From the President of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity

I thankfully take as a sign of such progress that in his reply Cardinal Ratzinger no longer sees my position as threatening to dissolve the church into purely sociological entities. This serious accusation, which he originally voiced, has been bruited all over; it has affected discussions in ecumenical bodies where the Council for Promoting Christian Unity is involved, and it has not exactly made my position there any easier. When one of my coworkers returned from a session of the Faith and Order Commission in Cuba and reported to me about it, I decided, after long hesitation, to answer the charge made by the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

I am all the more grateful that Cardinal Ratzinger now affirms our common ecclesiological foundations and even agrees with the formula that local churches and the universal church are incorporated into and interpenetrate one another, so that one can speak of their being simultaneous. If this formulationas Cardinal Ratzinger saysholds true for the church as it has existed throughout history, then I no longer care to attribute too much importance to the really rather speculative question of whether the situation is precisely the same or perhaps different with regard to the pre-existence of the church. In any case I can invoke for my position a witness as prominent as Henri de Lubac, whom both Cardinal Ratzinger and I highly respect as one of the Church Fathers of present-day theology.

I also note yet another step in the right direction and a no less important rapprochement here. In his argument in support of the pre-existence of the universal church Cardinal Ratzinger quite rightly says that there is only one bride and only one body. He does this by way of making over the thesis of the priority of the church universal into the thesis of the priority of inner unity. On both philosophical and scriptural grounds I can fully concur with this latter thesis, which avoids the confusing language about the precedence of the universal church. The fact that unity as a transcendental determination of being makes variety and multiplicity possible to begin with is a fundamental insight of both Platonic and Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, which thereby stand in opposition to the postmodern principle of absolute pluralism.

So in the end we are left with only two marginal notes and a question. Needless to say, Cardinal Ratzinger and I agree that one becomes a member of the Catholic Church through baptism. But one becomes soas the temporal-spatial event of baptism makes clearin a specific (episcopally structured) local church. The principle of simultaneity holds true precisely of the sacramental event. And as for the somewhat artificial controversy between Rudolf Bultmann, whom Cardinal Ratzinger would surely not like to echo on many other issues, and Joachim Gnilka, let me point out that in my friendly exchange I also quoted the other statement by Gnilka, which I explicitly appropriated, that the writings of St. Paul, like the rest of the New Testament, bear witness to the church not as some sort of amalgamation of individual communities but as the one holy church that we confess in the Apostles’ Creed.

The question to Cardinal Ratzinger with which I should like to close is whether such reflections really have to remain as devoid of concrete consequences as his article might appear to claim. If one takes seriously the fact that in the Catholic view the church is not some sort of Platonic republic, but a historically existing divine-human reality, then it cannot be wholly wrongheaded and be chalked off as mere political reductionism to ask about concrete actions, not in political, but in pastoral life.

(Cardinal) Walter Kasper

“Before time had a name....” –William Stafford

At noon today