Posted on 12/07/2005 2:16:29 AM PST by markomalley
Translated by Cecily Hastings
CANTERBURY BOOKS
SHEED AND WARD INC.
840 BROADWAY
NEW YORK 3
NIHIL OBSTAT: MICHAEL P. NOONAN, S.M., CENSOR DEPUTATUS
IMPRIMATUR: + RICHARD J. CUSHING, ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON
BOSTON, MARCH 22, 1951
This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of "Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf.
A similar reaction against public abuses within the Church accounts for Luther's radical discarding of the seven sacraments and the separate priesthood. In his polemic "De Captivitate Babylonica" he expressly speaks of the multitude of human regulations with which the Church had made of the sacraments a miserable captivity for the faithful.
His own master, Gabriel Biel, had taught him, entirely in accordance with the Catholic interpretation, that in the Mass there is no question of a fresh immolation of Christ, but only of a ritual re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Golgotha, and thus that through the Mass the one sacrifice of Christ is brought out of the past into our present moment, into our Here and Now. Nevertheless Luther's violent rejection of the sacrifice of the Mass can only be understood in relation to that crude externalization, secularization even, which had penetrated even to the innermost sanctuary of the Church and, as Luther complained, made "the Altar of the All Highest into an altar of Baal" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 399). When the clergy were not paid sufficiently for saying Mass they used to say a "missa sicca," i.e., they broke off the Mass before the Consecration. And when the faithful had a Mass said for them they often saw in it not so much the memorial of the death of the Lord as a kind of magic protecting them from earthly harm. As in the former case, Luther here identified a vulgar perversion of current practice with Catholicism itself, and made a clean sweep, rejecting the Mass as sacrifice and accepting only the Supper.
As the logical consequence of all this, Luther rejected along with the sacraments those who dispensed them; he would have nothing of an official priesthood. It is true that his view of the priesthood of the laity was directly in line with his key-doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But it was not in fact because of such speculative theological considerations that he adopted this line and pursued it--he was not speculatively inclined, it was the rage of the reformer, wounded in his deepest religious sensibilities by the frightful degradation of the secular and regular clergy, that convinced him that the priesthood and the religious state were in themselves the origin and the bulwark of abuse, and that they must therefore be torn up by the roots.
But precisely because it was the abuses in the sacramental life that Luther had before his eyes, he never intended to attack the essence of the sacraments themselves, the idea of the sacraments in the Church. In other words, he did not mean to undermine the belief that heavenly gifts are exhibited to us and imparted to us in simple, earthly symbols. His confidence in the objective efficacy of the sacraments is all the more striking in that the subjectivity of his belief concerning salvation must have exerted pressure on him in the opposite direction. And yet he clung to their objective efficacy. He made it clear that he believed that the miracle of grace by which saving faith is imparted is performed in the act of Baptism itself. For this reason he accepted infant Baptism from the Church's tradition, although infants cannot have trusting faith.
Similarly, in deliberate opposition to the "Sacramentarians", as he called Zwingli's followers, he associated the presence of the glorified Christ with the elements of the Eucharist; not, that is, directly with the subjective faith of the person receiving the Sacrament but with the objective faith of the Church, acknowledging the presence of Christ in these elements. When Luther, in his dispute with the Swiss Protestants, expressly taught that even those who are personally unbelieving or unworthy receive the very Body of the Lord, he was testifying in the clearest way to the ancient Catholic belief in the physical as well as spiritual presence of our glorified Lord. It is something independent of the faith within the soul of the communicant.
By retaining the Church's Sacrament of Penance--though without the obligation to confess and without the performance of satisfaction--by separating repentance from justification and holding that justification was only completed in the act of receiving the Sacrament, he was again giving decisive importance not to the trusting faith of the person alone but also to the extra-personal, impersonal outward sign. Thus a roundabout way was opened for the reintroduction of a kind of Sacrament of Penance, and as Harnack sarcastically says: "A practice was created which was even worse, because laxer, than the Roman confessional" ("History of Dogma," 6th ed., p. 472).
In all these sacraments it is a simple, visible sign that objectively guarantees the presence of the Holy One, the blessing of the Redeemer. Thus through them the Church's functionary who performs this sign in the name of Christ and by the Church's commission, necessarily in some sense re-enters the domain of the supernatural, and acquires in some sense full powers whose ultimate basis can only be an express decision of our Lord's will and a special commission from Him. Thus the old character of the Catholic priesthood still clings to Luther's lay priesthood, in so far as an objectively efficacious sign of grace necessarily implies a minister objectively and effectively empowered to carry out this sign.
We cannot escape from the fact that wide tracts of Luther's thought were simply Catholic. The people who eliminated these Catholic elements from his message were the Lutheran theologians of the period of orthodoxy, especially in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There have always been on both sides theologians who, instead of protecting and promoting living religion, have endangered it. On both sides it has always been their habit to entangle living beliefs in bloodless abstractions, concepts and ideologies, and then to use the result as a ball to juggle with in polemic dispute. And when, having elaborated their systems of thought, they commit them to paper, it is usually with a bitter and choleric pen, and love is not in them. So it has always been. So it was then.
Luther himself, as we have seen, judged the doctrines, ordinances and usages of the Church according to their fitness for survival as he saw it: that is, according to whether they appeared to him to be loaded with gross abuses, or not. He suffered personally from the festering wounds in the Church and sought in his own fashion to heal them. It is true that he went about it, especially in the latter part of his life, with a self-assuredness and a cheerful readiness to assume responsibility which sometimes bordered on irresponsibility (Lortz, vol. i, p. 427). He was sometimes too ready simply to cut off the diseased limb instead of healing it. But his fundamental intention remained the healing and renewal of the ancient Church, not her dissolution and destruction. In the midst of his most violent attacks on Rome he said: "I may be mistaken; I am not a heretic" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 393). In the depths of his soul he was still, despite everything, bound to the Church, and that means to the Church as he then saw her, ecclesia, una, sancta, catholica et apostolica.
We find a very different attitude in the orthodox theology which gradually developed and established itself. It took the Lutheran doctrines out of their historical context, separated them from the ecclesiastical abuses with which they were bound up and presented them simply in themselves, as an abstract system of ideas, as the new Gospel in fundamental opposition to the old Gospel. Their expositions no longer envisaged the suffering Church, labouring under abuses, but simply the Church that had been. They were concerned to found and establish a completely new Church. Lutheran theology became radically anti-Catholic. It was therefore a special aim of their polemical writing to seize on all the Catholic elements which Luther had tolerated, and even expressly affirmed, and in the interests of the stylistic purity of their Lutheran doctrinal edifice ruthlessly to eliminate them. This de-Catholicizing process was pushed so far that to-day, as we have seen, Lutheran theologians who wish to bring their people back to Luther's own vision of the Church are accused of Catholicizing tendencies. Now indeed altar was set up against altar and Church against Church.
But did not Luther himself, with unequalled savagery, attack the essential foundation of the Catholic Church, the "Rock" on which she is built? As early as the Leipzig Disputation in 1519 Luther had disputed the divine institution of the Papacy and its necessity for salvation, and from 1520 onwards he never tired of branding it as "the most poisonous abomination that the chief of devils has sent upon the earth".
That is indeed so. Papacy had no bitterer, no more determined foe than the barefoot friar of Wittenberg. He converted opposition and even hatred towards the Papacy into an essential element of Protestantism. The Rock which supports and safeguards the unity of the Church became in his teaching a rock on which that unity splits.
It is so to-day. There is no greater barrier to the union of German Christianity than the Roman Pope and his claim to have been called by God to be the Vicar of Christ and the Shepherd of all the faithful. All the theological difficulties that we have seen so far admit of at least a possible solution. But in this matter any such possibility seems excluded from the start. Why? Because in this matter not only men's minds but their very blood rise in revolt.
For centuries it was Germans who suffered most from the detestable strife which arose between the Papacy and the Emperors because of an unhappy confusion of religious and ecclesiastical issues with political and economic ones. The onset of externalism and worldliness which accompanied the Avignon captivity was and is felt by those of the Lutheran faith in a far deeper sense than by us Catholics. We make a sharp distinction between the person and the office. They see the crying scandal of a prolonged outrage against the majesty of the Holy One, against the spirit of Christianity. Because their creed was born of the struggle against abuses identified with Catholicism, protest against the Catholic Church is an essential element of their whole religious attitude, the necessary foundation of their independent existence. But even in those Protestant circles where religion no longer speaks with the accents of Luther, opposition to the Papacy is firmly rooted. There is no sense in hiding this. That passion for independent thought, for the autonomy of the intellect, which was engrafted into the German soul by nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, sees in every papal command, every Roman decree, every book placed on the Index, a relapse into the Middle Ages and a threat to the basic rights of the human spirit.
As we have already stated, there is no possibility of any Christian rapprochement with the prophets or believers of "free thought". They are too small and narrow for us, and, however much they rave about the freedom of the intellect, they are not free enough for us. They are too small and narrow for us because they shut themselves up from the start in the limited world of phenomena, the world of appearances. They put artificial blinkers on eyes open to unconditioned, eternal reality, because they will not see the real world, the world of God, which brings forth the visible world and maintains it in being. Plato would say that one of their eyes is missing, the eye that perceives what is above and beyond the senses, the Reality of realities, the Mind of all mind.
We Christians cannot be content to share the vision of such moles. Even if the unfettered human intellect had attained to an understanding of all the forces and all the phenomena of this narrow little visible world and co-ordinated them in one system, we should feel in that system as in a cage. Again and again we should thrust our way through its bars to cry our Sursum Corda! For we Christians believe in a final, supreme meaning of all being and becoming. This Meaning is the living God. And we believe that the living God has opened Himself to us, in certain homines religiosi, the Patriarchs and Prophets, and at last in His Only-begotten Son, that He has opened to us the very depths of His being and of His inconceivable love. Standing within this love our souls can grow to their height and breadth. They grow free, incomparably freer than the purveyors of human freedom can ever become. For it is only in faith in the living God that we know that we are more excellent than the stream of cosmic forces and powers. We are above this stream, not below it. And it is only if we start from faith that we can read the riddle of existence and attain to a satisfactory understanding of the world and of ourselves. It is only because we are children of God that we are really free.
Union is only possible, then, where faith in the living God and His Incarnate Son still binds and strengthens consciences. It is only with believing Protestants that we can discuss this final decisive question: whether the Papacy was founded by the will of Christ, or whether it is Antichrist who has achieved an historical embodiment in it. For believing Christians this question can only be solved in the light of Revelation, only, that is, by listening in reverent fear to the Word of God, and to His Word alone, not to personal preferences and feelings. No anti-Roman sentiment should be allowed to decide the question for us or accompany our consideration of it. Ulrich von Hutten's diatribes against "foreign priests" are understandable against the background of the contemporary situation. All Germany was completely "anti-Roman" then, as the Papal Nuncio Aleander was himself compelled to report. The policy of the Curia in matters of finance and official appointments, and other things besides, had exasperated national instincts in the highest degree.
To-day there is no longer any just excuse for regarding the religious question from the point of view of national politics and giving it an answer in those terms. The Renaissance tendency in Rome came to an end, broadly speaking, with the frightful visitation of the sacco di Roma, when the Eternal City was laid waste in May 1527. The Council of Trent and the great reforming Popes, Pius V, Gregory XII and Sixtus V, finally eradicated the abuses within the Church. Not one of Luther's accusations could justly be made to-day. Even the political dealings of the Roman See with secular princes have become impossible. No sober theologian would to-day accept Gregory VII's "Dictatus papae." The Gregorian system, resting on presuppositions completely alien to our own, can be finally relegated to the past. It was the result of the medieval view of the world. On a deeper level, it resulted from the fact that the unity of Western Christendom was created by Rome alone, that its maintenance through the centuries was due solely to the authority of the Roman Pope, that the Emperor himself owed his numinous aspect entirely to his coronation by the Pope, and that it was common Christian belief that all matters of political, economic and cultural policy were from the moral point of view (ratione peccati) subject to the authority of the Roman See. The rise of the principle of nationality and the national states cut away a considerable area from the Gregorian system, and it was finally superseded by the new idea of the world and humanity introduced by the Renaissance. In consequence it is not possible nowadays for a Lutheran to keep his eyes on the abuses of the late Middle Ages and speak of the papal Antichrist as a mainstay for his own religious position.
Since the Council of Trent the idea of the Papacy has been tremendously spiritualized. It has become strictly religious, strictly Christian, strictly ecclesiastical, and the glorious image of the Vicar of Christ shines out from all the illustrious figures that have adorned the Papal throne since the great reforming Popes. As things are now, the question of the divine rights of the Papacy can be decided for the faithful only in the light of Revelation. Since the believing Protestant, with the overwhelming majority of modern theologians, cannot entertain doubts concerning the authenticity of Matt. xvi. 18-19, his conscience is clearly and seriously confronted by our Lord's words to Peter: ". . . I say to thee, that thou art the rock and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." He must face up to these words.
From the purely Biblical point of view it is indeed possible for him to think here of Peter only, not his successors or in particular his successors in Rome. But he will not wish nor be able to deny that there is another possible interpretation. For Christ's words are valid for all time. They are words of eternity. If the first generation had need of a rock if it was not to be defeated by the gates of hell, how much more would later centuries, threatened from all sides by schisms and heresies! Could Christ really have been considering only the few years in which Peter was to live? Would Christ not rather have been thinking of the Last Times which would be cut short by His coming and for which He wished to build an unconquerable Church? It is in any case only in this sense that Christianity afterwards understood Jesus' words concerning the rock and therefore called the See of Rome even from early Christian times the "See of Peter" (cathedra Petri). For it was convinced that Peter died as a martyr in Rome and was buried there, and that he lived on in his successors. It was in any case precisely the Church of Rome which from the time of Cyprian (d. 258), Irenaeus (d. 202) and even Ignatius of Antioch (d. circ. 110), was regarded as the chief Church of Christendom, as its true and unique centre of unity, creating and guaranteeing that unity.
As in the course of centuries the Church spread all over the world and the centrifugal forces, the forces of schism, grew stronger, so the inexhaustible vitality of the Church liberated centripetal forces too, and theologians understood more and more unambiguously and univocally the meaning of the Rock upon which Christ founded His Church. There is a great significance in the change which took place in the attitude of the greatest of the theologians of the end of the Middle Ages, the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Like many of the theologians of the time, at the Councils of Constance and Basle he had, both in speech and in writing, supported Conciliarism, i.e., the superiority of a General Council to the Pope. But the lessons of Basle, the depressing realization that even the strongest religious desires do not prove themselves strong enough to create a unity of spirits, that there are situations so charged with explosive matter that even a General Council is no longer capable of reaching a united decision--all this drove him to the conclusion that amid the fluctuations of opinion there must be a last resort, a rock, to protect unity under all circumstances; a final, supreme religious authority, which ex sese, i.e., independently of the judgment of the bishops, can decide questions of faith and morals, and to which the whole Church is bound.
What Nicholas of Cusa discovered was to be learnt in the course of time by the whole of Christendom. We find ourselves confronted by the facts that alongside Luther appear Zwingli, Calvin and Thomas Munzer; that soon after Melanchthon's death the Lutheran Church was shaken by the crypto-Calvinists and Pietists; that in England, alongside the Anglican Church, Puritans, Presbyterians and Independents founded religious communions; and that to-day in America we can count more than three hundred sects tearing the Body of Christ to pieces. These facts practically force upon us the Catholic interpretation of Matt. xvi. 18, as finally developed at the Vatican Council in 1870.
It is the inner necessity of the Church, the constant threat and peril to her unity from human subjectivism, that necessitates this interpretation. For the sake of the unity of the Church the Rock of Peter's office must remain through the centuries, so that the Gates of Hell may not prevail. Seen from this viewpoint, the Roman Papacy and its claim to Apostolic authority cannot be an insuperable obstacle to the Christian confessions' coming together. For it is this Papacy alone which makes possible and realizes what all of us Christians must strive for, spiritual unity amongst ourselves.
Part 4...
But, although I wouldn't have worded it quite that way, I do agree with the author's point about the primacy of the See of Peter. If you were to take a look at a post I made on another thread, you will see the scriptural evidences I presented to substantiate this. The record of the General Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) shows both the need for taking a concilliar approach to the determination of critical theological issues; however, it also shows that the final authority of the keys rested with St. Peter when the council was unable to achieve consensus as a body.
One reason that comes to mind is the reliance on the Emperor Pantocrator either in Byzantium or Russia. The Orthodox Church -- except perhaps on its geographical periphery or at some historical fault lines -- had a cooperating state of which Gregory VII would not dream.
Related to that is the expansive nature of Roman social teaching. This is a church that cannot sit still till all quandaries of life: war and peace, church and state, marriage and divorce, contraception and abortion, euthanasia and surrogate parenthood -- are all opined about in a neat doctrine. We are in every bar brawl. I say so with pride. In comparison, and by her own admission, the Orthodox Church is centered around an objective, visible, identifiable well-preserved since the time of the Gospels kernel. There is much less to run from the center for.
Emperor Pantocrator -> Emperor Autocrator
"One reason that comes to mind is the reliance on the Emperor Pantocrator either in Byzantium or Russia. The Orthodox Church -- except perhaps on its geographical periphery or at some historical fault lines -- had a cooperating state of which Gregory VII would not dream."
Until 1453 this was theoretically the case, though in fact it hadn't been really true for some centuries before that. After 1453 most of the Orthodox world was under Mohhammaden oppression. Russia is a different story of course. Your point is well taken though and it seems to me that the way Petrine Primacy developed in the West was a direct result of "facts on the ground" in the West. The task ahead of us all now is to come to an agreement on what that primacy really and practically can mean in a united Church today. Even the Orthodox accept that it is more than a mere primacy of honor .
Thank you for this post. I agree that the modern papacy developed at least in part in response to the ills of modernity, that also originated in the West. For example, the formalization of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is thought of as being due to the materialistic view on the nature of man. To them who deny the reality of theosis we say, look at Mary, the true woman.
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