Below The Beltway

Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement yesterday that did nothing more than restate something that’s been part of Catholic doctrine for thousands of years, but the over-reaction has been amazing:

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy — Pope Benedict XVI reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches and Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation.

The statement brought swift criticism from Protestant leaders. “It makes us question whether we are indeed praying together for Christian unity,” said the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a fellowship of 75 million Protestants in more than 100 countries.

“It makes us question the seriousness with which the Roman Catholic Church takes its dialogues with the reformed family and other families of the church,” the group said in a letter charging that the document took ecumenical dialogue back to the era before the Second Vatican Council.

Not if you read what it actually says it doesn’t:

The new document _ formulated as five questions and answers _ restates key sections of a 2000 text the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, “Dominus Iesus,” which riled Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”

The commentary repeated church teaching that says the Catholic Church “has the fullness of the means of salvation.”

“Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” said the document released as the pope vacations at a villa in Lorenzago di Cadore, in Italy’s Dolomite mountains.

The other communities “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they do not have apostolic succession _ the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles _ and therefore their priestly ordinations are not valid, it said.

(…)

The document said that Orthodox churches were indeed “churches” because they have apostolic succession and enjoyed “many elements of sanctification and of truth.” But it said they do not recognize the primacy of the pope _ a defect, or a “wound” that harmed them, it said.

“This is obviously not compatible with the doctrine of primacy which, according to the Catholic faith, is an ‘internal constitutive principle’ of the very existence of a particular church,” said a commentary from the congregation that accompanied the text.

Despite the harsh tone, the document stressed that Benedict remains committed to ecumenical dialogue.

“However, if such dialogue is to be truly constructive it must involve not just the mutual openness of the participants, but also fidelity to the identity of the Catholic faith,” the commentary said.

Again, this is nothing new under the sun. It’s something that the Catholic Church has taught since the beginning, even after Vatican II. And it doesn’t mean that the Church is saying that Protestants are all going to hell, either. It does impact, however, an issue that has come up now and again, the reunification of Christian Churches.

Based upon the doctrine reiterated by Benedict, reunification with the Orthodox Churches would be possible because the recognize Apostolic Succession. Reunification with most other Protestant Churches, however, would be far more difficult, because they have drifted far away from what the Catholic faith recognizes as a Church.

You may not like it, but it’s what the Church teaches, and I don’t see anything wrong with the Pope reasserting it today.

More importantly, though, there’s this little piece from the document that the media isn’t paying attention to:

“[T]hese separated churches and Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation.

“In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

In other words, the Pope is not saying that Protestant’s are evil, or going to hell, just that they aren’t Catholic. Not an entirely controversial statement when you think about it.