Cover
story Doubts about dialogue
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff
Despite the pain that shot through
Roman Catholicism for much of 1986 -- the ongoing silencing of Leonardo Boff,
Fr. Charles Currans loss of his status as a Catholic theologian, the
decision to strip Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of authority in key
areas --the year also offered a remarkable harbinger of reconciliation between
the church and the wider world.
In October 1986, John Paul II assembled 200 leaders of the
worlds great religions in Assisi, Italy, not to pray together
-- that would be theologically problematic -- but to be together and
pray on behalf of peace. To many it seemed the pope wanted to lead the
church beyond the anathemas of the past into an embrace of religious pluralism.
In the years since, however, that hope for inter-religious détente has
run up against some hard doctrinal realities.
On that fall day in the birthplace of St. Francis, John Paul
joined a circle with the Dalai Lama, Orthodox bishops, Hindu swamis and a Crow
Indian medicine man in full-feathered headdress, saying little but offering a
powerful symbol of solidarity. Even that muted gesture was too much for
followers of schismatic, right-wing bishop Marcel Lefebvre, who distributed
flyers denouncing the pontiff as an apostate. In 1988, when Lefebvre ordained
his own bishops, he said he was acting to protect Catholicism from the
spirit of Vatican II and the spirit of Assisi. One U.S. Protestant
fundamentalist called the Assisi gathering the greatest single
abomination in church history.
Less stridently, some members of the Roman curia even voiced
reservations. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the popes top doctrinal officer,
told a German newspaper: This cannot be the model!
John Paul, however, insisted on the propriety of the event:
Diversity is the nature of the human family, he told an
interviewer. We must go beyond [Catholicism] to persons of goodwill who
do not share our faith. It was a striking overture, considering that
Roman Catholicism declared in 1217 at the Fourth Lateran Council that
there is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside which no
one at all is saved.
Today, Boff is out of the priesthood, Curran is teaching at
Southern Methodist University and Hunthausen is retired. With those dragons
slain, and despite the papal goodwill of a decade ago, the theology of
religious pluralism has emerged as the Vaticans new bête noire in
the late 1990s.
The crux of the debate is whether theres a necessary
connection between theological approval of religious pluralism and relativism.
Ratzinger identified relativism in 1996 as the central problem for the
faith at the present time, calling it a threat analogous to liberation
theology in the 1980s. In the wake of that statement, church authorities have
launched a broad crackdown designed to reassert doctrinal limits to
inter-religious dialogue -- where, according to Ratzinger, the danger of
relativism is most acute, since people could conclude that one religion
is as good as another.
Tension in October
Tension between the newly hardened doctrinal line on religious
pluralism and the popes desire for unity heading into the new millennium
will be thrown into stark relief in October, when two events -- the second
European Synod of the decade and a second summit of religious leaders -- follow
one after the other in Rome. While the Oct. 24-28 summit is intended to renew
the fraternal spirit of the 1986 gathering, the Oct. 1-23 synod appears poised
to issue a strong warning about pluralism and an even stronger reaffirmation of
the uniqueness of the Catholic church among the worlds religions.
The new concern with pluralism has so far claimed several
victims:
In January 1997, Sri Lankan Oblate Fr. Tissa Balasuriya was
excommunicated for his views on original sin, Marian piety and the role of
Christ in salvation -- all defended as necessary adaptations to the religious
pluralism of Asia. His excommunication was lifted in 1998 (NCR, Jan. 30,
1998).
In March 1998, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter of Munich,
Germany, informed theologian Perry Schmidt-Leukel that he could not hold a
Catholic professors position. Schmidt-Leukel, whose 1997 book Theology of
Religions: Problems, Options, Arguments is considered a standard in the field,
was told that this theology is in strict opposition
to the
Christian revelation. The decision made Schmidt-Leukel persona non grata
in German-speaking Catholic theology departments.
In August 1998, the Vatican released a posthumous censure
of Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello, whose best-selling books blending Eastern
and Western spirituality were cited for relativizing the faith and
contributing to religious indifferentism. The doctrinal
congregation accused de Mello of teaching that to think the God of
ones own religion is the only one is simply fanaticism. (NCR, Sept.
4, 1998).
In November 1998, Belgian Jesuit Fr. Jacques DuPuis -- a
professor at Romes Gregorian University and an adviser to various Vatican
offices -- confirmed rumors that he was under investigation by Ratzinger for
his book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (NCR, Nov. 20,
1998).
In August 1999, an expert on world religions at the
Catholic University of America, Michael Stoeber, was denied tenure after an
investigation turned up an essay he had written in 1990 favorably comparing the
Hindu doctrine of reincarnation with the Christian idea of resurrection (NCR,
July 2, 1999).
Observers caution there is a danger of mixing apples and oranges
here. De Mello was a popular spiritual writer rather than a theologian, while
Schmidt-Leukel and DuPuis represent different theological options on some key
issues. Still, the common term uniting all these cases is the question of
Catholic dialogue with other faiths.
The debate over religious pluralism was at the heart of the Asian
Synod in the spring of 1998. Many Asian bishops pressed for greater openness to
non-Christian beliefs and a priority for dialogue over evangelization in
contact with non-Christians, while Vatican officials stressed the centrality of
faith in Christ and the uniqueness of the means of salvation entrusted to the
church. The pope is expected to present the concluding document of the Asian
Synod in India in November.
Sources say it is the investigation of DuPuis that seems the
clearest evidence of a new level of scrutiny, since DuPuis is known as a
moderate who has been involved behind the scenes in drafting Vatican documents
on religious pluralism.
Observers caution the new clampdown is not universal, that
interfaith dialogue continues at all levels of Catholicism. Approximately 50
Jesuits from around the world, for example, gathered in Kottayam, India, Aug.
14-21 to discuss work on inter-religious issues.
Moreover, the Vatican has institutionalized its commitment to
inter-religious contact through creation of the Pontifical Council for
Inter-religious Dialogue, headed by the powerful Nigerian Cardinal Francis
Arinze. The secretary of that body, Bishop Michael Fitzgerald, is reportedly
among the front-runners to replace the late Cardinal Basil Hume in England.
The current campaign, therefore, seems designed to control where
dialogue goes rather than to stop it altogether. The message seems to be: Share
the faith and listen to others, but dont go too far toward embracing the
independent validity of non-Christian religions.
That message has made the late 1990s seem like years of living
dangerously for Catholics attracted to a deeper vision of religious pluralism.
When Im with my Catholic friends in public discussions, I
dont raise these questions because it would just embarrass them,
said John Hick, an English Protestant scholar whose work on pluralism is widely
seen as influential.
Whatever they may think privately, they are constrained from
speaking openly. ... There has been a virtual halt to public thinking on this
issue from the Catholic side, Hick said. He spoke to NCR from his home in
Birmingham, England.
It does have an impact, and thats the point of
it, agreed Jesuit Fr. Francis Clooney of Boston College, an expert on
Hinduism. These targets are carefully selected. It makes everybody
reconsider their own positions and critique them for themselves, kind of look
over their shoulders and ask, Is there something Ive written that
could get me investigated?
Ratzingers comparison of religious pluralism with liberation
theology is in some ways an apt one. Both reflect what theologians have called
the irruption of the Third World into Catholic consciousness.
Liberation theology calls attention to massive poverty in the Third World;
pluralism begins with the observation that outside Latin America, most of the
Third World is non-Christian. Both movements reflect the post-conciliar turn in
Catholic theology away from internal church concerns and toward the joys
and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the wider world. Liberation
theology seeks signs of Gods purpose in the struggle for social and
political emancipation; the theology of pluralism seeks elements of truth and
grace in other religions. For Ratzinger and others who believe a naive opening
to the world was the fundamental flaw of the council, both movements are
therefore suspect.
East meets West
In a 1993 speech in Hong Kong, Ratzinger argued that especially in
Asia there is a tendency for modern Western relativism to combine with Eastern
religious agnosticism in the belief that all faiths are equally valid.
Ratzinger says this blend shows up in Hinduism in the 20th century thinker
Radhakrishnan, and on the Catholic side in Fr. Raimon Panikkar. Ratzinger
argued that this relativistic synthesis has echoes to late antiquity, when
pagan thinkers urged Christians to see their faith as merely one among many
paths to truth. Then as now, he said, the church must maintain its claim to
exclusivity: Without this fundamental decision there is no
Christianity.
The preparatory documents for the European Synod, the second
gathering of bishops in Rome this decade, contain tough language on pluralism.
The instrumentum laboris, the working document for the event, says:
Pluralism has taken the place of Marxism in cultural dominance, a
pluralism which is undifferentiated and tending towards skepticism and
nihilism. This pluralism, touching extensive areas of social life today, is
resulting in a strongly reduced anthropology, in many cases without
meaning.
Since the required input from the various European episcopal
conferences to the development of the instrumentum has not been released to the
public, it is impossible to know to what extent this hard line reflects Vatican
thinking or ideas gathered from the bishops. It will therefore be instructive
to watch the interventions at the synod to see which, and how many, prelates
strike a different tone in their approach to other religions.
The instrumentums uncompromising stance also reflects the
thinking of John Paul, who obviously believes that two positions -- openness to
dialogue and insistence upon already possessing the truth -- can be reconciled.
Dialogue can be meaningful, he says, only if it is grounded in absolute clarity
about ones own position. But for advocates of pluralism, there is a
contradiction at the heart of this argument. If other religions can offer only
glimpses of the full truth already present in Christianity, then
Christians engage in dialogue not to learn but to teach -- a distortion, the
pluralists say, of what is conventionally meant by dialogue.
It is not the fact of pluralism that is at issue, and few
Catholics still question whether members of other religions can be saved.
Ratzinger conceded the point in the book-length interview that became
1997s Salt of the Earth: It is definitely possible for someone to
receive from his religion directives that help him become a pure person, which
also, if we want to use the word, help him to please God and to reach
salvation. ... This undoubtedly happens on a large scale, he said.
The real debate, as DuPuis phrased it in his book, is whether
religious pluralism exists de jure as well as de facto -- whether the different
religions are part of Gods saving plan. Put in its simplest terms, the
question is whether members of other religions are saved in spite of, or in and
through, their non-Christian faith.
Riding on the answer, according to observers, are four points of
deep concern in Rome: the danger of moral relativism; the impact on missionary
efforts; how the church understands the salvation achieved through Christ; and
the link between religious pluralism and the power of church officials.
Observers say the Vaticans doctrinal overseers fear a
slippery slope from pluralism to relativism, and from relativism on matters of
dogma to relativism about ethics. Its the camels nose under
the tent, Clooney said. The fear is that if you get boxed into a
relativistic position with the Dalai Lama, if you feel like you cant
criticize him about anything, then maybe you end up not being able to assert
the truth about anything.
Schmidt-Leukel believes this is a misreading of what religious
pluralism represents. Religious pluralism as I understand it has nothing
to do with such relativism, he said in a telephone interview from his
Munich home. The theology of religious pluralism makes a truth claim that
God wills religious diversity. The relativists say you cant make any such
truth claims.
In part, advocates of pluralism argue that Ratzinger and other
church authorities confuse their stance with relativism because Vatican
officials havent bothered to read what advocates of pluralism have
written. Hick noted in a response to Ratzingers 1996 speech that the
cardinal had not only misidentified him as an American, but had badly
misconstrued his central position (NCR, Oct. 24, 1997). Ratzinger had drawn on
a secondary source for his criticism of both Hick and American Catholic
theologian Paul Knitter.
Schmidt-Leukel said this mirrored his experience with Wetter, who
had obviously not read any of my work. He said Wetter called him in
for two conversations and promised a third that never materialized. After he
was notified he would be refused permission to take a position in Catholic
theology at the University of Munich, Schmidt-Leukel found that other
German-speaking dioceses also became inhospitable.
Next year Schmidt-Leukel will move his family to Scotland so he
can accept a theology chair at the nondenominational University of Glasgow.
It came as a kind of salvation to me, he said. Otherwise I
was facing unemployment after 20 years of education, with two small adopted
children to take care of.
Ratzinger never responded to Hick, and Wetter declined through a
spokesperson to be interviewed for this story.
The second concern about pluralism is doctrinal: If other
religions are capable of offering salvation on their own terms, what about the
uniqueness of the redemption won through Christ. This worry leads the authors
of the instrumentum laboris for the European Synod to a strong reassertion of
traditional Christology, the churchs doctrine about Christ.
In the context of the present increasing religious pluralism
in Europe, the Synod also intends to proclaim that Christ is the one and only
Savior of all humanity and, consequently, to assert the absolute uniqueness of
Christianity in relation to other religions. ... Jesus is the one and only
mediator of salvation for all of humanity. Only in him do humanity, history and
the cosmos find their definitively positive meaning and receive their full
realization. He is not only the mediator of salvation but salvations
source.
Though most advocates of religious pluralism would want to modify
this sort of uncompromising language, there is disagreement among them on
exactly what approach to take. DuPuis accepts the idea that Jesus is
constitutive of humanitys salvation, meaning that Jesus holds
universal significance and is the sacrament of Gods saving
will, but he is not the only expression of that will. The nonincarnate
Word, DuPuis believes -- that is, the eternal Word in its manifestations
other than in Jesus -- is operative in other religions and other saving
figures.
Schmidt-Leukel rejects this inclusivist argument,
which holds that salvation is offered through Christ and that members of other
faiths can be included within it. Schmidt-Leukel says Christians should
recognize that other religions offer valid pathways to salvation that cannot be
subsumed into Christ. Hick makes the same point. If you were to talk to a
Muslim and he insisted that salvation comes through ones response to the
Koran alone but that you could be included in it, that is pretty offensive,
isnt it?
In his 1996 speech, Ratzinger says that the pluralist emphasis on
dialogue rather than proclamation of the gospel is the antithesis of
conversion and mission. His remark speaks to the third concern of many
church officials: If you accept that other religions are valid, what happens to
missionary work?
John Paul devoted his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio largely
to this question, lamenting that missionary activity
appears to be
waning and insisting that religious relativism must not replace the
impetus to preach the gospel and to establish new churches among people or
communities where they do not exist, for this is the first task of the church,
which has been sent forth to all peoples and to the very ends of the
earth.
One possible response is to distinguish between
mission and proselytism, as the Federation of Asian Bishops did in
their 1987 Theses on Inter-religious Dialogue. The bishops said:
The focus of the churchs mission of evangelization is building up
the kingdom of God and building up the church to be at the service of the
kingdom. The kingdom is, therefore, wider than the church. From this
point of view, making converts is not the only goal -- it also includes
dialogue and work for justice, directed toward ushering in Gods reign.
DuPuis calls this a regnocentric view.
Knitter, who teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati, endorsed
the idea. We want to establish the church and increase the presence of
the Christian community, not as an end in itself, but as a means to
transforming the world towards greater mutuality and justice, Knitter
said. From that point of view, the primary purpose of missionary work is
to convert people, not to the church, but to the reign of God.
This understanding, however, stands in tension with the
popes declaration in Redemptoris Missio that proclamation is the
permanent priority of mission and that proclamation has Christian
conversion as its aim. In his Hong Kong speech, Ratzinger said the use of
kingdom of God to mean general work for justice is an example of
taking a word from the Bible and applying it in a profane, utopian
sense.
Pluralism and power
Finally, a fourth concern -- rarely voiced openly by Vatican
officials but often attributed to them -- has to do with their own authority.
Its part of the power of the faith, this claim to exclusive
truth, Hick said. People who run religious institutions believe
their future is most secure if they keep complete control over the
truth.
This is what was going on at the Asian synod, wasnt
it? Knitter said. Its difficult to maintain control from the
center if you accept that dialogue calls for adaptation at the local level.
[Fr. Karl] Rahner said somewhere that if a world church really is to emerge, we
have to accept the possibility of there being various magisteria. Thats
what people are really worried about, I think.
For supporters of religious pluralism, these four reservations --
important as they are -- actually miss the deeper issues. The idea that
God is on their side is still part of what enables young men and women to kill
and be killed for some political cause, Hick said. If we could
reduce that, allow people to think that other faiths have their own angle on
the divine, it might help make this a less violent world.
Fr. Balasuriya, who has called for financial reparations for Third
World nations to coincide with the Jubilee Year 2000, says the church also
needs to make theological reparations for the way its insistence on
possessing absolute truth has contributed to war, colonialism, and the
marginalization of Third World voices.
You see, they worry about relativism, but here we worry
about what happens when you absolutize limited human expressions of the
divine, Balasuriya said in a telephone interview from Sri Lanka. We
need to ask, How have we misrepresented Jesus Christ? That is a far
more serious concern.
Clooney says its important not to overstate the impact of
the chill on religious pluralism: Its not the Dark Ages returning,
and I know people who still manage to do good work in the field without getting
into trouble. Yet he admitted the disciplinary moves and hardened
language are cause for concern. If over time they produce a pulling back from
inter-religious dialogue, the loss will not be primarily among particular
theologians who write about it. What theyre trying to do is to find a way
of being a Christian in the millennium to come. It would be a very sad
development if the effect is to frighten Catholics away from thinking about
that question, Clooney said.
If these issues manage to get a serious hearing at either the
Synod for Europe or the summit of religious leaders immediately thereafter,
October could be a very interesting month to be in Rome.
National Catholic Reporter, August 27,
1999
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