Analysis
Papal deeds speak louder
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
It’s the nature of the office that a pope has to watch what
he says.
Ironically, the 1870 declaration of infallibility at the First
Vatican Council has probably inhibited papal freedom of speech more than any
king or emperor ever could. Since even his “ordinary magisterium,” or
regular teaching expressed in audiences and letters, is considered to enjoy a
divine seal of approval, popes feel compelled to sweat over every phrase. Once
it drops from his lips, it passes into tradition, and hence it must be
“just so.”
That’s inevitably a prescription for caution. Popes rarely
speak off the cuff, and when they do, pulse rates in Vatican offices head for
the sky.
Gestures, on the other hand, are by definition far more ambiguous.
A pope can be himself in his actions in a way he never can be with his words.
For that reason, often what a pope does is a better indicator of where
his heart is than what he says. The pontificate of John Paul II
illustrates the point.
Consider, for example, the December 1996 visit of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, then George Carey, and several of his brother Anglican bishops
to Rome. On the occasion, John Paul II gave Carey a gold pectoral cross, the
same gift he offers to Catholic archbishops on their ad limina visits.
He offered silver pectoral crosses to the other Anglicans.
It was a kind gesture with just one glitch: According to Catholic
theology, Anglican bishops aren’t the real deal, and hence have no
business sporting the symbols of the bishop’s office. Most recently, the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made this point in a commentary on
the 1998 document Ad Tuendam Fidem. It pointed to the invalidity of
Anglican ordinations as an example of not-yet-declared infallible church
teaching.
Notre Dame theologian Fr. Richard McBrien has argued that this
leaves two possibilities. Either the pope holds a different view about the
validity of Anglican ordinations, or he is guilty of the canonical offense of
falsifying the sacrament of holy orders by complicity in the fiction that the
Anglicans really are bishops.
Most observers believe John Paul was trying to encourage unity
between Catholics and Anglicans, whose dialogue since the Second Vatican
Council (1962-65) has been a model of civility, even ahead of an ability to
spell out quite yet the theological basis for that unity.
Other examples of actions speaking louder than words might include
the pope’s respectful, prayerful visit to the Grand Omayyad Mosque in
Damascus in May 2001, not long after the Vatican document Dominus Iesus
had asserted that non-Catholics are in a “gravely deficient
situation”; or his March 2000 visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem amid
acrimonious debates between Jews and Catholics.
Recent weeks in Rome have offered two more examples of the
pope’s “watch what I do, not always what I say” style.
On Oct. 4, in conjunction with an international conference marking
the 700th anniversary of the birth of St. Bridget of Sweden, John Paul II took
part in a gala vespers service in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Present for the occasion were 13 Roman Catholic bishops, plus nine
Lutheran bishops from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, one other Lutheran clergyman,
and three non-Catholic prelates (two Orthodox, one Anglican). There were, in
other words, an equal number on both sides.
The two sets of prelates were dressed in liturgical vestments, and
they processed in and sat down with equal dignity. It was difficult to avoid
the impression that the pope was recognizing some kind of brotherhood in holy
orders for the Lutheran and Anglican prelates that official Catholic theology
would struggle to explain. Privately, several of the Lutherans said that they
experienced the event as an unofficial form of papal recognition.
John Paul’s public comments on the occasion were not so
daring. “In a spirit of brotherhood and friendship I greet the
distinguished representatives of the Lutheran churches,” he said.
“Your presence at this prayer is a cause of deep joy. I express the hope
that our meeting together in the Lord’s name will help to further our
ecumenical dialogue and quicken the journey towards full Christian
unity.”
At the level of symbolism, however, the pope seemed to be saying
more.
Two days later, Patriarch Teoctist of the Romanian Orthodox church
arrived in Rome for the start of a weeklong visit, reciprocating the
pope’s May 7-9, 1999, visit to Bucharest. John Paul welcomed Teoctist to
the public Mass of thanksgiving for the canonization of Opus Dei founder
Josemaria Escriva Oct. 6, standing to embrace him in brotherly fashion before a
crowd of 200,000, then ensuring that Teoctist was seated in an exact duplicate
of the papal throne.
It was not the behavior of someone worried about underscoring his
own primacy.
In fact, all the week’s choreography seemed designed to make
the two prelates seem like equally eminent heads of churches. The high point
came with the signing of a joint declaration between John Paul and Teoctist on
Saturday, Oct. 12.
The text of the declaration was itself interesting. “Our aim
and our ardent desire is full communion, which is not absorption, but communion
in love. It is an irreversible path that has no alternative: It is the way of
the church,” the declaration reads.
It gets down to brass tacks, calling for a relaunch of the
international Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, currently in a deep freeze after a
disastrous session in Baltimore in July 2000. Those talks were paralyzed by
accusations of proselytism against Catholics in Orthodox nations, debates over
Eastern churches in communion with Rome, and most notoriously, differing views
of the limits of papal power.
More important than the wording, however, may be the way the
declaration was issued. The pope’s repeated gestures of humility and
fraternity, always careful to treat Teoctist like an ecclesiastical equal, were
designed to assuage Orthodox fears about a Roman “imperial papacy.”
In that sense, John Paul’s conduct reflected a reformed papacy that
Catholic theological language is not yet able to describe.
To understand what the pope is trying to communicate, therefore,
sometimes it’s a good idea to keep the pictures but turn down the
sound.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 08,
2002
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