Protestants & the pope

...The highly politicized image of the pope, the Renaissance prince or head of the Vatican state, the proud, authoritarian figure who demanded absolute obedience to his infallible teaching, the man who tyrannized, fearful consciences with dogmas— images which were dear to Protestant polemics in the past— had given way to the image of a pastoral figure who had shed the ancient princely trappings of his office (by refusing the tiara) and who cared for the poor...

...This may be true, but given the rigorous demands of his trip, the necessity to address many and different groups on a dozen different topics, with so many people hanging on his every word, the pope had to be ready with prepared texts for speeches and homilies...

...WE THINK it important to register these feelings of unease because our reactions, and the reactions of other Protestants, touch on issues that have not been raised by Roman Catholic commentators who have been preoccupied with the specific moral and ecclesiastical problems he addressed...

...If there are genuine theological reasons why women should not be ordained, or if it can be shown that contraception is inherently immoral, then the pope has the responsibility to stand by such views no matter how unpleasant the consequences...

...There is no reason, as far as we can see, that the man who is bishop of Rome in the last decades of the twentieth century should perpetuate a style of papal leadership that belongs to an earlier period in Christian history...

...The very style of his pronouncements confirmed this impression...

...In this view, one which is widespread within Roman Catholicism (and also in many sections of Protestantism), authority is set over against reason, persuasion, individual judgment...

...Therefore, contrary to John Paul IPs suggestions that theologians must be careful not to upset the laity (or themselves and the hierarchy), theologians must be free to do nothing less if they are faithful to their calling...

...In his reign the medieval papacy reached the zenith of political and spiritual power...

...Peter...

...As far as we are aware this title has dropped out of papal speeches in recent years, and its appearance gave us pause...

...Nationalism, along with racism, were the twin evils of our time that Pope Paul VI singled out in his encyclical On the Development of Peoples...

...There can be no return to the days when the various Christian communions lived in splendid isolation from one another, nurtured by caricatures of each other, smugly content to define what it meant to be Christian by reference simply to one's own past...

...Augustine "unless he has first thought it to be believable...

...In stressing this point we do not mean to suggest that Roman Catholics self-consciously isolate themselves or ignore other Christians...

...Nevertheless, as teacher he presented himself as one whose views needed no justification, only reinforcing the impression that what he taught depended more on his being the pope than on what he said...

...He was the sole person responsible for interpreting the Scriptures and the tradition to the present generation of Christians...

...The goal of Christian unity is that we all be one in Christ, not that we all look alike...

...If women should be ordained, as we think they should be, it is not because they have a "right" to ordination, but because they have been called to this ministry and because there is no sure Scriptural understanding of the office ministry that prevents it...

...Though many people praised the pope for his moral leadership, he offered no new horizons for Christian fellowship or community...

...Instead of seeking to persuade, he demanded obedience...

...As advanced as the ecumenical dialogue may be, it is still the case that for most Roman Catholics the only church is still the Roman Catholic church...

...In singling out the title Vicar of Christ and recalling its historical significance we do not wish to imply that John Paul II envisions himself a latterday Innocent III, nor that the title Vicar of Christ bears in his mind the meaning it had for medieval or Renaissance popes...

...That the church has such a character implies that Christians must be wary of nationalism in whatever form it appears, whether in Western democratic nations or in Marxist countries...

...As long as the term "Catholic" is not simply the name of a Christian denomination, Protestants have a stake in the office which claims to speak, in the name of the apostle Peter, for the one holy catholic and apostolic church...

...Especially since the publication of Paul VFs encyclical On the Development of Peoples Commonweal: 80 (Populorum Progressio), many Christians have realized that when the pope spoke on major social and political problems he spoke not simply for Roman Catholics but for all Christians...

...An indication that John Paul II fails to understand this ministry to the whole church can be seen in his practice, during his stay in the United States, as well as in Ireland, and on return to Rome, of using the term "Vicar of Christ" to apply to himself...

...The fruits of his visit will no doubt come later...

...That is, theology has a role in the formation of a community of Christians who bear witness to Christ...

...The purpose of teaching authority within the church is not to gain assent to theological or moral truths but to assist Christians to live lives of Christian discipleship...

...Yet, when John Paul II was in Poland last summer he reinforced the bond between Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, leading one to think that when nationalism is in the self-interest of the church Christians readily forget that the church is a people scattered among the nations, not a national or ethnic community...

...If the pope is to speak with authority his pronouncements must be theologically disciplined by appeals to the truths of the Gospel...

...If contraception is morally permissible, as we think it is, it is not because our sexual behavior is our "own private business," but because there are no theological or moral arguments that entail that every act of sexual intercourse should be open to procreation...

...The developments within the Roman Catholic church in the last several decades, the growing receptivity of non-Roman Catholic Christians to the papacy, even the international recognition given the pope, has set before the pope the possibility of a new role in the church, a new papal vocation if you will...

...This is a peculiarly modern idea of authority, having its roots more in the nineteenth century than in the classical Christian tradition...

...As John Calvin observed in discussing the teaching office in the church, teachers must show that they speak "from the Lord's mouth," for they have not been endowed "with any authority to teach or to answer, except in the name and Word of the Lord...

...what troubles us is that in addressing these and other matters, the pope spoke as if no other significant body of Christian experience and thinking existed...

...But the ecumenical dialogue has taught this generation of Protestants that the papacy is not an unfortunate, aberrant development within the Christian tradition, but a gift to the church, one of the ways by which God leads his church and preserves it in the apostolic faith...

...But there are other reasons...

...In Christianity this dimension of teaching has been traditionally linked to the office but it can never be dependent simply on the office...

...In this article, however, we are not concerned with the particular claims the pope made about ordination of women, contraception, or the celibacy of clergy...

...Rather we are saying that the sheer size of the Roman Catholic church, when compared to the other Christian bodies, creates a universe that embraces one from birth through the stages of life in a way that few who have not lived within Roman Catholicism can appreciate or understand...

...AS PROTESTANT theologians who have long worked within a Roman Catholic context, we are convinced that such theology can only be done ecumenically...

...Only by living and moving solely within the world of Roman Catholicism can Roman Catholics fail to grasp this...

...It is particularly ironic that at the very time that legitimate authority needs to be encouraged and supported in the church (and in society) the pope has chosen to link the teaching authority of the papacy to his person and to interpret authority primarily in terms of obedience...

...In the last ten or fifteen years, many Protestants have learned to appreciate the papacy, not simply as an office within the Roman Catholic church, but as an ecumenical office with a ministry to the whole church...

...In the wake of these changes, some non-Roman Catholic Christians began to think that the papacy was not the obstacle to Christian unity they had previously thought...

...In making general theological or moral pronouncements which readily call for assent by all Christians because they are grounded in the Scriptures and the classical Christian tradition, such language is intelligible and inoffensive...

...If one wishes to teach, says Calvin, "let him show himself to be God's messenger...

...The true test of a teacher's authority is whether his teaching enlightens and persuades...

...As the fathers and medieval theologians realized centuries ago, authority does not have to do with obedience, with the will, but with understanding, enlightenment...

...Our fear is that John Paul II, by his words, by his actions, and by his style, may well make the office of the pope a cause for stumbling, an obstacle to Christian unity, rather than a means to Christian unity...

...As our colleague Enda McDonagh has obCommonweal: 84 served, there can be no genuinely Catholic theology without appropriating the inheritances of the various Christian traditions, not to recover the past, nor to create a super theology which will transcend all differences, but to discover a genuine Catholic unity that is not based on the narrowness of any one separate tradition...

...There is no doubt that this happened to some, but in speaking to many Protestants during the days the pope was in the United States, and in the weeks afterward, we discovered that something else happened...

...Standing within this tradition Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed, in the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) that "it is altogether necessary for salvation that every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.'' It has long been a favorite ploy of Protestant polemics to saddle popes of one's own time with all the excesses of the medieval papacy...

...While in the United States the pope did not present himself as the kind of teacher who commands the respect of Christians because of what he says, but because he stands in an office which has the power and authority to enforce obedience...

...Why shouldn't the pope accent those things that have traditionally defined Roman Catholic identity...

...For the pope to speak with this kind of authority requires that there be a community of people whose lives are shaped by the Gospel...

...It was as though the pope had set out to reconfirm our past stereotypes of the papacy and to reawaken feelings that we thought were long forgotten...

...he appeared instead as the head of the denomination we know as Roman Catholic and he had come to the United States to rally the troops...

...At first it was simply that they felt uneasy at his style and puzzlement about some of his statements, but as the week wore on these feelings turned to disappointment, disillusionment, and even anger...

...After all, the pope was the bishop of Rome, that ancient see to which other bishops appealed...

...It is most unlikely that the pope called himself the Vicar of Christ while visiting the Patriarch of Constantinople in Istanbul at the end of November...

...Too much theology within Roman Catholicism in the last hundred years has been an elaborate exercise in justifying the pope's words...

...In such an ecclesiastical environment the pope's visit, coupled with his ecclesiastical style, only served to support the spiritual exclusiveness of Roman Catholicism...

...It appeared, at least to non-Roman Catholics, as though he, and he alone, was the teacher of the church and that once he has spoken there could be no discussion, no argument, no genuine dissent...

...Over the centuries the office of the papacy has continuously evolved, assuming new roles and responsibilities to meet changing conditions within the church and world...

...The reason the term is so offensive, as Luther observed long ago, is that it suggests that "being a Christian meant being bound to the pope and to Rome," and that the "papacy is the most important, most necessary, and most unique feature in the church...

...Modern historical scholarship has confirmed that the term Vicar of Christ did not become a title for the pope until the middle ages, and that it was not until the thirteenth century during the papacy of Innocent III (1189-1219), that it became the exclusive title of the pope, superseding earlier titles such as the Vicar of St...

...Any effort on the part of Protestants to assess the pope must be put in the context of the remarkable change in attitude on the part of Protestant theologians towards the Roman papacy in recent years...

...By calling for obedience on such matters, the pope undermines the authority of his office, for the office derives from the universal character of the church...

...Why should this bother Protestants...

...The answer to these questions is that Catholicism is not a private world in which only Roman Catholics have a say...

...He must convince the Christian people that he speaks for Christ...

...In any united church the bishop of Rome would certainly have a central role...

...Any teaching which has that end in mind can never be a matter simply of obedience to the office of the teacher...

...The vast majority of Roman Catholics have no experience of the "ecclesial reality'' of non-Roman communions...

...What we do wish to say, however, is thafthe title does reawaken an imperialist, even divine view, of the papacy, and that it denies the ecclesial reality of the separated churches...

...Does the pope expect the work of theologians to be any less unsettling than he clearly intends his own pontificate to be...

...When applied to the office of the papacy the title implies that the pope offers a unique access to Christ and that those in Commonweal: 82 communion with him are in communion with Christ...

...The pope came to encourage the faithful, to give heart to the clergy, to buttress religious communities, to say to one and all that it was good to be Roman Catholic...

...If he is faithful to such a calling, the unity that we proclaim as Christians will not appear to the world as a vague ideal but a living reality made possible by the power of a Savior who has taught us that we must first be servants...

...Perhaps the various Protestant churches could maintain their unique identities which have been formed over four centuries and are still nurtured by traditions of worship, of teaching, of discipleship, of piety, yet look to the bishop of Rome as the symbol of Christian unity...

...We are not suggesting that truth is a matter of democratic vote of consensus...

...The reasons most frequently given for this shift in attitudes toward the papacy are the Second Vatican Council, the warm and generous personality of John XXIII, or the sympathy of recent popes for the downtrodden peoples of the developing nations...

...By the time John Paul II returned to Rome at the end of the week some felt that he had not acted as if Ije were' 'our'' pope at all, nor as the symbol of Christian unity, nor as teacher of the whole church...

...In the light of Protestant prejudice and discrimination against Catholics such criticism may appear disingenuous...

...Like a secular politician he spoke bravely and prophetically to people and institutions for which he had no direct responsibility, but when speaking to Roman Catholics he brought a message of institutional selfpreservation that will only frustrate the search for Christian unity...

...In the Augsburg Confession Philip Melancthon said that "there is nothing here that departs from the Scriptures or the Catholic Church or the church of Rome in so far as the ancient church is known to us from its writers...

...No matter what later popes or councils may say, it is often presumed by Protestants that what was once decreed by a pope remains church teaching for all times...

...Now it might well be said that this is a traditional papal title and there is no reason for the pope to avoid using it...

...In a world desperately in need of moral and spiritual leadership, and among churches frequently lacking a firm sense of direction and purpose, the bishop of Rome, it seems, is the one Christian leader who has the wisdom, sense of tradition, and courage to speak clearly and cogently to international problems, and who, through his ancient office, could speak to all the churches and for the churches to the world...

...Innocent III envisioned himself as a priest-king, an intermediary between God and man, the locus of divine authority in the world, the source from which political authority derived its power as the "moon derives her light from the sun...

...The papacy of John Paul II begins at a particularly auspicious moment in the church's history when the possibilities of Christian unity are greater than they have been at any time since the Reformation...

...Moreover, the pope not only used the title in speaking to Roman Catholics but in his farewell message to the United Nations he said that his ministry only had meaning "insofar as he is the faithful Vicar of Christ on earth...

...The result is that if one is not convinced of the truth of the teaching, the only response is submission or disobedience—neither designed to foster the kind of mature Christian discipleship required today...

...IN HIS ADDRESS before the United Nations the pope called attention to the universal character of the Christian community as it embraces "faithful belonging to almost all countries and continents, nations, peoples, races, languages and cultures...

...He must persuade...

...he was the patriarch of the West...

...This was the first pastoral visit of a pope to the American Catholic church...

...Because Roman Catholics have lived in a world of their own they are illprepared to understand or negotiate a generally pluralist society or to envision a church which embraces many differing Christian traditions...

...We must acknowledge and recover those aspects of our common tradition that were lost in the historical separation of East and West, or in the great division which resulted from the sixteenth century...

...Nevertheless, there is hardly one title which could be more offensive to Protestants, as well as to the Orthodox...

...For over four hundred years, sparked by the polemics of the Reformation and the years following, Protestants and Roman Catholics have defined themselves over against each other...

...We listen to the teacher and respect his authority because he speaks with greater understanding, greater wisdom, deeper experience, and more truly than do others...

...15 February I960: 85...

...Theology can never be simply the exposition of what is received from the tradition or proclaimed by the present magisterium...

...The Reformation, however, was not a call for a new form of Christianity, but a movement of reform within the Catholic 15 February 1980: 81 church, a call to rectify abuses that obscured the preaching of the Gospel and had thwarted a life of geuine Christian discipleship...

...But when the topics are hotly controverted, and men and women of faith, of intelligence and learning differ profoundly, and when the Scriptures and tradition do not sound a clear and decisive note, such language is quite another matter...

...Such shaping comes primarily from the Holy Scriptures, the life of prayer and worship, the witness of faithful Christians, but also from teaching...

...Protestants have a large stake in what it means to be Catholic and the way that the pope, as the bishop of Rome, presents Christ to the world and to the churches...

...Moreover, the response of Roman Catholics to the pope has too often reflected a limited understanding of the role of the papal office, i.e., appealing to papal authority when it supports one's pet cause or criticizing the pope when he does not side with the latest social movement...

...The phrase cropped up in a number of papal speeches, for example in Des Moines, Iowa, where John Paul referred to himself as the "Vicar of Christ" who "represents him [Christ] in your midst," or in a speech to Spanish-speaking Christians in Philadelphia, where he spoke of your' 'communion with the Vicar of Christ...

...Frequently criticism of the pope's statements has been based on appeals to secular presuppositions about "individual freedom" or "rights" that fail to address the genuinely theological issues at stake...

...When the pope arrived in the United States there were many Protestant Christians ready, indeed eager, to embrace John Paul II, to receive his ministry and to hear his words of instruction...

...Such an approach to the papacy stands in sharp contrast to the traditions in which most Protestants were raised...

...The Roman Catholic church in which millions of Christians had grown up seemed to be disappearing and with the demise of this church many faithful Christians were losing a clear sense of Christian identity...

...No one believes anything," wrote St...

...Now it might be asked: what did you expect...

...But such a stress on institutional self-identity is not sufficient to sustain Roman Catholics in the world in which they now live...

...John Paul II, if he is to fulfill the vocation his ancient office offers, must realize he has a ministry which is not confined to the Roman Catholic church but to all Christians...

...On occasion some Protestant leaders have referred to the pope as "our pope...

...He came to a church caught in the throes of change, into an atmosphere of conflicting parties and interests, to bishops fearful of the future and laity uncertain about the meaning of the past...

...Article 21) Not all Protestants would agree with this claim, but it must not be forgotten that most Protestants continue to confess the same words in the creed as do Roman Catholics: "We believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic church...

...Instead of viewing authority as an aid to reason and understanding, and therefore to action, authority is made to take the place of reason, and of one's own judgment...

...John Paul II, as well as Roman Catholic theologians and faithful must be reminded how offensive such language is to Christians who belong to the Protestant and Orthodox churches...

...Though such phrases as "the church teaches through me" are traditional papal phrases, in the mouth of John Paul they conveyed a new spirit, an ominous tone, that give a misleading impression of the teaching office 15 February 1980: 83 in the church...

...Thomas, speaking of theological discussion in the medieval schools, observed that if a master decides a question ' 'by appeal to bare authorities, the listener will have a certainty that the thing is so, but he will have acquired no knowledge or understanding and will go away with an empty mind...

...On his return to Rome he urged a group of religious women "to be courageous in a holy manner in following the voice of Christ's Vicar...

...he appealed not to the understanding but to the will...

...JOHN PAUL II & CHRISTIAN UNITY Protestants & the pope STANLEY HAUERWAS & ROBERT WILKEN IT IS SURELY too early to assess the role John Paul II will play in future relations between the Reformation churches and the Roman Catholic church, but his visit to the United States, as well as statements he has made in recent months, has prompted us to look closely at his papacy...

...The popes of recent years have all been deeply spiritual men, who appeared before the public eye not only as religious leaders and teachers, but as men of prayer, kneeling before an altar, a tomb, a statue, presiding at the Eucharist and administering Communion to the faithful, reading and preaching from the Scriptures...

...The reformers never claimed that they were founding a new church...

...This is not to say that Protestants should have the same say that Roman Catholics do in the Roman Catholic church, but that as long as the Roman Catholic church claims to be Catholic and not simply Roman, Roman Catholic leaders will have to be responsive to the other churches in defining what it means to be Catholic and Christian...

...Some have criticized the pope because he did little listening...

...As one ecumenical document put it recently: there exists "a ministry in the universal church charged with primary responsibility for the unity of the people of God and their mission to the world.'' If this is so, in a significant sense, the pope is "our pope," and he can no longer define Catholicism simply by reference to the Roman Catholic tradition...

...But in these matters, as well as others, there is a large body of Christian opinion that differs from that of the pope...

...For the pope kept alive the illusion that by clinging to the certainty provided by the papal office, Roman Catholics, unlike Protestants, will be immune from the subtle temptations of modernity...

...How often has it been said: Rome never changes...

...And St...

...As much as we admired the courage of Sister Theresa Kane to address the pope directly, we think her followers misstated the issue by arguing her case in terms of "rights...

...In such matters the pope, as teacher of the church, cannot insist on obedience to his pronouncements...