind the Bergoglio-Kasper advocacy of eucharistic leniency and other relaxations of Church discipline], and the Church has experienced a great deal of flexibility in rules and regulations in the past decades.
In other words, says Fr. H, Kasper is saying, "We messed up the liturgy in the late 60s and got away with it. So we can mess up other areas of discipline and get away with it".
[That's the spirit of AL,all right!]
One other premise attributed to Kasper and his likeminded colleagues among the German bishops is their identification of the Church as being equivalent to the Pope and the Roman Curia. Cardinal Ratzinger remarked on this in an address on the 35th anniversary of
Lumen gentium:
Resistance to the affirmations of the pre-eminence of the universal Church in relation to the particular Churches is difficult to understand and even impossible to understand theologically.
It only becomes understandable on the basis of a suspicion: "The formula becomes totally problematic if the one universal Church is tacitly identified with the Roman Church, de facto with the Pope and the Curia. If this occurs, then the 1992 Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [cited earlier] cannot be understood as an aid to the clarification of the ecclesiology of communion, but must be understood as its abandonment and an endeavour to restore the centralism of Rome".
In this text the identification of the universal Church with the Pope and the Curia is first introduced as a hypothesis, as a risk, but then seems de facto to have been attributed to the Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which thus appears as a kind of theological restoration, thereby diverging from the Second Vatican Council.
This interpretative leap is surprising, but obviously represents a widespread suspicion; it gives voice to an accusation heard everywhere, and expresses succinctly a growing inability to portray anything concrete under the name of universal Church, under the elements of the one, holy, catholic of the Church. The Pope and the Curia are the only elements that can be identified, and if one exalts them inordinately from the theological point of view, it is understandable that some may feel threatened.
[The German bishops are, of course, notorious for reducing the concept of the universal Church to nothing but the pope and the Roman Curia, since their primary criterion for anything appears to be political. And financial - they ca excommunicate you for failing to pay the Church tax that ought to go to them, to the German Church, at any rate.]
Fr H then brings up
Apostolos Suos, John Paul II's 1998 Apostolic Letter on the Theological and Juridical Nature of Episcopal Conferences.
The key question about ECs is whether they can autonomously promulgate doctrine that must be accepted by their subjects with religious submission. And the answer is framed thus:
Taking into account that the authentic magisterium of the Bishops, namely what they teach insofar as they are invested with the authority of Christ, must always be in communion with the Head of the College [the pope] and its members, when the doctrinal declarations of Episcopal Conferences are approved unanimously, they may certainly be issued in the name of the Conferences themselves, and the faithful are obliged to adhere with a sense of religious respect to that authentic magisterium of their own Bishops.
However, if this unanimity is lacking, a majority alone of the Bishops of a Conference cannot issue a declaration as authentic teaching of the Conference to which all the faithful of the territory would have to adhere, unless it obtains the recognitio of the Apostolic See, which will not give it if the majority requesting it is not substantial.
The recognitio of the Holy See serves furthermore to guarantee that, in dealing with new questions posed by the accelerated social and cultural changes characteristic of present times, the doctrinal response will favour communion and not harm it, and will rather prepare an eventual intervention of the universal magisterium.
[Have the German bishops ever submitted any such non-unanimous (for there are a handful of 'conservative' German bishops) teaching to the Holy See for proper evaluation and possible approval?]
Fr H says that with
Apostolic Suos, Cardinal Ratzinger 'won' the argument hands down not just on what episcopal conferences can and cannot do, but also on the priority of the universal Church over local Churches.
I purposely delayed towards the end what I found to the be the most striking statements I heard from Fr H last night - a measure of how greatly he esteems Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.
But first, here is how he started his talk. He quotes from an admonition of the evil Screwtape to his rookie-devil nephew Wormwood after one of the latter's 'patients' had become a Christian:
There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.
All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew...
At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armor and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real — though of course an unconscious — difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.
Emblematic, he implies, of the state and direction of the Church - and the faithful - today. Then referring to one's time frame of history when considering this condition, he remarks:
"Ratzinger has been pope much longer than you think. Think of a papal diarchy, a collaborative papacy that began in 1981 and ended in 2013, during which Joseph Ratzinger laid down the theology of that dual papacy. A Wojtyla-Ratzinger condominium."
Other commentators have, of course, previously written of the Wojtyla-Ratzinger papal continuum from 1978 to 2013. But Fr H used terms much stronger even than those much disputed words whereby Georg Gaenswein spoke last May about an 'enlarged papal ministry' with a contemplative (ex)-Pope and an active Pope.
But again, anyone who has followed Fr. H's blog will know how often he brings up Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI - as he often as he does John Henry Newman - to strengthen points that he raises about the life of the Church.
So, thank God for persons like Fr H, and thank God even more for the Wojtyla-Ratzinger 'papal diarchy' and what it gave to the life of the faith, all of which, one prays, will serve good Catholics well during this times of trial.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/10/2016 23:10]