Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  The dialogue imagined by John Paul II and similarly courageous Jewish thinkers would begin with such problems as religious belief in an increasingly secularized world and move on to the common moral border between Judaism and Christianity—the Ten Commandments—exploring their implications for building free and tolerant societies. These issues would only open the new discussion John Paul envisioned, though. Questions untouched for almost two millennia remained to be examined. How do Jews and Christians understand Jews as an elect people? What do Jews and Christians understand by “covenant” today? How do Jews and Christians understand their common messianic hope for a completion of God’s saving work in history?

  These were some of the questions at which John Paul was hinting in his historic visit to the Synagogue of Rome and his addresses commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate. That document, to the Pope’s way of thinking, had set a foundation. He was now interested in starting to build, and in a way that had never been done since the theological conversation between Jews and Christians self-destructed during the First Jewish War, 1,900 years ago.

  LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

  Even as John Paul was making this pioneering proposal in Jewish-Christian relations, he was addressing the theological self-understanding of the Christian community. On May 18, 1986, the solemnity of Pentecost, John Paul II signed his fifth encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem [Lord and Giver of Life]. This extended meditation on the Holy Spirit completed the Pope’s Trinitarian trilogy of encyclicals, which includes Redemptor Hominis and Dives in Misericordia.

  The idea of one God who is a Trinity of persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is central to Christian faith.88 Yet it is the Christian doctrine least well-understood by Christians and it often seems utterly baffling to non-Christians—especially to monotheistic Jews and Muslims, to whom the doctrine smacks of polytheism. The confusion and bafflement are not surprising, for the Trinity is, in the strict theological sense of the term, a mystery—a reality that the human mind cannot ever fully comprehend. Encyclicals are not occasions for theological speculation, and Dominum et Vivificantem is less a theological argument than an exhortation to the Church to take more seriously the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, in preparing for the Great Jubilee of 2000. John Paul does not discuss the infinitely complex issue of how the Persons of the Trinity are related, or the endlessly debated question, crucial for relations between Western and Eastern Christianity, of whether the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father (the position of Orthodoxy) or from the Father and the Son (the position of Western Christianity since approximately the ninth century). Dominum et Vivificantem is written by a theologically informed pastor looking to rekindle devotion to the Holy Spirit in his people, not by a professor seeking to win a debate.

  Christ’s gift of the Holy Spirit, the Pope writes, is a new way of God’s “being with” the world that goes beyond God’s self-gift in creation. This is self-giving for the world’s redemption, which is carried out in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Meditating on Christ’s saying that the Holy Spirit will “convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16.8), the Pope proposes that the Holy Spirit comes into the world because the world has forgotten its story. The world does not know where it came from, what sustains it, or where its destiny lies, although it assumes that it knows all these things. The sending of the Holy Spirit reveals to the world the truth about itself and its history.

  The Holy Spirit, through the Church, must convince the world of its sin, precisely so that the world can recognize its need for redemption. This means, first of all, wrestling with original sin, “which is the principle and root of all the others.”89 God in creation called the world and humanity to communion with himself; humanity refused. The refusal of communion with God is the original, history-determining sin, and it results in the fracture of communion within humanity itself, beginning with Adam and Eve. In calling men and women to communion, God was revealing humanity’s true good. Rejecting that invitation, men and women proposed to decide for themselves what constituted good and evil.90

  The Holy Spirit’s work in the world is to reopen consciences so that the world can begin to discover the outlines of its true story. Calling evil and good by their right names is the first step toward conversion, forgiveness, reconciliation, and the rebuilding of communion—within the human family, and between humanity and God.91 Individuals can refuse to take that step; this is the unforgivable “sin against the Holy Spirit.”92

  The gift of the Spirit continues to meet resistance in the modern world, John Paul writes, just as it did in the world of the apostles. The world’s refusal to consider even the possibility of its need for redemption has led to such death-dealing realities of the late twentieth century as the threat of nuclear destruction, indifference to poverty, the disposal of inconvenient life in abortion and euthanasia, and terrorism.93 On the edge of a new millennium, the Church in the modern world must be, like the Holy Spirit, a “guardian of hope” and an active witness to life against death. In doing so, the Church, in the power of the Spirit, helps restore to the world “the divine sense of human life.” In that rediscovery the world relearns its true story. In that recovery, the Holy Spirit renews what is good in humanity and renews the face of the earth.94

  Dominum et Vivificantem is the longest, most complex meditation on the Holy Spirit in the history of the papal teaching office. As such, it was an important response to the ancient complaint of Eastern Christianity, that the Christian West did not take seriously the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Six weeks after the encyclical was released, John Paul welcomed a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to the annual celebration of the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and told his Orthodox guests that their theological dialogue “must proceed to the very end: all the way to the altar of concelebration.”95 When that day of Eucharistic unity arrives, Dominum et Vivificantem will be remembered as one of the paving stones along the road to reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Rome.

  ANGLICAN DIFFICULTIES

  In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, no bilateral ecumenical dialogue within Western Christianity had more hopes invested in it than the dialogue between Roman Catholicism and the Anglican Communion. Those hopes rested on the historical assumption that there was something fundamentally different about the English Reformation. Unlike the separations with the Lutheran and Reformed Christians of the continent, some proposed, there was no Church-dividing doctrinal difficulty between Rome and the English Church, the division in the sixteenth century having been largely precipitated by a political dispute. This view was reinforced by the nineteenth-century ascendancy of the Anglo-Catholic movement, which insisted that Anglicanism, along with Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, was a “branch” of the one Catholic Church. The Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue also had a long history behind it, including the “Malines Conversations” in Belgium in the 1920s, led by the second Lord Halifax and the Primate of Belgium, Cardinal Désiré Mercier. The memory of those initial explorations of restored unity gave the dialogue, formally established after Vatican II under the auspices of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), a special sense of possibility.

  After a joint preparatory meeting in Malta in 1968, the formal theological dialogue known as ARCIC-I met thirteen times between 1970 and 1981 and discussed Eucharistic doctrine, ministry and ordination, and authority in the Church. Its final report, also known as ARCIC-I, was submitted to the Anglican Consultative Council and to the Holy See in 1982. While ARCIC-I was being digested by the relevant authorities, ARCIC-II was launched in 1983 to discuss salvation and the Church as communio.

  ARCIC-I was submitted to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for review. In early April 1982, CDF sent a set of “Observations” on the final report to Catholic bishops’ conferences around the world. Though the Congregation did not have the final word in the matter, its opinion carried considerable weight a
nd indicated that the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue was heading into troubled waters.

  CDF welcomed ARCIC-I as “a notable ecumenical endeavor and a useful basis for further steps on the road to reconciliation,” but disagreed with the report’s claim that “substantial and explicit agreement” had been reached on several contested issues. Anglicans and Roman Catholics were still disagreed on Eucharistic adoration, on infallibility, on Marian dogmas, and on the meaning of the “primacy” of the Bishop of Rome, and it was not clear that genuine agreement had in fact been achieved on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, on the Eucharist as sacrifice, on the nature of the ministerial priesthood, and on the structure of the Church. Apostolic succession and divergences in moral teaching seemed not to have been dealt with at all, or only indirectly. The Congregation nevertheless recommended that the dialogue continue, since “there are sufficient grounds for thinking that its continuation would be fruitful.”96

  That hope soon ran up against the problem that would push the possibility of Anglican–Roman Catholic reunion even further into the future—the ordination of women to the priesthood by some Anglican Churches around the world, which had gained international visibility after the practice began in the United States in 1974. The question of “Anglican orders” had been discussed intensely between Anglicans and Roman Catholics since the late nineteenth century. Anglicans claimed they had maintained the apostolic succession despite their break with the Roman primacy. Rome (in the person of Leo XIII) declared in 1896 that Anglican orders were “absolutely null and utterly void,” because the ordination rite of 1552 omitted references to the Eucharist as sacrifice and the relationship between that sacrifice and the priesthood. Both sides had agreed, in ARCIC-I and ARCIC-II, not to reduce the matter to a historical question but to deal with it theologically, examining each other’s current beliefs to see if they were compatible. Had it been clear that Anglicans and Roman Catholics believed the same things about the Eucharist and the priesthood today, ways could be found to deal practically with the issues left over by history.97

  This was precisely what was called into question by the ordination of women in some Anglican Churches. Could this unprecedented practice be reconciled with the notion of an apostolic tradition transmitted from the apostles to the present day? The Orthodox Churches thought the whole idea impossible, precisely because it had no warrant in Scripture or the Church’s tradition. The Roman Catholic Church had also reaffirmed that it could not ordain women to the priesthood, in the 1976 CDF Declaration Inter Insigniores [Among the Characteristics of the Present Age]. The question raised by the new practice was whether the Anglican Communion held a fundamentally different understanding of priesthood than Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. A further question involved the understanding of communio in the Anglican Communion, in which some provinces refused to acknowledge ordinations in other provinces.

  Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, President of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, raised the issue of apostolic tradition in a letter to the Anglican and Roman Catholic co-presidents of ARCIC-II in July 1985.98 Seven months before, John Paul II had written privately to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, alerting him to the gravity of the issue for the dialogue’s future. After reviewing the history of the discussion—the 1975–1976 exchange of letters between Paul VI and Runcie’s predecessor, Archbishop Donald Coggan, Inter Insigniores, and the comments by the official Vatican observers at the 1978 Lambeth Conference (the decennial meeting of world Anglican leaders)—the Pope wrote “with all brotherly frankness” that the Catholic Church continued to adhere to the principles and practice of Inter Insigniores. The two communions had come a long way in their mutual dialogue and much progress had been made, but John Paul had to tell Runcie that “the increase in the number of Anglican Churches which admit, or are preparing to admit, women to priestly ordination constitutes, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, an increasingly serious obstacle to that progress.”99 The letter ended on a note of hope, that the grace which had brought the two communions thus far would be sufficient to deal with this new problem. The letter was also a warning. The spread of the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion, especially if ratified by the 1988 Lambeth Conference, could do fatal damage to the hopes for ecclesial reunion between Canterbury and Rome.

  Archbishop Runcie’s formal reply came in a letter eleven months later, dated November 22, 1985. The Archbishop reaffirmed the Anglican commitment to “full ecclesial unity,” while noting that no one had ever thought the path to unity would be easy. He “fully” recognized, he continued, that “one such difficulty…is the difference in thinking and action about the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood.” Knowing that, he had consulted confidentially with the Primates of the autonomous Anglican Churches (or provinces) around the world, who in turn consulted within their local Churches. That was why he could reply only now to the Pope’s letter.

  Archbishop Runcie stated that despite differing opinions within his own Anglican Communion, “those Churches which have admitted women to priestly ministry have done so for serious doctrinal reasons,” which he proposed to spell out further in a letter to Cardinal Willebrands. Further, the Archbishop proposed that the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholicism undertake a “joint study” of the question, with special reference to its consequences for “the mutual reconciliation of our Churches and the recognition of their ministries.”100

  The Archbishop’s letter to Cardinal Willebrands admitted that the Pope had raised a serious caution by affirming “that the Roman Catholic Church believes it has no right to change a tradition unbroken through the history of the Church, universal in the East and the West, and considered to be truly Apostolic.” He also frankly acknowledged that “on the Anglican side, there has been a growing conviction that there exist in Scripture and Tradition no fundamental objections to the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood.” At the same time, Runcie conceded that “for so significant a theological development” to be recognized as authentic, there had to be positive reasons “for such a development,” not simply a lack of reasons against, and that these reasons had to be theological, not simply sociological or cultural. The Archbishop then stated that “the most substantial doctrinal reason, which is seen not only to justify the ordination of women to the priesthood…but actually to require it,” was that Christ had redeemed all of humanity, which “must be a humanity inclusive of women if half the human race is to share in the redemption [Christ] won for us on the Cross.” Because the priesthood had a “representative nature,” with the priest representing the whole saved community of the Church, a considerable body of Anglican opinion held that “the ministerial priesthood should now be opened to women in order more perfectly to represent Christ’s inclusive High Priesthood.” In a formulation that seemed in tension with his earlier rejection of “sociological” and “cultural” reasons for a change of this magnitude, Runcie went on to say that this argument was “strengthened today by the fact that the representational nature of the ministerial priesthood is actually weakened by a solely male priesthood, when exclusively male leadership has been largely surrendered in many human societies.”

  Archbishop Runcie said that he did not think it appropriate for some Anglicans to act on this matter unilaterally until there was consensus within the Anglican Communion, and he recognized that “the argument for ecumenical restraint”—that is, the opposition of Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy—“is also a doctrinal one, because it is only in such a wider perspective that particular churches can truly discern the mind of the whole Church.” He regretted the fact that, after 400 years of estrangement had given way to “tangible signs of reconciliation,” there was a “new obstacle between us.” He could not see the way forward, but then neither had those who had begun the ARCIC dialogue twenty years earlier seen “the end from the beginning.”

  Cardinal Willebrands’s response, seven months later, emphasized t
wo points. First, the break with tradition unilaterally undertaken by Anglican Churches divided among themselves raised grave questions about the Anglican understanding of the Church’s nature and its relationship to an authoritative tradition. There were also serious issues of sacramental theology at issue. Christ had taken on human nature to redeem humanity, and he had done so as a man. That, too, was part of salvation history. The priest who celebrated the Eucharist and the other sacraments of the Church did not represent the priesthood of all the baptized. The priest represented Christ, and “however unworthily, he stood in persona Christi” [in the person of Christ]. The ministerial priesthood was an icon of the unique ministry of Jesus Christ, God and man. The manhood of the priest was part of that sacramental iconography. To alter that tradition was a “radical innovation” that threatened a sacramental understanding of the priesthood as the visible sign of Christ’s enduring priesthood in the Church.101

  This exchange of letters was publicly released by the Vatican on June 30, 1986, and marked a turning point in the Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue. From the Roman Catholic point of view, shared by many Anglo-Catholics, the issue was whether Anglicanism was declaring itself a nonapostolic Church, with a fundamentally different understanding of the sacramental nature of the Church and its ministry. Twenty-one years after Vatican II, the real question was the one that John Henry Newman had been forced to face in 1841: Was Anglicanism the via media, the “middle way” between Rome and the continental Reformation it historically claimed to be? Or was it another form of Protestantism, and therefore in principle separated from communion with Rome?102