ARTICLES

Relativism, Ecclesial Style

More on San Jose Diocese's Lay Ministry Program

BY ROSEANNE T. SULLIVAN

Sister Marie Gertrude Roldan (Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet and holder of a licentiate in canon law) instructed first year students at the San Jose diocese's Institute for Leadership in Ministry during a Saturday session I attended in 2002, called, "Canon Law: an Invitation and a Challenge." According to Sister Marie Ger trude's remarks, changes in canon law are trending towards the eventual removal of the division of roles between the laity and the ordained clergy. It seems it won't be good enough if the plans of the diocese of San Jose come to fruition and lay people are installed as spiritual leaders of parishes with adjunct priests providing "for the sacramental life of parishioners." [See "Ordination's No Object," April 2005 Faith] According to the ideas expressed in the canon law class, if thinkers like Sister Marie Gertrude and the theolo gians she quoted have their way, ordained clergy won' t be needed at all.

Sister Marie Gertrude is a judge on the diocesan marriage tribunal and serves as San Jose Bishop Patrick McGrath's delegate to religious.

At the class I attended on October 5, 2002, Sister Marie Gertrude started with a straightforward, abbreviated history of the early development of canon law. Quoting well-known theologians Father Teilhard de Chardin and Father Edward Schillebeeckx, Sister Marie Gertrude told the class that Vatican II gave permission "to look at it all [canon law] in new ways." According to Sister Marie Gertrude, after Vatican II, canon law began "to incorporate a new way of thinking that Church is communion." Because of Vatican II, she said, now "we [the pope, clerics, religious, and lay people] are all in relationship with each other." In the post-Vatican II Church, according to Sister Marie Gertrude, "decisions are made at the lowest level in concert with each other."

At the end of the class, Sister Marie Gertrude mentioned one change currently in place. "Lay people can preside at Sunday service in the absence of a priest," she said. "Can we consecrate? No, but we will get there yet!"

Sister Marie Gertrude did not mention that the Holy See's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith found serious errors in at least one of the theologians she quoted. And she did not mention that the notions that doctrine rises from below and that authority can spring from the community of the faithful were condemned by the congregation when it reprimanded Brazilian Father Leonardo Boff and when it released another letter about these errors to all the bishops.

In his 1992 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Catholic Church Considered as Communion," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), writing as prefect of the Congre gation for the Doctrine of the Faith, acknowledged the suitability and value of the notion of "Church as communion" as it was expressed in Vatican II documents and then went on to describe how the very interpretations mentioned by Sister Marie Gertrude Roldan "suffer from a clearly inadequate awareness of the Church as a mystery of communion," which " has to be understood within the teaching of the Bible and the patristic tradition....

"The rediscovery of a eucharistic ecclesiology, though being of undoubted value," wrote the cardinal, "has ... sometimes placed unilateral emphasis on the principle of the local Church. It is claimed that, where the Eucharist is celebrated, the totality of the mystery of the Church would be made present in such a way as to render any other principle of unity or universality non-essential. Other conceptions, under different theological influences, present this particular view of the Church in an even more radical form, going as far as to hold that gathering together in the name of Jesus (cf. Mt 18, 20) is the same as generating the Church: the assembly which in the name of Christ becomes a community, would hold within itself the powers of the Church, including power as regards the Eucharist. The Church, some say, would arise 'from base level.'"

The letter referred to these conceptions as errors. (See this link.)

On Sept. 15, 1986, under the direction of Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a "Notification on the Book, The Church With a Human Face: A New and Expanded Theology of Ministry, by Dominican Father Edward Schillebeeckx," one of the theologians invoked by Sister Marie Gertrude. The notification said that the book disagrees with the teachings of the Church about ordination and the possibility of lay people presiding at the Eucharist.

"The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is forced to conclude that the conception of the ministry as set forth by Professor Schillebeeckx remains in discord with the teaching of the Church on important points," the notification said. It also said that the congregation's mission towards the faithful "obliges it to render this judgment public."

The notification continued that "on the fundamental problem, it must be stated with regret that the author continues to conceive and present the Church's apostolic succession in such a manner that apostolic succession through sacramental ordination becomes a factor not essential to the exercise of the ministry and consequently to the power to consecrate the Eucharist -- all this in opposition to the doctrine of the Church."

Father Schillebeeckx's theology also denies the historical truth of the resur rection and the divinity of Christ, as expressed in his book, Jesus, An Experiment in Christology. Schillebeeckx's starting point was the premise that the gospel accounts of Jesus' life and resurrection were created out of the community's recollection after His death and were not historical in any normal understanding of the word.

Bishop Patrick McGrath expressed the same basic premise as Schillebeeckx's in a February 18, 2004 San Jose Mercury News article about the movie, The Passion of the Christ. "While the primary source material of the film is attributed to the four gospels, these sacred books are not historical accounts of the historical events that they narrate," wrote McGrath. "They are theological reflections upon the events that form the core of Christian faith and belief."

The following quote from Schillebeeckx's book on Jesus gives an example of his belief that the "legend" of the resurrection arose from the community's recollection after the events. According to Schillebeeckx, the women finding the empty tomb is "an aetiological cult-legend intended to shed light on the (at least) annual visit of the Jerusalem church to the tomb in order to honor the risen [exalted] One." The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith criticized this book for denying the divinity of Jesus.

The congregation's communications to Father Schillebeeckx and the notification are mentioned at www.vatican.va. Excerpts from the notification are available at www.sspx.ca.

In 1985, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification on the book Church: Charism and Power, by Brazilian Franciscan Father Leonardo Boff, who argued that the Church's current hierarchical structure was not that intended by Christ and that authority can spring from the community of the faithful. The notification called Boff' s theories "ecclesiological relativism," said the theories were based on "a profound misunderstanding of the Catholic faith," and called the book "dangerous." The text of this notification can be found at www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/CDFBOFF.HTM.

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