September 6, 2000 by By R. Jeffrey Smith
A new Vatican dictum issued today declares that individuals can attain full salvation from earthly sin only through the spiritual grace of the Catholic Church and that other faiths–including Protestant Christian ones–have defects that place their followers in a “gravely deficient situation” in seeking salvation.
A new Vatican dictum issued today declares that individuals can attain full salvation from earthly sin only through the spiritual grace of the Catholic Church and that other faiths–including Protestant Christian ones–have defects that place their followers in a “gravely deficient situation” in seeking salvation.
The goal, according to a top Vatican official, is to combat the “so-called theology of religious pluralism,” which suggests that Catholics are on a par in God’s eyes with, say, Jews, Muslims or Hindus.
The pronouncement drew statements of dismay from other religious groups, with whom Pope John Paul II has sought to establish more peaceful and cooperative links over the past two decades. Muslim, Jewish and even Orthodox Christian leaders have repeatedly asked to be treated as equals in dialogue with the Vatican, an idea that the new declaration explicitly circumscribes by reaffirming centuries-old claims of Catholic primacy.
Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, the spiritual leader of Anglicanism, which includes the Episcopal Church U.S.A., said “the idea that Anglican and other Churches are not ‘proper churches’ seems to question the considerable gains we have made,” the Associated Press reported.
The World Council of Churches said it would be a “tragedy” if Christian cooperation were “obscured by the Churches’ dialogues about their relative authority and status–however important they may be.”
The Rev. Valdo Benecchi, president of the Methodist Evangelical Churches of Italy, declared: “It’s a jump backwards in terms of ecumenism and with dialogues with other religions. There is nothing new about this, but we had hoped they had taken another road. This is a return to the past. . . . The salvation through Christ is not deposited in one religion only. This puts not only the Catholic Church at the center, but especially the Catholic hierarchy.”
Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit scholar and editor of the Catholic weekly magazine America, said he was dismayed that the statement had “practically no reference to the dialogue going on for the past 35 years between Catholics and Protestants” on various religious issues. “The danger,” he said, “is that this document will be seen as a rejection of that dialogue,” a message he said he did not think was intended.
Issued after two years of study and timed to coincide with the millennial celebration of Jesus’s birth, the document effectively delineates the boundaries of the Vatican’s forbearance of other faiths.
As such, it reflects age-old Vatican anxieties about the dilution of Catholic authority, which Church officials maintain comes directly from God through the pope. It also may grow from a heightened concern by Church officials that Catholicism must remain competitive with Islam and other expanding faiths, particularly in East Asia and other battlegrounds for religious adherence in the developing world.
The Vatican document asserts that “equality . . . refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not the doctrinal content” underlining their religions. Without citing particular alternative religions, it describes others as inherently inferior, because they depend on “superstitions or other errors [that] constitute an obstacle to salvation.”
It also reminds Catholics that their duty is to evangelize adherents of other faiths during any dialogue, an idea that has rankled Orthodox Christian leaders, among others, who have long accused the Vatican of trying to convert their followers.
The document appears to differentiate non-Catholic Christian churches from other religions. The non-Catholic churches “suffer from defects,” it says, but they “have by no means been deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation.”
The document was presented at a news conference by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the principal Vatican body charged with defining and upholding theological tradition. Its release comes in the midst of uncertainty about the longevity of John Paul II, who suffers from the effects of a Parkinson’s-like disease, and a growing clash of views within the Church over its future direction.
John Paul has notably embraced a handful of dicta dating from the famed Second Vatican Council meetings of the mid-1960s, which called for religious liberty and explicitly supported ecumenism, or religious cooperation and unity. During a visit to the Middle East last March, he also called for “more mature understanding and ever more practical cooperation” among Christians, Jews and Muslims.
But today’s declaration is concerned more with establishing limits than breaking barriers, and its tone at times seems closer to the inhibiting orders of the First Vatican Council, in 1870, which was convened just as the Church’s political control over a sizable chunk of Italy was slipping away. Then, the council lent its support to a “Syllabus of Errors,” which explicitly challenged any notion that other religions were as “true” as Catholicism.
The 36-page dictum, issued under the title of “Declaration The Lord Jesus on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church,” contains another list of doctrinal errors that Vatican officials say threaten the Church’s “constant missionary proclamation” and must be shunned by modern adherents.
None of those who are alleged to have advocated these errors were identified in the document or at the news conference. But the list includes any conviction that divine truth is elusive; that a different truth can exist for some cultures, particularly those in Asia; that the last judgment of God does not loom; and that reason can be the only source of knowledge.
“True tolerance . . . is being manipulated and surpassed today” by theologians who advance such ideas while propagating “the erroneous idea that the religions of the world are complementary to the Christian revelation,” Ratzinger warned.