Responses to Current Issues
Published in The Globe and Mail, Canada

DOES GOD FOLLOW ROME'S RULES?
Joanna Manning

When I was growing up Catholic in the fifties there was a joke about God showing a Protestant around heaven. After admiring many beautiful settings of paradise filled with people of diverse faiths or none, they come to a high walled building with no windows on the outside. "That's for the Catholics" says God. "We let them think they're the only ones up here."

Vatican II and the breath of the Spirit unleashed by Blessed Pope John XXIII blew down those high walls and opened the windows to the outside world. Several momentous battles over the expression of dogma took place on the council floor, including a redefinition of the Church as the Pilgrim People of God continually in need of reform rather than a perfect society which already possesses the answer to every question.

One of those battles was fought over the phrase "there exists a single Church of Christ which subsists in the Catholic Church" which occurs in a key passage in the decree on Ecumenism. This month's declaration from Cardinal Ratzinger's office which redefines the primacy of Rome over all other Christian churches misrepresents this phrase in a way that reneges on Vatican II's teaching.

The first draft of Unitatis Redintegratio prepared for the Council by the Roman Curia had read that "there is a single Church of Christ which exists in the Catholic Church, " in other words, the true Christian Church is coterminous with Catholicism. Between this and the eventual text which read 'subsists in' lies a world-shattering shift of doctrine. God's truth is revealed outside as well as within the Catholic Church. The Council went on to state that the Catholic Church has much to learn from reciprocal exchanges with other churches.

But with this month's missive from the Holy Office, Protestants and all other denominations and faiths are back not just outside the pearly gates but beyond the pale. This places the future of ecumenical exchanges such as the one which took place in Toronto earlier this year in jeopardy, as Archbishop Carey has been quick to point out.

This reassertion of a sectarian kind of Catholicism comes at a awkward and delicate time for the Canadian Catholic Church. Catholics are stumbling way behind both the United and the Anglican Churches in apologizing and making
restitution for the sexual, physical and emotional abuse inflicted on native communities by those invested with the authority of Holy Mother Church. Although sexual abuse is not a doctrinal issue, the 1990 Winter Commission Report from Newfoundland pointed out that it is a systemic problem rooted in the Church's dogmatically defined patriarchal and hierarchical structure.

Also, the exclusive rights of denominational Catholic schools in Ontario have recently been singled out for criticism at the UN Human Rights Committee. The UN ruled last November that funding should go to all religious schools or to
none. If students in Catholic schools are now to be taught in obedience to Rome that all other denominations and faiths are false, how long will taxpayers in multicultural Ontario be willing to foot the bill for such divisive religious instruction?

But Rome seems bent on rebuilding the walls of fortress Catholicism. Altar rails are back, symbolically at least, with another decree on liturgy issued this July which instructed priests to stay in the sanctuary at Mass and keep lay people in the pews. No shaking of lay hands by clergy is permitted at the sign of peace and absolutely no lay person's hands are to touch the tabernacle or the chalices used in the Mass, not even to clean them. Catholicism is beginning to look like an exclusive cult. Some Catholics have slipped comfortably back into the cult of authority which has pervaded this papacy, and which has been a recurrent temptation in Catholic history. A cult of personality has flourished around John Paul II, aided and abetted by the
world's media which loves papal spectacles but is too impatient to analyse the substance of the Pope's teaching.

Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism offered a vote of thanks to Protestants for preserving the centrality of the scriptures as a source of Christian teaching and told Catholics that equal reverence for the gospel as a source of revelation should provide a corrective to an excessive dependence on an authoritarian and sometimes fallible magisterium. The Council's final document On the Church in the Modern World even states that the Church can learn from secular society. God, after all, roams free of Rome's rules and will always remain beyond the grasp of any one religion or of all of them put together.