Analysis Anglican-Catholic commission reaches agreement on
authority
By JOHN WILKINS
Special to the National Catholic Reporter
The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has been at
work for 30 years. Its method has been to try to get behind the Maginot lines
of doctrinal formulas of the past so as to breathe more freely in open country.
In this way it has achieved agreement on disputed questions of ministry and the
Eucharist, which would have seemed inconceivable before it started out.
On authority -- most difficult of all -- there has been
convergence, with a request from the churches for more work. Hence the
commissions latest document, The Gift of Authority, which
takes the further step of accepting papal primacy (NCR, May 28). A
number of evangelical Anglicans are protesting in alarm that the heritage of
the Reformation is being dismantled, but the text poses many questions for
Roman Catholics as well.
The theological method used to reach agreement is fertile and
creative. The document turns on a scriptural passage, Second Corinthians 1:19
and 1:20, where St Paul writes of our amen to Gods
yes to us. So authority is a gift because it aids our
reception of Gods assurances -- our amen. The document also
introduces the crucial concept of re-reception, necessary when some
elements of the apostolic tradition have been neglected or some
formulations of it are perceived to be inadequate or even misleading in a
new context. The whole people of God are involved in this process of
reception and re-reception, at every step, right up to the stage of solemn
definitions pronounced from the chair of Peter in the Church of Peter and
Paul. These definitions may express only the faith of the
church.
Where previous commission documents drew back, this one then takes
the jump of commending the primacy of the bishop of Rome as a gift to be
received by all the churches. There has been a steady and unprecedented
movement within Anglicanism toward acceptance of the idea that some form of
authority is needed that is able to take precedence. Otherwise there is nothing
to stop church provinces from getting into incompatible positions and rupturing
communion. So why not go for the option that is available -- the traditional
primacy of the bishop of Rome? But only on the basis that each church learns
from the other, sharing its strengths while correcting its weaknesses. The
document clearly assumes that the papacy has to be reformed, as the Catholic
church has been reformed.
Nor is this simply a surrender by the Anglicans. Far from it. The
text claims that forms of primacy exist in both churches -- thus
Anglican provinces have a primate, there is a primates meeting that
serves the whole Anglican Communion, and the archbishop of Canterbury has a
primatial role within the Anglican Communion. So it is here being claimed that
Anglican bishops share in the teaching authority of the college of bishops,
which underlies the bishop of Romes universal primacy.
The document then drops a further bombshell --
dynamite, the Jesuit ecumenist Fr. Ted Yarnold has called it.
Members of the commission are of the opinion, they say, that they have now
reached sufficient agreement to allow a universal primacy to be offered and
received even before our churches are in full communion. Unity
under a universal primate before the roadblock of womens ordination is
removed? On this peak of Darien, remarks Yarnold lyrically,
we gaze at the possibilities with wild surmise.
Such are the proposals the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican
Communion are now to evaluate. Obviously the skeptics, both conservative and
progressive, will have a field day.
The former will note that it is not long since Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger was putting his name to a statement of the Vatican Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, which he heads, reasserting that Leo XIIIs
bull Apostolicae Curae is infallible. According to Leo, Anglican orders
are null and void, and Anglican bishops are not bishops at all.
The progressive skeptics will say that this is not the moment at
which Anglicans should concede to a papacy that, under John Paul II, has
reasserted so strongly its centralized power.
In the short run, the skeptics are right. The document envisages
that the bishops of the two churches could now cooperate in a variety of ways:
international, regional and local collaboration; joint teaching and witness;
joint ad limina visits to Rome; and so on. Not much of this is likely to
happen. But the commission has produced a landmark text, all the same. The
Gift of Authority now joins the other documents developed by this
commission as an agenda in waiting. The commissions work is like a
deposit in a bank. Its value will be evident when the time comes for it to be
withdrawn for use.
John Wilkins is editor of The Tablet, a Catholic weekly
published in London.
National Catholic Reporter, June 4,
1999
|