Called to Communion: understanding the Church today.

San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1996, 165 pages, paperback, $11.95 (US)

REVIEWED BY FATHER LEONARD KENNEDY, C.S.B.

This book contains five talks given by Cardinal Ratzinger in recent years. They deal with the nature of the Church, which must be clearly understood if we are to make any changes in her to help her to function better. Because the Cardinal treats this subject in depth, it is not easy reading. It requires attention and perseverance.

Origins

The first essay deals with the origin and essence of the Church. It considers whether Christ founded a church and, if so what kind of Church he founded. The liberal theory of the Church downplays its ritual and its priesthood and stresses the importance of the individual conscience as opposed to the institution, tending to reduce Christianity to ethics. This theory also has a Marxist branch, in which the class struggle between priests and prophests will end with the classless society.

On the other hand, the true interpretation of the Bible is that Jesus founded a cultic religion in which the Eucharist replaces the Temple. Through the Eucharist we are brought together as the Body of Christ. Individualism is out. We are all incorporated into Christ and all become one with him and thus with one another. We are a corporate personality. This same point is made by the consideration that Christ is the bridegroom of the whole Church.

It is also important to remember that the Church was not founded by man but by the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost. And the Church is universal from the start; it is not a federation of local churches. The Church reproduces itself throughout the world and yet remains the one Church. "The temporal and ontological priority lies with the universal church." This is important in answering questions such as what is the relationship of the Pope to the other bishops.

Primacy of Peter

The second talk deals with the primacy of Peter and the unity of the Church. The Cardinal is convinced that a Church without unity cannot remain the same: "Only such a centre can be an effective protection against the drift into dependence on political systems or the pressures emanating from our civilization."

He says that it is easy to see in the New Testament that Peter was given very important privileges. It is harder, however, to see that they were to be passed on to his successors in the papacy, since no Scripture text says such a thing explicitly. The matter was settled historically, as it were, by the way in which the whole Church came to recognize the leadership of Rome (where St. Peter was martyred), with the other two most important sees, Antioch and Alexandria, acknowledging this. This agreement, he says, came before agreement on the canon of Scripture, which was brought about chiefly by Rome. The agreement is, therefore, as much a part of authentic tradition as is the Bible.

Church universal and local

The third talk considers the relationship between the universal and the local Church. The Church is the Eucharist, the Body of Christ. The Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ literally, and also the Body of Christ metaphorically. The Church exists to continue the work of Christ on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, to draw everyone into the Paschal Mystery. It is a communion, but one in which the vertical element is absolutely necessary, since the horizontal element would not exist without it.

The Church is not a club; it exists for everyone. And it achieves its unity in each diocese through the bishop; that is why there is only one bishop of each diocese. And the universal unity of the Church requires the Pope. The (Eastern) Orthodox Church recognizes the need for unity on the diocesan level, but has no universal binding factor. The Protestant Churches have the Church coming from below, with the assembly as the safeguard of unity, but this is a formula for universal plurality, schism and disunion.

In the Catholic Church the bishop is the source of unity in a diocese, yet he is first of all a representative of the universal Church. The universal Church has precendence over the local one, as we see in the New Testament with the Apostles. One sign of this is that a bishop has to be consecrated by three neighbouring bishops. And throughout the history of the Church, bishops have had contacts with other Catholic bishops.

Essence of the priesthood

The fourth talk considers the essence of the priesthood. The large number of priests leaving the Church a few decades ago indicates that there was something of a doubt concerning its nature. An important error was to think that the priest was simply someone with certain functions to perform in the Church. This error led to thinking that it was the priest who brought about the Kingdom of God, through his talents.

But the truth is that the Kingdom is brought about by God, by Jesus bringing God's message to his Apostles and disciples, and by the Apostles, bishops, and priests bringing this same message to men down through the ages. That is what it means for ordination to be a sacrament: priests are not appointed by a congregation to perform certain functions; they are chosen by God to carry on not their own agenda but Christ's and the Father's.

A corollary of this is that "the essential foundation of priestly ministry is a deep personal bond to Jesus Christ." Another is that the priest, since he is called to do Christ's work, need not worry about "success"; he can leave the outcome to God. This is an antidote to frustration and overwork, to a "strained pursuit of results." Another corollary is that the priest's real task is to lead men to Christ: "Many priests today doubt whether it really benefits men to bring them to faith or whether one is not thereby making life harder for them. They think that it might be better for them to let men remain unbelievers in good conscience, because it seems easier to live that way. When faith is conceived merely as an added complication of life, it cannot give joy....

Only such joy in Christ can also give joy for ministry and make it bear fruit."

Renewal in the Church

The fifth talk has to do with renewal in the Church. Some people are dissatisfied with the Church because it does not accept dissent, others because there is so much dissent, others because it restricts freedom, especially because the Church is supposed to bring happiness instead of restriction.

As a result some want the Church to become a democracy ruled by majority opinion; some want constant change in the liturgy to make it more "meaningful." Both of these are activist solutions, and their advocates do not realize that what is needed for reform is not doing something, but becoming something.

Michelangelo looked at a stone and saw in it what he wanted to produce.

He looked on his task as getting rid of something, removing impediments. What we must do is remove the impediments to our faith, remove from ourselves whatever stands in the way of seeing what sin is, and repenting of it. Activism is not the answer: "The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is."

Also, if we want to be truly democratic, we should remember that the voters are not just the living but all those who have died, and especially the saints, as St. Thomas More said when his judges told him that nearly everyone else in England had accepted the Oath of Supremacy. We must keep the unum necessarium always in mind and not fall into unthinking activism. "Where there is no longer anything worth dying for, life itself is no longer worth living for."

The insights of Cardinal Ratzinger are often startlingly new, but they are always sound. And he is convinced that we must have a clear notion of the nature of the Church, and the nature of the priesthood to which it is essentially connected, if we are to solve the problems whose solutions depend on a correct diagnosis of what Jesus intended when he founded these two related institutions.

Father Leonard Kennedy is a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil (C.S.B.). He is a retired professor of philosophy who now devotes himself to writing on theology.