AMERIO, Romano
253. Theory of anonymous Christians in the new ecumenism.
The conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate quotes the famous Johannine
text about the "light that enlightens every man" that gives what genuine
basis there is in every religion. But the council says nothing about
what John Paul II has described as a mystery parallel to that of the
Incarnation, namely that the light was rejected by men. It is thus impossible
for the light to be truly the foundation of all religions.[1] The Pope
says that Christmas contains the double mystery of belief in the birth
of the Incarnate God and of His non-reception by the world and by His
own people.
The council refrains from speaking about a supernatural light coming
from the Word and talks instead about a "fullness of light." That the
two documents, Ad Gentes, and Nostra Aetate, are stamped
with a certain naturalism can be seen even from their terminology; the
word "supernatural" does not occur in either of them .[2]
This optimistic view of non-Christian religions inevitably led to an
emphasizing of those elements of natural religion that Islam and Christianity
have in common. The council mentioned the Islamic belief in a provident
and omnipotent God and in a last judgment, but it ignored the denial
of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, that is, the denial of the
two most important truths of Christianity which some have held to be
necessary for salvation.
Within the new ecumenism lurks the old problem of the salvation of unbelievers,
which has beset Christian theology from it beginnings, and has been
compounded with the question of the number of the elect, the presumption
being that a relatively small number of persons attaining salvation
would somehow reduce the credibility of Christianity. The divine Word,
who is incarnate as Christ, is the origin of all created good; thus
to follow the Word at the supernatural or the natural level is in fact
to follow the same principle. Campanella took Christ, the universal
source of rationality, as the foundation of his whole philosophy and
made this insight the explanation of Christian missionary activity.
"Christ is not the leader of a sect, as are the heads of other peoples;
he is the wisdom, the word, the reason of God, and thus himself God,
who assumed humanity as the instrument of our renewal and redemption;
since all men are rational in virtue of their sharing in Christ as primal
Reason, all men are implicitly Christians; they need to recognize this
fact explicitly within the Christian religion, in which alone man returns
to God."[3]
While knowing nothing of Campanella, the new theology has taken up his
idea of implicit Christians and turned it into that of anonymous Christians.
These persons are alleged to adhere to Christ by an unconscious desire
and to attain eternal life by so doing.[4]
254. Critique of the new ecumenism. Pelagian coloring. Unimportance
of missions.
The principal characteristic of the new system is its Pelagian flavor.
The new view does not in fact maintain the unique divine status of Christianity
because what brings salvation in the new view is not grace, that is,
God's special communication of his own being through historical
events, but rather God's universal self-communication to men's
minds through the natural light of reason. Historical reality
is abandoned for a timeless ideal; a real presence is replaced by the
intuition of an idea. Man's ordering towards natural goods, which is
the foundation of human culture, is distinct from an ordering towards
supernatural goods, which is the foundation of Christianity; it is illegitimate
to disguise the leap from one to the other by teaching Christianity
as if it were immanent within the religious sense of the human race.
It is impossible to discover the supernatural by the light of nature.
The supernatural is implanted in the depths of man's heart by a special
historical action; it does not spring up from within those depths themselves.[5]
The new ecumenism also does away with missions. If the nations
already have saving truth buried in the breast of their own religious
sense, the proclaiming of such truth by Christianity becomes unnecessary
and futile. The spreading of Christianity will end up seeming like nothing
more than an attempt to subject souls to the missionaries, rather than
to the truth, if in fact the souls in question are held to possess the
truth already. The truth however is, that in preaching the Gospel the
Church is not preaching its own doctrine, and that not even Christ himself
preached his own message.[6] Instead of integrating other religious
truth into itself, as Gioberti rightly saw that Christianity did, the
new ecumenism integrates Christianity into other religions. Mgr Rossano
expressly talks about the "perpetual problematicity of the Christian
subject"; a formula that does away with the certainty of faith, and
plants scepticism in the very heart of all religion.[7]
In the Catholic view, the preaching of the Gospel must take precedence
over the advancement of technology, which is in fact what culture has
come to be in modern society; Paul VI said it was wrong to reverse this
order by giving precedence to "human promotion" and liberation.[8] Nonetheless,
the reversal has occurred in much post-conciliar activity. Father Basetti
Sani[9] says that the Koran is a divinely inspired book; Mgr Yves Plume
states that "beyond differences in dogma and morals, Christianity and
Islam teach the same truths and aim at the same end";[10] the Osservatore
Romano says[11] "Hinduism is already oriented towards Christ and
already in fact contains the symbol of Christian reality"; therefore
the Church's missionary activity can be nothing more than literacy programs,
irrigation schemes, agricultural improvements and health services, that
is, the advancement of civilization rather than religion. The notion
of non-missionary missions has become the essential idea in the annual
World Missions Day; in 1974 the latter was the occasion for disseminating
hundreds of thousands of leaflets saying "What does it (the Missions
Day) mean? It means working together to eliminate hatreds, wars, famine
and misery. It means cooperating in the spiritual, human and social
redemption of peoples in the light of the Christian message. What does
it ask of us? Maternity homes, sheltered accommodation, schools, hospitals,
dispensaries, orphanages, old people's homes, leprosariums, hospitals
for tuberculosis. The missionaries are waiting for a generous act of
solidarity." The whole appeal is devoid of any trace of the Catholic
religion as such; it is entirely devoted to philanthropic undertakings.
The common basis of all mankind's religions, to which the new ecumenism
appeals, is not Christ the Incarnate God known by revelation, but Christ
conceived of as representing an ideal humanity, the perfect man desired
by naturalist humanitarianism. It is hardly surprising then if missionaries
become disenchanted with missions that are primarily directed at a merely
earthly renewal of humanity; nor is it surprising that an ecumenism
of a merely natural sort should have found its pantheon at Marseilles,
thanks to Mgr Etchegaray.[12] It is, lastly, no surprise that at an
Islamic-Christian seminar in Tripoli in 1976, Cardinal Pignedoli agreed,
as point 17 of a document, to accept the condemnation of all missions
aimed at conversion, on the basis that the founders of both religions
were "messengers of God."[13] It has now become commonplace among Catholics
to regard as proselytism what used to be called missionary activity;
Catholics have completely accepted the World Council of Churches' view
on this matter. Pastor Potter, the secretary of the council, said in
his speech to the world ecumenical conference in Vancouver in July 1983
that the mature fruit of the ecumenical movement in the Christian world
at large was that: "From mistrust, from refusal to recognize each other
as churches, from proselytism, from apologetics in favor of
one's own particular faith, we have moved on to discourage proselytism
so as to make our common witness to Christ more faithful and more convincing."
The Osservatore Romano reports all this without any reservations,
and seems to accept that this is the Catholic Church's position too.[14]
It is hardly surprising, in the midst of this doctrinal confusion, that
an enormous Red Indian totem pole was erected as a symbol at the site
of the meetings. The Osservatore Romano reports the fact under
the headline, "Diverse cultures converging in a single faith."[15]
Notes
[1] O.R., 26-27 December 1981.
[2] See the cited Concordantiae under this word.
[3] R. Amerio, Il problema esegetico fondamentale del pensiero campanelliano,
in Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 1939, pp.378ff
[4] The view of K. Rahner's school, in Das Christentum and die nichtchristlichen
Religionen, in Schriften zur Theologie, Cologne 1972.
[5] Thus, to say, as the Osservatore Romano does on 11 January
1972, that "the council has ruled out once and for all the assumption
that only Catholics possess the truth" is rash and erroneous, because
it fails to draw the crucial distinction between the specific truth
coming from Christ and the universal truths coming from human nature.
Again, to say the Church is not monolithic is to deny that it has a
single foundation stone that stretches beneath both the visible and
invisible worlds.
[6] Cf. John, 7:16.
[7] Syncretist ideas have spread widely among ordinary people; the Rimini
Meeting for Friendship between Peoples, organized by the great Catholic
movement, Comunione e Liberazione, in August 1982 turned into
"a colloquium in several voices, (Protestants, Buddhists, Jews, etc.
took part in it) on the subject of the religious experiences of people
of different faiths, but having the common denominator of communion
for man, and for his reserve of the sacred." O.R., 30-31 August 1982.
This commonality was at odds with the teaching that John Paul II was
giving during the same few days, in his sermon in San Marino in which
he developed the idea that "in this world good is separated from evil,
and is set against it by the very will of God" and that this opposition
manifests itself in man's conscience; the same human consciousness which
the Rimini Meeting made the ground of man's unity.
[8] O.R., 25 October 1971.
[9] In Renovatio, 1971, p.229. This statement was widely objected
to, but defended by the editor Don G. Baget Bozzo, who rejects the criticism
in a letter he sent me on 9 September 1971.
[10] Cited in Ami du Clerge, 1964, p.414.
[11] In a review of a work by R. Panikkar. O.R., 28 July 1977.
[12] The attempt to transform a chapel in Notre-Dame de la Garde into
a merely monotheist centre, with the statues of saints being replaced
by texts from the Koran and the Torah, aroused strong popular objections,
which led to its being in part frustrated. Itineraires, No
.205, pp. 113 and 167.
[13] O.R., 13 February 1976.
[14] O.R., 28 July 1983.
[15] O.R., 31 July 1983.
AMERIO, Romano. Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century. Trans. John P. Parsons. Kansas City: Sarto, 1996.
