Msgr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais: Faith Imperiled by Reason - Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

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CHAPTER VI - Personalism and Ecclesiology

The trouble of putting a little weight upon the manner in which personalism has penetrated ecclesiology, that is to say, the theology of the Church, would here be worthwhile.


1. The Church, communion in charity

Applied to the spiritual society, the Church, Scheler, Buber and Wojtyla’s personalism, which I analyzed in chapter II, makes the Church seem to be a simple communion in charity, by lessening the fundamental communion in the true faith. From there emerged ecumenism, even expanded to all religions, as in the colorful gathering at Assisi on October 27, 1986, which gathered the representatives of the ‘world religions,’ if not to pray together, at least to ‘be together to pray.’

‘The creaturely unity’ of the ‘human family,’ John Paul II assures us, is greater than differences in faith, which come from a ‘human fact.’ ‘Differences are an element made less important by a link in unity which, on the contrary, is radical, fundamental and dominant.’[166]

Indeed, men are all issue of Adam, in whom they recognize their common father, and by him they form one family. Besides, by the fact that man is created in the image of God, that is to say, endowed with intelligence, he is capable, differing from other animals, of tying the bonds of amity with all like him. There thus exists in potency a certain universal fraternity between all men.[167]

However, original sin and, later, the sin of Babel has broken up the human family into a mass of ‘familiae gentium peccati vulnere disagregatae (families of nations broken apart by the wound of sin),’ as says the collect for the feast of Christ the King.

In order to make real the universal brotherhood between all men, there must be a reparatory principle which can embrace all humanity.

Well, for such a principle, there is only one option: Christ. ‘For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’[168] (I Cor. 3, 11)

The beautiful collect of Easter Thursday brings out well the natural contrast and the supernatural synthesis between the universality of nations and the unity of faith:

God, who has reunited the diversity of nations in the confession of your name, give to those who are reborn by the fount of Baptism the unity of the faith in their spirits and of piety in their actions, through Our Lord, Jesus Christ.[169]

There is no other universal society possible than the Church, or perhaps Christianity. The beautiful invocation Veni Sancte Spiritus proclaims this:

Come, Holy Ghost, fill the hearts of thy faithful and inkindle in them the fire of thy love, who, beyond the diversity of tongues, has reunited the nations in the unity of the faith.[170]

It is the Holy Ghost, bond of charity between Father and Son, who is also the driving force behind a unity for all diverse people, by reassembling them in the unity of the faith. Upon this unity of faith is founded the supernatural fraternity of Christians, of which Jesus said: ‘All you are brethren [...] for one is your father who is in heaven.’ (Matt. 23, 8-9)[171]

But the pure communion of charity, in which, according to the personalists, the Church consists, does not limit itself to eliding [suppressing or omitting] the faith; it also lessens the hierarchy. However, if the Church is a combatant and pilgrim here below, it is because she is not yet in her final state; upon this earth, she always has a finality: eternal salvation. It is this end which gives its form to the multitude of believers and makes of them a single organized multitude; it is this end which, also, demands a human efficient cause for this end: the Church is thus necessarily hierarchic. It is this which causes one of the differences with the Church in heaven. The Church of the blessed, already attained to man’s ultimate end, possessing God without possibility of loss, has no more need of hierarchy. She has only a hierarchy of saints, saints great and small, under the Blessed Virgin Mary and under Christ, the only head, who subjugates them and units them all to God his Father.

The conciliar idea of the Church as ‘the people of God’ tends also to falsify what remains of the hierarchy. Which is seen solely as a diversity of ‘ministers’ among the people of God, already essentially constituted by the communion of charity between members, and not as a distinction of divine institution, constitutive of the very establishment of the Church. The faithful of Church, says the new code of Canon Law, are those who, in so far as they are incorporated in Christ by Baptism, are constituted in the people of God and who, for this reason, being made participants after their own manner in the sacerdotal, prophetic and royal function of Christ, are called to exercise, each according to his own condition, the mission which God has confided to the Church so that she may accomplish it in the world.[172]

Personalism is the root of the religious democracy which is the Church of communion. That the new code of Canon Law, which I just cited, consecrated this revolution, John Paul II did not hide in its promulgation on January 25, 1983. He describes thus what he himself called the ‘new ecclesiology’:

Among the elements which express the Church’s own true image, he writes in his apostolic constitution, there are those which must above all be reckoned up: the doctrine of the Church as the people of God (cf Lumen Gentium, #2); that of authority, hierarchic just as service is; the doctrine of the Church as a communion, which consequently establishes the relations which must exist between the particular Church and the universal, between collegiality and primacy.[173]


2. The Church of Christ ‘subsists’ in the Catholic Church

To this ill-defined communion of the members of the Church is joined the idea of a more or less full communion with non-Catholics, from the fact of the ‘ecclesial elements’ which these keep despite their separation. It was during the Council that Pastor Wilhelm Schmidt would suggest to Joseph Ratzinger to have done with the affirmation of identity between the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church, an identity reaffirmed by Pius XII in Mystici Corporis (# 13) and Divini Redemptoris (DS 2319). The formula proposed by the pastor, and which Joseph Ratzinger transmitted to the German bishops, was that in place of saying, ‘The Church of Christ is the Catholic Church,’ it should be said, “The Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.’ The reporter for the doctrinal commission explained that: Subsistit in was employed in place of est, so that the expression would harmonize better with the affirmation of ecclesial elements which exist elsewhere.’ ‘This is unacceptable,’ Mgr. Luigi Carli protested in the conciliar court, for one could believe that the Church of Christ and the Catholic Church are two distinct realities, the first abiding in the latter as in a subject.’

From then on, the conciliar teaching would recognize in separated ‘Churches and ecclesial communities’ an ‘ecclesial nature’ and the constitution Lumen Gentium concerning the Church would adopt the Subsistit in, while the declaration Unitatis Redintegratio concerning ecumenism would recognize, contrary to the whole Tradition, that ‘these Churches and ecclesial communities are in no way deprived of significance in the mystery of salvation; the Spirit of Christ in fact not refusing to serve itself by them as means of salvation’ (UR, #3).

– An impossible thing, as Mgr. Marcel Lefebvre explained to Vatican II, in a few luminous lines filed with the secretary of the Council in November 1963:

A community, in so far as it is a separated community, cannot enjoy the Holy Ghost’s assistance, since its separation is a resistance to the Holy Ghost. He cannot act directly upon souls or use means which, of themselves, bear any sign of separation.[174]

Cardinal Ratzinger himself explained the subsistit in: The Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church; it is not said to subsist elsewhere.

By the word subsistit, the Council wished to express the singularity and not the multiplicity of the Catholic Church: The Church exists as a subject in historical reality.[175]

Thus, the subsistit would signify that the permanence of the Church of Christ is the Catholic Church. This explanation does not reflect the real intention for change. For the rest, Joseph Ratzinger, in the same text, clarifies:

The difference between subsistit and est reinforces, however, the tragedy of ecclesial division. Although the Church should be only one and subsists in a single subject, ecclesial realities exist outside of this subject: true local churches and diverse ecclesial communities. Since sin is a contradiction, on cannot, in the last analysis, fully resolve from a logical point of view this difference between subsistit and est. In the paradox of difference between singularity and concretization in the Church, on the one hand, and the existence of ecclesial reality outside the unique subject, on the other, is reflected the contradictory character of human sin, the contradiction of division. This division is something totally different from relativistic dialectic [...] in which the division of Christians loses its dolorous aspect and, in reality, is not a fracture, but only the manifestation of many variations on a single theme, in which the variations have reason, after a certain manner, and again do not have reason.[176]

In reality, sin introduces its contradiction in the will only, which revolts against the principles—here the principle of unity: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock, I will build my Church’ (Matt. 16, 18). But the principle remains untouched, without any internal contradiction. It is the unrepentant denial of the principle of non-contradiction which introduces a contradiction into understanding and into the principles; sin would never come to be, if sin were not contrary to the understanding of the first principles.

The truth is that the churches and separated communities have no ‘ecclesial nature,’ since they lack either hierarchic community with the Roman pontiff, or communion with the Catholic faith. The notion of communion invoked by Joseph Ratzinger is in this regard entirely adequate. Commenting upon what Saint John said concerning the communion of charity through Christ with the Father (1 John 1, 3-4), the cardinal says:

Here appeared in the very first place the starting-point for ‘communion’: the encounter with the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who, by the Church’s announcement, came among men. Thus was born the communion of men with each other, and that in its turn was founded upon communion with the one and triune God. Communion with God is accessed by the intermediation of this realization of the communion of God with man, which is Jesus Christ in his person; the encounter with Christ creates a communion with him and thus with the Father, in the Holy Spirit.[177]

The new notion of communion as ‘encounter’ proposed by Joseph Ratzinger is evidently attributal to Martin Buber’s personalism, for whom the intersubjective ‘I-Thou’ relation sets free the ultimate truth of the human and opens to the true relation between man and God, the eternal Thou. Christianized by Joseph Ratzinger, is this communion-encounter the communion of charity? We don’t know. It is in any case neither communion in faith, nor hierarchical communion, which are however the two essential components of the Church.


Footnotes
[166] John Paul II, Speech to the Cardinals in the Curia, October 22, 1986, DC

#1933, year 1987, p. 133-134.
[167] See Pius XII, encyclical Summi pontifi cantus, October 20, 1939, in UtzGroner-Savignat, Human Relations and Contemporary Society, Fribourg, ed. Saint-Paul, t. 1, p. 17-9, #26-35.
[168] ‘Fundamentum enim aliud nemo potest ponere praeter id quod positum est, quod est Christus Jesus.’
[169] —Deus, qui diversitatem gentium in confession etui nominis adunasti: da, ut renatis fonte baptismatis una sit fi des mentium, et pietas actionum, per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum.
[170] Veni Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fi delium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accende: qui per diversitatem linguarum cunctarum, gentes in unitate fi dei congregasti. (Antiphon for the offi ce of Pentecost)
[171] See Jean Carmignac, To Hear Our Father, Paris edition, 1971, p. 17.
[172] Code of Canon Law from 1983, canon 204, §1.
[173] John Paul II, apostolic constitution Sacrae disciplinae leges (January 25, 1983), promulgating the new code of Canon Law.
[174] I accuse the Council, Martigny, ed. Saint-Gabriel, 1976, p. 34.
[175] J. Ratzinger, ‘Conference on the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium to the congress of studies concerning Vatican II from February 25-27, 2000,’ DC 2223 (2000), p. 311.
[176] Ibid.
[177] Ibid., p 305.