Ministry of Unity and the Bishop of Rome:
A Roman Catholic Perspective
Dr. John J. Burkhard OFM Conv
Presented at the Woodstock Forum, September 25, 2005
In his encyclical Ut Unum Sint,or, as it is sometimes referred to in English, On Commitment to Ecumenism (1995), John Paul II called for responses to his proposal that Catholics and non-Catholics alike conduct “a patient and fraternal dialogue” on the Petrine office. In the intervening decade, I have read many responses — most were positive, sometimes with reservations, and some were negative. I do not propose to review these many views on the papacy or to tally up the replies to determine whether the ayes or the nays carry the day. Instead, I will attempt to do what our symposium purposes: to engage the office of the Bishop of Rome by my theological reason and my ecclesiological imagination. I hope to examine the papal office by judging it in terms of six pairs of fundamental concepts. Some concepts emerge from the teachings of Vatican II, while others issue from the contemporary situation in which Christians find themselves culturally or philosophically. After this exercise in theological reflection, I hope to engage in some theological imagining.
I. Before I examine the six categories that are my main concern, in this first part I need to make a few prefatory remarks of a more general character. First, we need to note the change in theological terminology when referring to the papal office. Linguistic usage is highly revealing of changed theological or ecclesiological positions. The term “papacy,” though indispensable, is also problematic. It states both too much and too little about the office of the pope. Since Vatican II, and in the literature emerging from the various ecumenical dialogues in particular, there is a clear preference for the title of Bishop of Rome. This is the root title for the office we are considering — not Universal Primate (centered on the concept of jurisdiction) and not Pope or Holy Father (centered on the many historical factors that have concretely defined the papacy), and certainly not the title of Supreme Pontiff (centered on its roots in the ancient Roman religio-civil system). The Petrine ministry or function usually stands behind the root title of Bishop of Rome as the preferred designation of the papal office today. Bishop of Rome is more inclusive than the papal titles that were often employed in the pre-Vatican II period, and its use by recent popes indicates a certain distancing from earlier titles rooted in Roman, feudal and medieval terminology. In this title the biblical roots of a Petrine ministry come to clear expression, while the title of the Bishop of Rome also expresses the efforts of the early Church to define post-apostolic office in reference to episcopacy. Whenever, then, I refer to the “pope” it in the sense of the bishop who leads the see of Rome or the local church of Rome. Without adverting to this insight, what I say in terms of my imagining the office in the future will make little sense.
Second, we must advert to the very different fundamental styles of exercising the papal office in the first as compared to the second Christian millennium. Given its increasing isolation from the counterbalancing influence of the churches of the East, the western or Roman church took a turn toward exercising the office in more juridical and authoritative terms. By this I mean that the popes of the second millennium often exercised their teaching office by means of authoritative definitions rather than by marshalling the witnesses to the faith that was so characteristic of the first millennium and by adding its own substantial apostolic weight as a witness to the faith. From witnessing to the faith, the papacy, from about 1000 A.D. on, tended toward defining the faith. Its own highly practical bent, absorbed from the soil of the Roman culture in which it grew, and because the theological controversies it engaged in hardly had the same kind of importance to the faith and faith’s expression as the controversies regarding the Trinity, Christology, the created order and grace in the first 700 years, the West fell under the spell of refining the teachings of the faith in ever-more accurate terms and insisted on a clear uniformity of expression. If the East and the West had remained in fruitful theological dialogue with each other, I doubt that the West would have succumbed to these tendencies to dogmatize the faith. In a word, by becoming comfortable with its state of isolation from the churches of the East, the Roman church tended to set the stage for the later magisterial Reformation. The question now is, how can the West return to its earlier, more balanced understanding of the faith, without repudiating the valid lessons it has learned and the values it has incorporated into its life in the last thousand years?
II. In the second part of my paper, I propose to look at six fundamental categories and to consider the implications of these ideas for the Petrine ministry and how they help to further define the papacy in terms of a ministry of unity that is open to all the particular churches.
Communion vs. Christomonism
Several sources show that a theology of the church as communio has become the dominant understanding of the church in the post-conciliar period. Among these sources the following deserve special mention: the explicit teaching of the Extraordinary Synod of Roman Catholic Bishops in 1985 convoked for the occasion of commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the close of Vatican II, the development of communion ecclesiology among virtually all theologians in their studies after the Council, and its omnipresence in the statements of various ecumenical dialogues — national and international, bilateral and multilateral. An ecclesiology of communion is shared by the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and the broad spectrum of theologians issuing from the Reform.
It isn’t clear, however, that all share the same definition of communion, but all seem to indicate that a theology of communion points to a deeper reality in the church that unites the believer first of all with the triune God as well as with one’s fellow believers. Communion, though a deep faith-given spiritual reality, at the same time impels a Christian to fellowship with other Christians. According to this understanding, institutional matters, issues of Church polity, church ministry, and church leadership are not primary, but derive their deeper meaning from communion, without thereby being rendered dispensable or of purely human fashioning. A theology of communion also calls the churches to reflect explicitly on the role of the Holy Spirit in their ecclesiology. The whole of western theology, pneumatologically anemic since the separation of East and West, is struggling to understand the church more in terms of the Spirit of God, while integrating these new insights with the traditional strength of their Christocentric faith and its implications for ecclesiology. The issue is not one of a disjunction between Christ and the Spirit, but how both trinitarian persons — always together — explain the church. The orthodox theologian Metropolitan John Zizioulas has coined a particularly illuminating phrase, when he speaks of Christ as providing the “institutional” dimension, while the Spirit provides the “constitutional” dimension. Each modifies the other without subordinating or negating it, but by bringing it to fullness.
The challenge our communities face is not only seeing our individual churches in terms of communion but in seeing the Church of Christ, consisting in some way or other of the multiplicity of churches, as also constituting a communion. Some theologians speak of the Church of Christ as a “communion of particular churches,” while others speak of the Church of Christ as a “universal communion.” These insights force the question, then, of the appropriate ministry of service to the unity of this greater communion. Issues of primacy, jurisdiction, infallible teaching authority, etc. are seen as inadequate for rendering the richness of the mystery of ecclesial communion. They cannot be ignored, but they demand rethinking, reformulation and reconfiguration.
Collegiality vs. Papalism
The legacy of Vatican I for Roman Catholics was a church that institutionally was centered on the papacy and that did not know exactly what to do theologically with the episcopate or how bishops related to the papal office. This ecclesiological imbalance had been many centuries in the making, and the fervor with which it was defended was largely the Catholic reaction to the traumas of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the secularization of Europe. The imbalance and latent anxiety can still be read in chapter three of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The episcopate and the papacy stand in tension over against each other. For all that, Vatican II demonstrated considerable boldness in retrieving the spirit of episcopal collegiality from the experience of the early church, restoring it to its rightful place in ecclesiastical leadership and thereby, at least in radice, moving to correct Vatican I’s ecclesial imbalance. However we understand the papal office after Vatican II, it is no longer possible to do so without speaking about the college of bishops. The office of pope no longer occupies an isolated position of authority at the head of a pyramid of official ministry. After Vatican II, we have new tensions relating to episcopacy and papal primacy, but at the very least we can no longer speak of the pope without also speaking about the body of bishops and vice versa. The theological task bequeathed to us by Vatican II is the arduous one of rethinking these two offices in relation to each other. This re-reception of Vatican I demands that the doctrine of episcopal collegiality be given its full weight. It is not permissible for the Catholic church to return to the ultramontane theologies of the papal office, however difficult the task of integrating episcopal collegiality and primacy is proving to be. With respect to this ecclesial tension, the import of my introductory remark about the root title of the pope as the Bishop of Rome assumes its full weight. According to the teaching of Vatican II, there is no Bishop of Rome without his fellow bishops, just as there is no body of bishops without the service of unity of the Bishop of Rome.
Mystery vs. Conceptualism
Modern science and the epistemic ideal of modernity have so concentrated on clarity, objectivity, and certainty that the church has tended to ignore its native vocabulary of mystery. The story of the last four hundred years has been the emergence of the dominance of concepts over lived and believed reality — a phenomenon I call “conceptualism.” Here, too, it is fair to speak of an imbalance — an epistemological one. In conceptualism, ideas and intramental states determine reality. Vatican II boldly challenged the hegemony of clear and certain ideas by devoting the whole of chapter one of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church to the church as mystery. To speak of the church is to speak of mystery. But what is mystery?
While the scriptures are convinced of the necessity of mystery, modern men and women seem to have lost their sensibility for engaging mystery. The serious study of the scriptures and liturgy as part of the “return to the sources” movement in the years leading up to Vatican II whetted the appetite of scholars for mystery. We have increasingly come to see just how we humans are sustained by mystery — an unfathomable or transcendent reality that beckons, enfolds and guides us. In a word, mystery humanizes us or explains what the human being is. We are defined and constituted by what we cannot control but that embraces and fulfills us. Mystery does not conform to the laws or principles of the created order that we discover or devise. Mystery is always beyond the boundaries of our laws and principles, not negating them, but not being reduced to them either.
Moreover, the rediscovery of mystery has promoted the recovery of the role of symbols in our life and thought. We have come to realize how symbols help us organize and make sense of our world, both at the conscious and the unconscious levels. We live in a world of objective and symbolic realities. To choose one expression of reality at the expense of the other is a crude form of reductionism. Symbols and concepts together are the key to understanding and shaping our world for the humanum. Finally, symbols have an inherent drive to express themselves in narratives and ritual gestures. Symbols, narratives of faith, and liturgy emerge from our being rooted in mystery and mystery’s impulse to express itself and encompass the whole of our lives. Applied to our question of the papacy, how is this ministry to be understood in symbolic terms, that is, at a more fundamental level than the conceptual level of “power of jurisdiction”? Can we re-imagine jurisdiction in symbolic terms?
Relationality and Essentialism
In the final three fundamental categories, we turn our attention to cultural and philosophical factors that serve as background ideas to the explicitly theological considerations. All three are generally associated with the cultural phenomenon of postmodernism. The first, relationality, understands reality primarily in terms of relations and not in terms of isolatable qualities that distinguish and, to some extent, separate one reality from all others. “Essentialism,” then, is the philosophical view that sees reality as constituted by distinct essences or natures that account for what a thing is in and of itself, that is, without consideration of how it interacts with other realities and is constituted by them. The philosophical view that understands reality in terms of how things are influenced by their mutually constituting relationships is often referred to as “relationality.” The renewed theological interest in the Trinity in the 70s and 80s led to the rediscovery of the importance of viewing the persons of the Trinity in terms of their being “substantial relations.” Relationships of being, therefore, are not purely logical, that is, categories of the mind, but find their being in influencing and being influenced by other realities. This rich concept of relation is being applied by some theologians to the Petrine ministry. Hierarchical or essentialist thought would locate “primacy” on a higher plane of existence and see “episcopacy” as fundamentally derived from it. A relational approach sees papacy and episcopacy as mutually defining, mutually constituting each other. If relationality governs the Trinity, why should it not also explain how episcopacy and the papal office are understood? But we are also free to ask how relationality might help to explain the primacy of the office of the Bishop of Rome with the other ecclesial primacies, those of the ancient patriarchs of the East, the heads of the auto-cephalous churches, and the metropolitans of major sees in the churches of the West. In a relational way of looking at reality, the Petrine ministry of the Bishop of Rome is not found at the summit of a pyramid or outside and over against the system of primatial authorities in the church, but as always within the circle of primacies, influencing and being influenced by the other primacies.
Pluralism vs. Diversity
Bishop Benedict XVI of Rome has warned against the “dictatorship of relativism” in the strongest possible terms. It is important, therefore, to distinguish pluralism from relativism. Likewise, the true meaning of pluralism does not emerge if it is seen in terms of mere diversity or multiplicity. The latter simply states that the world is so richly diverse that there is no vantage point from which we can gain a unifying overview or synthesis of reality. The world is de facto multifaceted and multifarious. Pluralism goes beyond mere diversity, but not as far as radical relativism. Pluralism maintains that the world is so richly diverse because it consists of explanations, meanings and insights that always remain partial, incomplete, and to some extent incommensurable with other realities because of the open-endedness of our knowledge. Pluralism, then, maintains that the world is de jure multiform. But unlike relativism, pluralism does not necessarily capitulate on the question of the meaningfulness of humanity’s striving toward the sharing of our partial insights in pursuit of the truth of reality. We never have the truth completely in hand, but neither is truth an illusion. Our assumptions regarding truth might be more modest than in the ancient world and in modernity, but truth remains a central value for the human mind and for human societies. None of this makes sense to the person committed to pure relativism. Christians cannot be relativists, but I think it is possible for us to be pluralists.
Applied to the Petrine ministry, then, we begin to realize that each of our traditions — Orthodox, Anglican, Roman Catholic, the churches of the Reformation — has something relevant to contribute to the discussion on the nature of ministry in the churches and among the churches as an expression of the communion that already exists. A pluralistic approach to papal ministry calls each of our traditions to the table and invites open dialogue and expression of each one’s needs. How can the Bishop of Rome serve the greater unity and mission of the Church of Christ, and how can the other traditions enrich the Roman expression of this universal ministry? The Bishop of Rome can only serve by himself being open to being served by the other churches and traditions. He needs to ask: What does my ministry have that I can share with you, and what do you have that I need?
Historicity vs. Objectivism
Our final fundamental category concerns yet another determinant of the postmodern worldview — historicity. From Heidegger through Gadamer and Habermas, the category of historicity, or the inescapability of our being determined by our time and place in the depths of our existence (“historical consciousness”), has come to characterize the humanum. We are not timeless or free of conditions, but are always found within the web of development, searching, fragility, and temporality. None of this makes much sense to an objectivist way of looking at the world, a viewpoint that concentrates on the conditions of our knowing and acting that are a priori and that explain the absoluteness, universality, and necessary reasons of our knowing and acting. An objectivist rushes past the fragmentariness of existence in the headlong pursuit of completeness of explanation and meaning. The historicist pauses to observe and to immerse himself or herself in the multiplicity, openness, precariousness, and fragmentariness of reality. The strength of the Christian faith’s commitment to the particularity of the Incarnation of the Word is the firm ground on which the Christian historicist stands. The absolute or transcendent is never reached in spite of the particular but always in and through the mediation of the particular. This insight of historicity complements all thought of human transcendence that is conceded too easily — or too cheaply, in Bonhoeffer’s turn of phrase.
When we apply this characteristic of our postmodern world to the Petrine ministry, we are challenged to give equal consideration to all those historical factors that have conditioned the papacy. How unchangeable is the definition of papal primacy of jurisdiction? What is the partial truth it tried to express, but what too are its time-conditioned, cultural limitations that now must be surmounted because of new historical particularities? Has the time come to surrender the limitations of an understanding of the papal office in jurisdictional terms in favor of a more comprehensive Petrine ministry?
This is all the more so the case since when dealing with ecclesial ministries we are not dealing with the most fundamental mysteries of the faith, as we are when treating, for instance, the Trinity or the Hypostatic Union. There are gradations of meaning and value in the Christian system or logic of faith. Not everything we profess is of the same order of meaning or importance. Some truths are necessary for the explanation of other truths and are therefore primary, while other truths do not in their turn ground our most fundamental faith claims and are therefore secondary. We need to seriously consider whether ecclesiological claims help us better understand the core statements of our shared Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or whether we have singled out some statements that are true but derivative and that can obscure what is most basic to the faith. Does the non-acceptance by some Christians of secondary faith statements in exactly the same sense as they are professed by other Christians really exclude these Christians from full participation in the ecclesial communion of all the churches, so long as the non-accepting Christians do not reject the teaching out of hand? Is it, in other words, sufficient that one group of Christians be asked simply to refrain from totally rejecting as heretical the position of other Christians regarding secondary statements of faith, in order for there to exist the minimum basis for communion among the churches? If we answer this question affirmatively in the case of the Petrine ministry of the Bishop of Rome, do Christians of different positions that are not diametrically opposed to each other continue to enjoy ecclesial communion — at least in certain situations? And if so, what might the implications of this position be in regard to our ecclesial imagination?
Thesis: A deeper grasp of the Church in the light of the teaching of Vatican II and the conditions of postmodernism demand the rethinking of the office of the Bishop of Rome. Surprisingly, postmodernism and theological renewal open up possibilities for rethinking the Petrine ministry in terms of an office that serves the unity of all believers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
