Into the Deep Sea of History

The release of Anglicanorum Coetibus.

According to his critics, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy would alienate, not attract, be rigid, not flexible. But as he presides over an imaginative papacy of growing Christian unity, their predictions fall away.

Unable to compute that disaffected Anglicans had approached Pope Benedict and asked for entry into the Church, they cast his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus as an act of aggressive evangelization.

“Vatican Fishing for Disgruntled Anglicans,” declared the Washington Post. The New York Times described it as “an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse.”

The coverage contained an implicit assumption: that the Catholic Church is a man-made sect which steals members from other man-made sects.

Were that assumption true, were the Catholic Church a grasping human organization among others, the negative spin on Anglicanorum Coetibus might be understandable. But the assumption is false. The Church comes from Jesus Christ, and the Pope and her bishops are called to be “fishers of men,” as he told the disciples.

True, Pope Benedict’s accommodation of disaffected Anglicans in Anglicanorum Coetibus is not “ecumenical,” as defined by modern liberals. But it is apostolic, and that’s what matters. He is not, after all, the world’s ecumenical coordinator but the Vicar of Christ.

In Pope Benedict’s inaugural sermon, he noted the fisherman’s ring each pope receives, a symbol that the “Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel—to God, to Christ, to true life.”

And the fishing to which Christ calls his Church does not kill but saves, emphasized Pope Benedict: “for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food. But in the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true. We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendor of God’s light, into true life.”

With Anglicanorum Coetibus and the other bold initiatives of his papacy, Benedict is fulfilling his Petrine role not only as fisherman but also as shepherd. The successor of Peter is called to unite and save all, for the fragmentation of Christians is contrary to the will of God, as Benedict explains in the introduction to the apostolic constitution:

In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately. The Apostolic See has responded favorably to such petitions. Indeed, the successor of Peter, mandated by the Lord Jesus to guarantee the unity of the episcopate and to preside over and safeguard the universal communion of all the Churches, could not fail to make available the means necessary to bring this holy desire to realization.

The Church, a people gathered into the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, was instituted by our Lord Jesus Christ, as “a sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all people. Every division among the baptized in Jesus Christ wounds that which the Church is and that for which the Church exists; in fact, “such division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages that most holy cause, the preaching the Gospel to every creature.” Precisely for this reason, before shedding his blood for the salvation of the world, the Lord Jesus prayed to the Father for the unity of his disciples.

Anglicanorum Coetibus is not an affront to Christian unity, as some claim, but a significant step towards it, not an act of arrogant sectarianism, but a repudiation of it. In the document’s flexibility and generosity, Pope Benedict shows once again that his orthodox understanding of the Church as one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic makes him open to everything save heresy.

Ironically, it is the heterodox inside the Church who recoil from this openness and appear rigid as they try and lock the doors to traditionalists who do not pass insubstantial litmus tests. In his approach to disaffected Anglicans, the Society of Pius X, and the Orthodox, among others, Pope Benedict has rejected that species of small-minded sectarianism. He does not treat unity as uniformity and force traditionalist searchers to swallow a uniform version of post-Vatican II Catholicism before entering the Church.

The Catholic left clamored for “diversity” and a “reformed” religion from Pope Benedict, but this is not what they had in mind. They fear that his gestures to traditionalists, both outside and inside the Church, threaten to retard liberal progress. Let us hope they are right.

Catholics, in fact, may find exposure to the elements of the Anglican patrimony permitted under this apostolic constitution to be far more edifying and historically Catholic than exposure to the progressive ad hoc practices at their own parishes.

Benedict, as he launches out into the deep sea of history, is not so much re-shaping Catholicism as restoring it and reminding the world that true Christianity is not a sect but a universal religion.

George Neumayr is editor of CWR. This editorial appears in the December 2009 issue.

According to his critics, Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy would alienate, not attract, be rigid, not flexible. But as he presides over an imaginative papacy of growing Christian unity, their predictions fall away.

Unable to compute that disaffected Anglicans had approached Pope Benedict and asked for entry into the Church, they cast his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus as an act of aggressive evangelization. 
 
“Vatican Fishing for Disgruntled Anglicans,” declared the Washington Post. The New York Times described it as “an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse.”

The coverage contained an implicit assumption: that the Catholic Church is a man-made sect which steals members from other man-made sects.


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