The Change in the Macro Setting of the Church

The anti-ecumenical document Dominus Iesus, issued by the Doctrinal Congregation under the direction of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in July, 2000, claiming that the Roman Catholic Church is the sole true Church, outraged not only Protestants but also many Catholics. It is an armistice document lacking in perspective and vision. It was widely anticipated in the December 18, 1979, decree against me by the same Congregation. Already condemned at that time were three central ecumenical desiderata: * An ecumenical working through of the infallibility and primacy problematic * The recognition of Protestant and Anglican offices and eucharistic celebrations * The possibility of an overall ecumenical understanding of eucharist. It is with a yearning sadness that, in the face of the new restorationist politics of the Polish pope, I recall the 1960's: * * Then there was an Italian pope who spoke less about the Oikumene than he acted for the Oikumene, and who called to Rome those theologians who had been dismissed, banned, or otherwise restricted by his predecessor: John XXIII. * Then I participated in an ecumenical council, which, different from the later Roman Synods, did not simply repeat the constantly recalled, well-known Roman doctrines but put into action the demands of the Reformation and Enlightenment and awakened hopes of overcoming the more than 450-year church split and the twice-as-long West-East one: Vatican II. * Then there came to the University of Tubingen, in response to my invitation, the Roman Curial Cardinal Augustin Bea, President of the new Roman Secretariat for Christian Unity, who in the Festival Hall expressed his appreciation for the ecumenical service of the Tubingen theological school and held a discussion with Catholic and Protestant professors. * There the professors of the Protestant Theological Faculty opened up their working community to the colleagues of the Catholic Theological Faculty. * There we began to hold joint seminars, to mutually recognize seminar credits, to celebrate ecumenical religious services, and to plan the integration of the two large libraries. All in all, an ecumenical climate that manifested itself in the historically Protestant Tubingen. However, in the 1980's the broad weather pattern changed again: A stationary ecumenical low spread from Rome over the Alps, indeed over wide areas of Christendom. Under Pope Paul VI the ecumenical barometer long stood at changeable. Strong curial counter-streams had in fact since Vatican II attempted to put the brakes on the ecumenical renewal efforts and, in the church's upper reaches, brought them to a standstill. Curial cardinals, indeed of other nationalities, but not of another mentality, rather strengthened Romanism instead of ecumenism. The Sanctum Officium Inquisitionum (Holy Office of the Inquisition) once again changed its name--and its methods slightly--but hardly its spirit or goal. In the beginning there were critical voices in the episcopacy, such as those of Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens (Brussels), Cardinal Giacomo Lecaro (Bologna), and the Canadian and Dutch bishops, but they soon went silent because they found no support from the rest of the episcopacy, especially from the German and French. The Curia used particular conciliar texts--because of their forced compromise character--concerning collegiality/papal primacy and birth control/ethical decisions in order to interpret them in former ways. …

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