Problems of Christian Unity-Two Articles

...IN addition to these fears, the pressure of an uneasy conscience weighs heavily upon many Protestants, especially white Protestants...

...That virtue is that they have learned from the organic collectivism of the old order something of the social substance of human existence...

...Its obvious aim, Brown says, is to force the mass media to conform to Roman Catholic standards, using, if necessary, censorship, boycott and reprisals...

...Most of its partisans are not bigots in the style of 1884 ("Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion") or of 1928...

...They offer many evidences of their contention...

...Many a minister refrains from expressing his candid opinions of Roman Catholicism from the pulpit for fear of embarrassing some of the businessmen of his congregation who may furtively share his views but who depend in some measure upon the patronage of Roman Catholics...

...Professor Robert MacAfee Brown of Stanford University, a sympathetic official observer in Rome, has written a revealing analysis of it in which he concludes, more in sorrow than in criticism, that it could be used by reactionary Catholic leaders "to impose a type of control that will jeopardize Catholic creativity in the arts...

...What was to become of the accepted axiom of moral theology that "error has not the same right as truth...

...Indeed, Rome seems at times to be moving in a direction that cannot help but bring to mind the 18th century prediction of Montesquieu that eventually Protestantism would disappear as a separate movement because Catholicism would yield on the major issues of the Reformation...

...This was especially apparent on the crucial issue of the relation of Christianity to the ancient religion of the Jews (whose ethic of justice, ironically, is closer to the Catholic social ethic than either is to the individualism of the Protestant's "separated Brethren...

...The other was a radical pronouncement on liberty of conscience...

...That Protestant officialdom refuses to release the results of this study is also revealing...

...But he did not offer to put the disputed issue of papal supremacy, which has long divided Eastern and Western Catholic life, on the bargaining table...

...But over the years it has undergone such changes as to make it barely recognizable...

...Could it be that the Pontiff found the debate on thorny questions, a debate which was bound to reveal the critical reactions of the traditionalists in the Council, both inconvenient and embarrassing...

...There is alarm at what might come to pass if and when the nation has a Roman Catholic majority...

...Critics might wish that the Orthodox churches were more sympathetic on the issue of papal supremacy...

...The persistence, the scope, and the intensity of anti-Catholicism in America probably is explained most simply as a residue from the past...

...First, Protestants generally accept Roman Catholicism as a sister Christian church, but they believe that it has succumbed to heavy pagan influences...

...Some "WASPS" feel unjustly abused by such a strategy, pleading that the Earl Warrens and the Adlai Stevensons are white Protestants, too...

...The high hopes of the first Council session, prompted by the charismatic influence of the late Pope John, were not realized...

...The second session under a new Pope, however, was conducted in a different spirit...

...The crisis in South Vietnam in 1963 found thousands of American Protestant ministers running to the defense of the Buddhists in that faraway land...

...Yet what cold war issues could be solved in the little nations of Israel and Jordan...

...The new atmosphere is truly remarkable...

...Nervousness, sometimes approaching paranoia, has been aggravated by the realization that Protestant prestige is dropping continuously and that, meanwhile, the Roman Catholic percentage of the total population rises each year...

...The Eastern Church, however, shows no inclination to accept papal supremacy, despite the embrace between the Pope and Patriarch Athcnagoras...

...At any rate, an effort to obscure the embarrassments of the recently adjourned session may just possibly have motivated the papal pilgrimage to the Holy Land...

...The fine points of anti-Catholicism usually vary from place to place and from time to time...

...And why, indeed, should he...

...Millions of them voted for the late President Kennedy and for a Governor Brown and a Senator Lausche and countless other political candidates of Roman Catholic persuasion...

...Moreover, politicians do not feel the need to appease a "Protestant vote," and there would be amused laughter if someone had the audacity to suggest that Protestants are sometimes victims of religious bias in these United States...

...They have been firm in the conviction that the Biblical love commandments must be transmuted into an ethic of justice, an ethic relevant to the collective life of man...

...They have never been fully convinced that the Church of Rome accepts the four freedoms of the Bill of Rights as currently interpreted in the United States...

...Or what of the Church's traditional claim that it is a repository of the truth, as well as a judge of what is error and what is truth...

...None is more serious, I think, than the deeply-rooted antipathy most Protestants continue to feel toward the Church of Rome...

...Do they not need rescue from their uninspiring position beneath the chariot wheels of national parochialism...

...Relations between them may improve...

...Protestants increasingly resent what some describe as the "kid-glove" or the "most favored" treatment given Roman Catholicism in the mass media...

...This is persuasive evidence of how deep is the chasm dividing these two branches of Christendom...

...Proposals for making the pronouncement less offensive to traditional Christians were reported sub rosa, such as the affirmation that "only a few Jews were guilty of the death of Christ...

...But the price that a universal church must pay for including in its universality both the cultures of the 13th and 20th centuries was displayed in the tensions of the second session...

...They have creatively applied this wisdom to the problems of modern technical collectivism...

...It is, however, still a matter of speculation whether there will be a third Council session...

...Whether that someone was Pope Paul VI was a question which buzzed about at the end of the Council session...

...Consider, too, the profuse coverage of the recent session of the Second Vatican Council...

...The principal moving force in this historic change was, of course...

...The action on the Jews, intended as a refutation of primitive religious anti-Semitism with its charge that the Jews were "Christ-killers," was particularly dear to Cardinal Bea, a Germanborn Jesuit and the late Pope's alter ego...

...Curiously, this latter brief document, opposed by 503 of the Church fathers, all but escaped comment in the American press...

...They never cease to be amazed and offended by popular Catholicism with its novenas for souls in purgatory, its assemblage of saints to be invoked in any and all situations, its veneration of relics, the centrality of the virgin cult, and the profusion of appendages ranging from holy water to the rosary...

...Clearly, the malaise of the second session resulted from the final boggling and evading of these issues...

...The so-called transalpine churches, it should be noted, include not only those of pluralistic Western culture, but also those of Asia and Africa...

...Many pulpits resound with hopeful speculations on ecumenicity...

...But someone seemed to have given the order for the postponement from behind the scenes...

...These churches represent a virtue of Catholicism which professional antiCatholics do not appreciate...

...But the impression remains that he was responsible for shelving debate on the issues which threatened to reveal divisions within the Church...

...But the wiser members of the Council knew that such a statement would be worse than no statement at all...

...This anti-Catholicism—a term I use with great reluctance—bears little resemblance to the bigotry of the Know-Nothings or the American Protective Association or the Ku Klux Klan of earlier generations...

...He is said to have queried some of his Jewish friends on how this might best be achieved...

...That Roman Catholicism craves the return of the "separated brethren" is obvious, and there are those who contend that the Second Vatican Council has sought to appease Protestantism by placing less emphasis on Mary and more emphasis upon the limitations of papal authority...

...If so, his policy would have to be to extinguish some of the fires which Pope John had ignited, fires which threatened to consume some of the Church's cherished traditions...

...Much of the bitterness may disappear...

...Pope John XXIII who, in his 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, insisted upon the freedom of every human being "to honor God according to the dictates of an upright conscience...

...But, alas, any constructive pronouncement would offend the traditionalists in the Church...

...The action on liberty of conscience presented the traditionalists with even more difficult problems...

...And they have remained untouched by the excessive individualism of cither the classical economy or of the Calvinistic bourgeois life...

...The debates of the Council's second session were obviously between the prelates of the transalpine parts of the Church—not with the conservative Curia—and the bishops of Spain and Italy...

...The primary reason for this secrecy is fear...

...The Protestant churches themselves, of course, have sought to influence public policy over the years, and prohibition was one of their more dubious achievements...

...Among the "WASP" intelligentsia, in particular, self-criticism at times degenerates into vigorous breastbeating to the tune of "O what miserable sinners we are...

...Clearly, it will be ro easy task to bring the Church "up to date" when a part of it is still enmeshed in the culture of the 13th century...

...Compared with the abortive conciliar movements of the middle ages, its success has been striking...

...While there is something of a liturgical revival within American Protestantism, as a whole it remains "low church" and, under the influence of our scientific age, increasingly inclined to reject crass superstitions handed down from the past...

...It was evident, too, on the equally crucial issue of freedom of conscience, in which the Church had to come to terms with the standards of a pluralistic and secular culture...

...Misrepresentation on both sides may be corrected...

...One of the postponed actions dealt with anti-Semitism, and sought to absolve the Jews of any guilt in the death of Christ...

...A few fundamentalists continue to cling to these quaint and scurrilous views, but such fantasies are either unknown or the subject for amusement and ridicule in most Protestant circles...

...The religious press in the United States is blossoming with bouquets...

...It does not want to risk raising an extremely delicate and divisive issue...

...Pope Paul did not openly show his hand...

...Talk about the reunion of the Christian churches, therefore, should not be taken too seriously—at least not yet...

...THE ECUMENICAL COUNCIL After the Second Session By Reinhold Niebuhr Almost all the regular journalists and the unofficial "observers" who reported the second session of the Vatican Council, which adjourned before the recent holidays, seemed to agree that something went wrong...

...The abrupt end of the second session, following the postponement after brief debate of two important actions until the third session, seemed mysterious and was disappointing to those who had hoped for the "dawn of a new day...

...Both amended and challenged traditional Catholic attitudes and dogmas...

...As for Christian unity, Pope Paul did embrace an Eastern Patriarch...

...Cardinal Bea, who was very influential during the first session and was perhaps also instrumental in the original decision to convene the Ecumenical Council, is reported to have an uneasy conscience about the Nazi era in German history, and to have the ambition to establish more charitable relations with Jewish religious organizations...

...Press and public were deeply impressed...

...It is seldom expressed openly, except when carefully camouflaged behind an appeal to keep church and state separate...

...Problems of Christian Unity — Two Articles Catholicism & Protestantism By Ralph Lord Roy Reports from the Vatican and around the world indicate that relations between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have changed immeasurably during the past few years...

...The Pope said he was undertaking it in the interest of "world peace and Christian unity...

...A recent confidential report of the Protestant Council on the "religious distribution of New York City policy makers and important office-holders" verified what was known already: Protestant representation in public administration, education, the judiciary, and in other arenas falls far, far below the corresponding proportion of the population...

...Postponement may have been the most prudent policy once the Pandora's box of religious prejudice was opened...

...Anti-Catholicism in any discernible guise has been so thoroughly discredited that public criticism of the Roman Catholic Church is viewed with suspicion by a significant proportion of the community...

...The hopes of both Catholic and non-Catholic observers were excited by the fact that, when the issue was joined between the "fathers" of the Council and the conservative Curia (or Vatican bureaucracy), Pope John XXIII sided with the innovating majority in every critical instance...

...They also suspect that the heavy hand of the Catholic hierarchy manipulates the political structure to its own advantage...

...Cardinal Bea had optimistically declared that the present Pope was a younger incarnation of the spirit of Pope John...

...Symbolic of this is reference to Cardinal Spellman's Manhattan residence as "The Powerhouse...

...The disappointment of the second session reached its pitch with the shelving of the two proposed actions...

...Second, Protestants are afraid of the power of the Roman Catholic Church...

...Persons in both camps, led by some of the most influential scholars, are exulting in a spirit of camaraderie which would have seemed impossible only a short decade ago...

...Instead, he gave the impression of a very shrewd and prudent ecclesiastical statesman...

...Roman Catholics, he instructed his flock, should be prepared to cooperate in worthy endeavors with "Christians separated from this Apostolic See"—a radical change both in spirit and language from the traditional anathemas against schismatics and heretics...

...Ralph Lord Roy, Pastor of Grace Methodist Church in New York, is author of Apostles of Discord, and Communism and the Churches...

...Thus, when the AntiDefamation League issues its occasional surveys of "anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Negro hate groups," the impression is inevitably left that the "bad guys" are white Protestants...

...One Presbyterian friend wondered aloud if some newspaper somewhere might have the courage to call it a "donothing" Council...

...It is rare to find a Protestant who promotes the pornographic canards charging immorality among priests and nuns or who identifies Roman Catholicism with the scarlet woman, "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth...

...Despite these new and amazing developments, however, casual observers will be misled if they rely too heavily upon reports which leave the impression that Christendom is on the verge of reunion...

...This is why, incidentally, the common practice of lumping anti-Catholicism together with anti-Semitism and white supremacy confuses rather than clarifies the understanding of prejudice in our times...

...There are two basic areas, however, in which antipathy toward Roman Catholicism is most pervasive and permanent, though Protestants differ so much from one another that there must be some qualification of any blanket statement...

...And for the first time in history, Luther is commanding a degree of respect in some Roman Catholic circles, while among Protestants one hears enthusiastic expressions of admiration for the progressive elements which seem to be successfully pushing and pulling the Vatican out of its medieval mold...

...depicted so vividly in the 17th chapter of Revelation...

...In the Northeast, for example, there is a hushed but intense indignation over the virtual exclusion of Protestants, Negro or white, from government positions in some large metropolitan areas...

...Putting off these items was possible under the complicated parliamentary machinery of the Council...

...It was, after all, the first time a Pope traveled by air, and Paul was the first Pope to visit the Holy Land...

...Economic factors often play a decisive role, too...

...Papal monarchy has not only been the impressive instrument of the unity of a truly international Church, it is the real source of prestige and religious renewal of modern Catholicism...

...The walls that have separated Roman Catholicism and Protestantism have begun to crumble...

...It would probably offend them not because they seriously believe in the ageold slogans of Christian anti-Semitism, but because it is difficult to offer an official olive branch to a great and historic religion which has stubbornly refused to accept the tenets of the "only true religion...

...But the impact of Baptist and Methodist piety is only a shadow of its former self in most parts of the nation, and Roman Catholicism has emerged as the main champion of public morality...

...Anti-Catholics today, unlike their forebearers, normally accept individual Roman Catholics without the slightest hint of hostility...

...Yet during the Council's second session Pope Paul was obviously lacking in the charismatic charm and force of his predecessor...

...The most interesting characteristic of current anti-Catholicism is the clandestine aura which surrounds it...

...Four hundred years of religious conflict and competition have led many, especially among theologically liberal Protestants, to regard the major non-Christian religions with greater sympathy than Roman Catholicism...

...There is no Protestant uproar when Hollywood produces an "Elmer Gantry" or when Bible-quoting evangelists in adult Westerns usually end up as racketeers or libertines or both...

...Unlike Pope John, who threw the weight of his exalted office behind the Church's innovating forces in the Council's first session...

...IN recent years, a third cause of religious tension has become important...

...It may even be true, as rumor has it, that he was elected as a compromise candidate between the Church's two factions...

...Still, the pilgrimage's lack of substantive significance is apparent...

...But most display shame rather than resentment...

...IN other words, this would mean that Pope Paul was confronted with a difficult task, and the Council's second session revealed that he could not wholly succeed in it...

...Perhaps no scriptural text is receiving more attention in Sunday sermons than the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John: "And there shall be one fold and one shepherd...

...At least by implication, organized forces against bigotry usually point the finger in their direction when casting about for a villain...

...Admittedly, in the eyes of the faithful this suspicion on the part of a casual and critical observer must appear malicious and unsupported, except for the slender evidence that the pilgrimage was announced at the end of the Council session...

...In fact, everybody seemed pleased, except King Hussein of Jordan, who felt the Pope's statements equated the traditional Holy Land with Israel...

...There is abundant evidence that the Counter-Reformation is finally drawing to a close, that four centuries of hot and cold war within Western Christendom is subsiding...

...But these issues are too deep to be solved by an embrace between two ecclesiasts—the one the "Supreme Pontiff" of Western, or Roman, Catholicism, the other the leader of a section of a fractionalized church...

...Their enmity is directed, instead, at what they see as a giant complex of power, a dynamic, cohesive, aggressive institution...

...Such Christian unity, though, has in its path a host of obstacles...

...Hence, a person who wants to sound off now and then against Rome feels safe only among his trusted friends and only in the privacy of his living room...

...A Spanish prelate of the Council is reported to have offered an amendment on the statement about freedom of conscience warning Protestants not to confuse the faith of the faithful by proselytizing...

...There are signs, however, of growing restlessness at what some view as a tendency to exalt priests and nuns in movies and television, even if it requires a rather radical revision of history to achieve this goal...

...In response it should be said that two documents were completed, one allowing liturgical changes (which, my Presbyterian friend replied, are largely of the nature that Protestantism made 400 years ago...

...The second is entitled, "On Instruments of Social Communication...

...These scruples, of course, do not do justice to the sensational features of the Pope's pilgrimage...

...But the prospect of unity in the near future is very dim, indeed...

...At the same time, however, he would also have to conserve some of the warmth of those fires...