Books Plea for a consiliar church
UNANSWERED
QUESTIONS By Christoph Theobald and Dietmar Mieth, editors, Issue
One in the 1999 volume of Concilum Orbis Books, $15
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By HUBERT
FEICHTLBAUER
Unanswered questions after Vatican II was the theme
that caused editors of the Netherlands-based Catholic journal Concilium
to present their latest issue in the shadow of St. Peters Cathedral in
Rome.
They held a news conference introducing this issue at the end of a
colloquium held in the same room where 35 years ago Concilium was
initiated by publisher Paul Brand with famous theologians such as Frs. Karl
Rahner, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx and Yves Congar as its godfathers.
Both the issue and the colloquium offer important food for
thought.
Some of the still unanswered questions as this dialogue-oriented
publication views it today: Are we marching back to the pre-conciliar reading
of the Bible? Are we prepared to encounter neighbors of other
faiths in our global village? How much headway has liberation from the
straits of church morality made? Has the new paradigm of sexuality been fully
grasped? Has doctrinal teaching concerning womens ordination met the test
of conciliarity? Why is the magisterium afraid of a creative instead of a
blindly obedient reception of its teachings? Hasnt pre-conciliar
fundamentalism and integralism crept back into our church? And finally: Should
we strive for a new ecumenical council?
The call for decentralization of church power, of conciliar ways
of decision-making, and for the application of subsidiarity within the church
was clearly audible during the Rome meeting and is vehemently voiced in the new
Concilium.
Brazils José Oscar Beozzo, lecturer at the theology
faculty of São Paulo University, calls, among other things, for a
strengthening of mechanisms for shared authority at all levels of church life.
Diocesan synods and less formal diocesan assemblies should become the principal
forums for decision-making. Synods of bishops should mature in the
direction of greater co-responsibility with the bishop of Rome in the
governance of the universal church.
Beozzo argues that baptism should be re-evaluated as the
founding sacrament, which would not only allow for more synodality
and conciliarity in decision-making, but also for a greater role played by the
educated conscience of Christians in their decision-making.
The colloquium also issued a clear plea for a stronger role for
theology and theological thinking within the church. We need theologians
more urgently than ever, Dominican Fr. Timothy Radcliff, master general
of the Dominican order, said to the assembly. Happiness must be the fruit
of theology. I am happy to be a theologian, he said.
Dominicans and Jesuits have had a close association with
Concilium since its founding.
Participants in the Rome colloquium, like the contributors to the
new issue, were unanimous that theologians must not evade problems like war,
injustice and poverty. Karl-Josef Kuschel, professor of culture and
interreligious dialogue at the University of Tübingen, made a passionate
plea for interfaith communication to bring about better preconditions for
nonviolent problem solving.
Kuschel argued that Jewish-Christian relations should be on
the agenda forever, and that Islam must be taken much more seriously by
Christians who in the past have mostly demonized or ignored it. There has been
no serious theological reflection on the passages about Islam in Nostra
Aetate (Vatican IIs declaration on other religions), Kuschel said,
and he welcomed the reported intention of the pope to invite religious leaders
of the world to a prayer meeting in the Vatican this fall.
The idea of another ecumenical council came up repeatedly in the
colloquium, as it does in the Concilium issue. Of course we are
not suggesting to readers the agenda for a future Vatican III, publishers
Christoph Theobald (professor of fundamental and dogmatic theology in Paris)
and Dietmar Mieth (professor of theological ethics in Tübingen) profess in
their introduction.
It is not certain that the time for such an ecumenical
assembly has come. Rather, we need to enter collectively into a period of
experimentation in which the church accepts becoming more like a laboratory, in
which many experiments are being carried on. And they do not hesitate to
add: Doubtless with unforeseen results.
In this connection its worth noting that the Swiss bishop of
Basel, Kurt Koch, and the auxiliary bishop of Vienna, Austria, Helmut
Krätzl, recently discussed the question of calling a new ecumenical
council during a session at the University of Vienna. Koch said that a new
council might be needed to resolve the issues of priestly ordination for women
and married men. Krätzl, however, issued a caution: Today, he said, the
votes arent there among the bishops to assure progress on either issue.
So, he seemed to suggest, be careful what you wish for./P>
Hubert Feichtlbauer is the chair of the Austrian We Are
Church movement and a columnist for the Austrian newspapers Die
Presse and Die Furche.
National Catholic Reporter, July 16,
1999
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