|
The
Theology of Cardinal Ratzinger. A Response to Dominus
lesus
The
Declaration Dominus Iesus, published on
August 6, 2000, by the Roman Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith and signed by Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, deals with the uniqueness of
Jesus Christ and his holy Church and strongly
emphasizes the difference rather than the
similarity between the Catholic tradition and
other Christian traditions and between the
Christian religion and the other religions. The
Declaration offers a harsh criticism of Catholic
theologians who try to deal with religious
pluralism in a manner that seems to relativize the
uniqueness and universality of God’s
self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The
positive aspect of the Declaration is that it
affirms, with one exception, the teaching of
Vatican Council II on the universality of God’s
redemptive presence in the world. Embracing the
theology of Maurice Blondel and Karl Rahner (at
one time minority voices in the Catholic Church),
the Vatican Council proclaimed in several of its
documents that operative in the whole of history
is the mystery of salvation, fully revealed in
Jesus Christ. It offers rescue and new life to
people wherever they are and aims at the
transformation of humanity into a community of
justice and peace. God is graciously at work in
the whole world. God’s kingdom is pressing upon
peoples and their institutions, urging and
empowering them to leave their destructive side
behind and move creatively into a new future. This
is a new and startling reading of the Christian
message, one that sheds light on the prayer “Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven.” This
teaching of Vatican Council II leads to an
understanding of Christian faith that inspires
openness to people of other religions or of no
religion at all, an openness that is sensitive to
the drama of personal and social transformation
taking place in their lives. The new Declaration
reaffirms this teaching – not with joy, but with
fear. Cardinal Ratzinger is afraid that this new
openness to the transformative religious and
secular ex-periences may prompt Catholic
theologians, eager to account for religious
pluralism in God’s world, to relativize
Christian truth and regard all religions as true
in their own way. Ratzinger is also afraid that
the new ecumenical friendship between Christians
of different traditions may lead Catholic
theologians to relativize the Roman Catholic
tradition, regard one Church as being as valid as
another, and overlook the claim of the Roman
Catholic Church to be the one, true Church founded
by Christ. Instead of rejoicing in the new
openness of the conciliar theology, Cardinal
Ratzinger is fearful that theologians, wrestling
with the issue of religious pluralism, make too
many concessions. It
may well be that some Catholic theologians,
wrestling with new questions, do not sufficiently
protect the teaching of Scripture and tradition.
When new ideas emerge, they are often articulated
in an overstated manner, until a more moderate
formulation is found. But because Ratzinger’s
theology is inspired by fear, it has a
fault-finding and scolding tone that has made this
document singularly unattractive. On
one issue Cardinal Ratzinger does not follow
Vatican Council II. While this Council stresses
the universality of Christ’s redemptive work, it
also acknowledges, for the first time in the
Church’s history, that the Jewish people remains
a covenanted community, the recipient of the
divine promises, and a worshipping assembly in
which God’s Word is heard and God’s grace
received. Not only in Nostra aetate does
the Council acknowledge God’s abiding covenant
with the Jews; it also states in Lumen gentium (no.
16) that “the people to whom the covenants and
the promises were given... remain, on account of
their fathers, most dear to God because God does
not repent of his gifts.” The Catholic Church
here respects the Jewish faith, which holds that
the Torah is God’s definitive, never to be
surpassed self-revelation. The Church no longer
tries to convert Jews to the Christian faith since
they are already in a covenant relationship with
God. This acknowledgment does call for a certain
rethinking of Christology, even if a theology
acceptable to all Christians has not yet been
found. Because Cardinal Ratzinger makes no mention
of this conciliar teaching, relevant though it is
to his topic, his theology remains defective. The
Declaration has other defects. One of them is the
idea that dialogue with the world religions is
compatible with the intention of making converts.
Dialogue is a conversation based on trust and
mutual acceptance, in which the partners feel free
to reveal their own problems and unresolved
questions. Dialogue is an unguarded conversation.
Dialogue is an exchange that transforms both
partners, leading them to a better
self-understanding, revealing to them the
prejudice mediated by their own tradition, and
making them aspire to a more authentic and
enlarged possession of their own religion. It
would be utterly deceitful to lure a partner into
dialogue, attempt to create a community of trust
in which the partner is willing to expose the
weakness of his own tradition, and then abuse this
confidence in an effort to persuade the partner to
change his or her religion. It may happen, of
course, that in such a trusting dialogue a partner
decides to move to another religious tradition.
But interreligious dialogue would be a form of
manipulation if its aim were to make Christians of
the participants. The proposal that dialogue and
convert-making can go together is unethical. This
seems to me such a basic moral conviction that if
a person does not sense it – like Cardinal
Ratzinger – one cannot explain it to him. The
Declaration does not deal at all with the pastoral
problems of the present. I wish to mention two of
them. First, there is the awareness among
today’s Chris-tians that the missionary movement
– the European invasion of the other continents
from the end of the fifteenth century on and the
subsequent creation of the Catholic and Protestant
colonial empires – was for the most part
associated with a political and cultural project.
We should not be surprised, therefore, if in many
parts of the world people continue to look upon
Christianity as a foreign religion introduced
under the protection of the conqueror. The
unwillingness to honour the religions of the
colonized people has been denounced as a sin in
Pope John Paul II’s liturgy of repentance on
March 12, 2000 (see pp. 16 – 18 of this issue).
The Canadian church lead-ers, including the
Catholic bishops, have repeatedly made apologies
to the Native peoples regretting that the
Church’s missionary activity did not respect
their religious traditions and, even though
sustained by faith and love, the mission
understood itself as part of a European civilizing
endeavour. Many Catholic bishops in Asia have
raised the question whether respect for the Asian
religions and their contemporary vitality does not
demand a rethinking of the Church 's mission and
an end to the efforts to make converts. Yet when
John Paul II went to India, he announced an
alternative policy, namely an intensification of
the Church’s effort to convert Hindus to
Christianity. Hindu nationalists who feel that
their religio-cultural identity is threatened by
powerful west-ernizing forces, including the
Christian church, have used the Pope’s message
to justify their hostility to Christians in India.
Will Cardinal Ratzinger’s Declaration intensify
opposition to Christians in some parts of Asia? Ratzinger
develops his theology without asking any question
about the weight and power of religious ideas in
society. We should have learnt from the
devastating cultural impact of the Church’s
anti-Jewish rhetoric that religious ideas have
practical consequences, and that if these ideas do
not promote love, justice and peace, then they are
not true reflections of the gospel of Jesus. A second pastoral issue related to the topic of the Declaration is the troubling awareness that in many situations of injustice and persecution, Catholics are not necessarily the boldest witnesses to the love of Jesus. Research on the persons who, during World War II, helped to save Jewish men and women from violent death has revealed that Christians were by no means more loving and more generous than people indifferent to religion. Research on prejudice in the United States has found that prejudice against. certain groups of citizens is stronger in Christian groups than among secular people. In the Report of the Truth and Justice Commission of South Africa, a special section deals with the churches and reveals that on the whole, apart from a number of courageous men and women, the churches did not offer resistance to the apartheid system. A recent book by Charles Villa-Vicencio, reviewed in The Ecumenist (Winter 2000, p. 17), examined South Africans who took the risk of standing up against the evil structure and concluded that they were a mixed crowd, representing different religions and secular outlooks. Yet all of them felt inwardly compelled to love their neighbour and take risks in doing so. Feeling inwardly compelled to love and resist evil sounds to theological ears like God’s presence in the human heart. But if it is true that God’s Spirit moves where it wills, then how modest must the Church become when it claims a special status before God and at the same time examines its historical record in matters of slavery, colonialism, racism, sexism, the suppression of freedom and so forth, all matters in which the ethical initiative has usually come from outsiders. Has Cardinal Ratzinger’s theology an adequate notion of religious truth? He seems to recognize only its cognitive dimension. Yet redemptive truth is much more than information about God; redemptive truth modifies human consciousness, it makes believers see themselves and their world in a new light, it relates them in a new way to their neighbour and it expresses itself in new attitudes and new actions. God’s truth saves. What Catholic theology must wrestle with is to find a concept of redemptive truth that respects the cognitive dimension and yet relativizes it in the light of its transformative func-tion. In my own writing I have often referred to “the irony of the gospel” – that we encounter people outside the Church who are more trusting, more hopeful and more loving than we are ourselves. Who knows the heretical opinions swirling in the head of the Good Samaritan! An idea of revealed truth remains incomplete if it does not take its salvific power into account.
Gregory Baum The
Ecumenist, vol. 37, no 4, Fall 2000 [ Retour ]
|
