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Christian, remember your
baptism
These remarks were delivered by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann as part of
a panel discussion at St. Johns School of Theology, Collegeville, Minn.,
on April 17, 1997. Panelists were asked to speak about the meaning and purpose
of the Second Vatican Council and on the state of the reform and renewal in
todays church.
Cardinal [Leo] Suenens [of Belgium] stated that Vatican Council II
was a council about ecclesiology, about the nature and activities of the
church. I believe most theologians would agree. So I suppose the first question
that comes to mind is what is the church?
It may come as a surprise to many to discover that Vatican Council
I in 1870 and Vatican Council II have given radically different answers to that
question. For more than three centuries before Vatican II, the accepted answer
would have been that of Robert Bellarmine: The church is a society. There are
two perfect societies, that of the church and of the state. Thats not a
very spiritually inspiring definition, is it? It is a definition in fact which
a priori excludes the very possibility of collegiality. It was only in the
1920s that a new, or rather, the biblical, Pauline and patristic understanding
of the church, began to surface again in the Western church. And it became the
leitmotif of the pastoral liturgical movement, namely, the church as the body
of Christ.
The body of Christ. Too bad it was called mystical body of
Christ. At that time many were put off by the word mystical: What has
that got to do with me? Perhaps at the present time the term would be
welcomed.
The concept of church, or body of Christ, only gradually gained
acceptance. It was a very sensitive subject. We had to be very careful in
speaking of it, or printing an article about it in Orate Fratres or
Worship [magazine], principally because, I suppose, of our
post-Reformation nervousness about the priesthood of the laity, of the
faithful. Only with Pius XIIs encyclical on the mystical body in 1943 did
it gain respectability. Let me quickly enumerate five of its most inspiring and
revolutionary implications.
1. Every baptized Christian is an active, co-responsible member
of the body having a distinctive contribution to make. This became the
Magna Carta of the laity, the basis of active participation in the liturgy and
the great movements of the time; the Jocists, the Family Life Movement, the
Catholic Worker.
2. Collegiality: Bishops are not vicars of the pope. They,
too, are vicars of Christ. The diocese is not just a geographical division of
the universal church; it is the local church, united to all other churches, and
in a most special way to Rome, the church of the pope. The bishops
leadership is made manifest above all in the celebration of the Eucharist.
3. The presences of Christ: Not only in the eucharistic
bread and cup but Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am
in the midst of them. This involved a long overdue rethinking of
sacraments. Sacraments are not just external signs to confer grace, that
terribly mechanistic, automatic understanding of the sacraments that created
rightful scandal among our Protestant friends. Sacraments are not things, they
are acts. They are acts of Christ. Christ is in our midst, continuing to send
the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the church.
4. The recovery of the resurrection of Christ as
redemptive: We in the West for some 500 years at least had put almost
exclusive emphasis on Christs passion and death as effecting our
redemption. How bad the situation was is clear from the fact that [F.X.]
Durrwells book on the resurrection as redemptive, published in 1960, just
a few years before the council, created heated controversy. But the apostle
Paul said, Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification,
that is, that we might have life, Christs life.
No wonder Augustine could cry out, We are sons and daughters
of the resurrection, and Alleluia is our song!
5. And what is that life of Christ? It is the life of the
risen Christ. It is divine life. We are sons and daughters of God, not by
nature but by gift. This is the essence of the Christian glad tidings. To quote
a patristic cliché, God became human that we might become
divine. Or, as St. Leo the Great tells us, Christian, remember your
dignity. And that thought, I submit, constitutes the one and only school
of Christian spirituality of the biblical and patristic period. There are
dozens of schools of spirituality at the present time. This is the only one
that I could recognize in the writings of the early church: Christian,
remember who you are, or equivalently, Christian, remember your
baptism.
I should, by right, add a sixth point. Since Vatican II, a new
situation has arisen, a rightful demand to achieve and to put into effect the
equality of male and female. In this question, also, the doctrine of the body
of Christ, as expressed, for example, in Galatians 3, or 1 Corinthians 12, the
body of Christ concept gives us the strongest and clearest biblical warrant for
urging the radical equality of men and women. You all know the famous passage:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither
male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians
3:28).
In conclusion, therefore, let me say, the topic of our discussion
is the renewal of the church. Those of us who are old enough will remember what
an exhilarating and enriching period of spiritual renewal were the several
decades of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement, a movement inspired by the
doctrine of the body of Christ. It was a voyage of ever new discoveries. When
all is said and done, Vatican II was a church-wide effort to effect spiritual
and structural renewal by that same doctrine.
I submit that it is a complete misunderstanding of the council to
think that the concept people of God was meant to replace that of
the body of Christ, as largely happened after the Vatican Council
II. The chosen people of the Old Testament, the Jews, were already spoken of as
the people of God. The new dispensation offers something gloriously new; the
people of God have become the family of God, true sons and daughters of
God.
The term people of God was used as the heading of
Chapter Two of the document on the church chiefly to pick out, to give
prominence to, one important aspect of the body of Christ, namely, that the
entire body is more important than any of its members, even pope and bishop,
and that applies also to the teaching of infallibility. The total body is
greater than its parts.
In a word, renewal of the church according to the council demands
of necessity the recovery in the popular minds and perhaps in that of
theologians the biblical and patristic understanding of the church as the body
of Christ. Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a
member.
National Catholic Reporter, February 26,
1999
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