The Unfinished Reformation

ROMAN CATHOLICS

His Eminence Julius Cardinal Dopfner was the youngest bishop in Europe at the age of 35; ten years later, in 1958, he became the youngest member of the College of Cardinals. Today he governs the powerful See of Munich, and was one of four prelates chosen by Pope Paul VI as "moderators" to oversee the debates at the second session of the Vatican Council. Last week he made the most direct statement yet by any cardinal on the need for a genuine reform of the Roman Catholic Church, and defined that reformation--already begun, but as yet unfinished--as the true aim of the Vatican Council.

When Dopfner speaks, others listen, and 2,800 people--including priests, foreign diplomats and non-Catholic clergy--gathered in Munich's Congress Hall to hear him. It turned out to be, said one excited Lutheran churchman after ward, "the first time anyone so high up in the Catholic hierarchy has made a speech quite so daring."

Superannuated Souvenir. "Masses of the faithful have been lost," said Dopfner, because to many the Catholic Church appeared as "an institution that enslaved freedom" and as a "superannuated souvenir from a past age." It spoke to man in an ancient tongue, through incomprehensible rituals, in preaching concepts that have no relation to current life. Instead of penetrating the world, the church seemed to sit "in a self-imposed ghetto, trying to build its own small world adjoining the big world." Tied to "antiquated forms," Catholicism often gave the appearance of resenting the inescapable presence of ideological pluralism, political democracy and modern technology.

These unpleasant truths persuaded Pope John XXIII that the council was needed, and gave new force to the traditional understanding of Catholicism as ecclesia semper reformanda--a church ever in need of reform. Christ himself was free of sin; but the continuation of his work, Dopfner pointed out, "has been entrusted to frail, sinful humans." Thus the church has sometimes been guilty of "failing to achieve what God had desired. The presentation of the love of Christ can lag if the church uses the means of power instead of humility, of force instead of service."

This means, according to Dopfner, that any reform can only be carried out by the church at the council in a spirit of penitence, or metanoia, in the knowledge that it is "a community of sinners." Reform also must be based on the teachings of Christ and Holy Scripture. It also must be in the nature of renovation rather than revolution, preserving what is good from the past tradition while remaining open to future possibilities of development. "We are in danger of resisting ideas, forms and possibilities to which perhaps the future belongs, and we often consider as impossible that which will finally manifest itself as a legitimate form of Christianity," said the cardinal.

The Wealth of Truth. Even in the area of church teaching, development is far from impossible, said Dopfner, since "a dogma as such is not finally synonymous with divine truth but only incompletely expresses the wealth of divine truth because it sees revelation in human terms." This does not mean that the church can recant or change dogmatic definitions of the past, but it can discover new aspects of truth and find new ways to express traditional teaching.

Thus the ancient belief of Catholics that "outside the church there is no salvation" can be amplified to make it less offensive to Protestants. It should also be modified to recognize "that the word and grace of God is effective in many manifestations outside the church. To recognize this in a statement by the highest teaching authority is undoubtedly an innovation, which in earlier times, when the people of other faiths were merely considered in the light of formal heresy, would have been utterly inconceivable."

But, said the cardinal in his peroration, "the recognition of the Holy Spirit outside the limits of the Catholic church establishes a bridge to our 'separated brethren' and enlarges the order of the church as such. And God's work among our brethren establishes a common ba sis from which the attempt must be made to continue a sincere fraternal and patient dialogue in which the issues which divide us can be clarified. This we view as the first step of the road along which God can ultimately lead us to each other."

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