The Path to Rome—The Holy Spirit Unites
September 18, 1998
Talk given in Chicago, Illinois
In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, we confess that we believe in the Holy Spirit and in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. My assigned topic is The Path to Rome—The Holy Spirit Unites. Since the Holy Father has asked us to reflect upon the mission of the Holy Spirit in Christ, the Church, and the world during 1998, my task has been a welcome one.
A summary follows. As requested, I will begin by describing my own personal path to Rome as requested. Secondly, I will enter directly into the topic by developing a theme from St. John’s gospel, the Holy Spirit has glorified Christ. Then I will reflect upon another Johannine theme, the mystery of Christ being glorified in his disciples. Fourthly, following Augustine, I will speak of the role of the Holy Spirit in creating a communion of love within the Church; this is manifested most clearly in the unity of the many shepherds in the One Shepherd, Jesus Christ, whose concrete representation in the Church is the Pope of Rome. My fifth point will deal with some misinterpretations of the Second Vatican Council. And finally, I will offer a brief description of the relationship between the search for Christian unity and evangelization followed by concluding comments.
My talk will be informed by many of the theological insights to Hans Urs von Balthasar.
1. PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS
I have been asked to describe my own personal path to Rome. I was somewhat perplexed with the request. How does one speak of a path to Rome when one has always considered the Eternal City a spiritual home? There was not a time when I was not already in Rome, at least in my heart. Rome was the dream of pilgrimages since my earliest childhood. Solemnly framed etchings of St. Peter’s Square, of Michelangelo’s dome, of Maderno’s facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, of the Apostolic palace, and of the Colosseum, adorned the staircase and landing of my grandparent’s home in Catonsville, Maryland. The grandchildren passed them by on Sundays whenever we climbed to pray before the altar in the great hall of the second floor with its niches containing an array of our favourite saints or to celebrate May devotions. Those Roman etchings in my grandfather’s home were as much a part of my Christian experience as was the annual Mass for the repose of my grandmother’s soul on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of her death. Her husband, my grandfather, as well as all their sons and daughters and grandchildren, faithfully attended that memorial Mass at the parish Church, the parish of our baptism, until the year when he himself became seriously ill. I knew Rome’s St. Peter before I recognized Washington’s White House or New York’s Statue of Liberty.
The name of our conference today coincides with the title of Hilaire Belloc’ s book, Path to Rome. It has been a long time favorite of mine. It probably complimented my early interest in Roman pilgrimages. In the process of forging his own identity as a Christian and writer and apologist, he wrote about his pilgrimage from St. Cloud in southern France to far away Rome in 1901, thirteen years before the outbreak of the Great War changed everything.
At one point, Belloc narrates the effects of early memories on his mature Christian experience. Recalling his tears at being “taken up and transfigured by the collective act” of all the men and women of the village of Undervelier attending Vespers in their parish Church one Sunday evening, he probes deeper into the origins of his own Catholic belief during his pilgrimage. The return to faith, he writes, “is [caused by] the problem of living; for every day, every experience of evil demands a solution. That solution is provided by the memory of the great scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood pierces through again....But I will not attempt to explain it” (159).
For me, Rome and the centuries of faith the Eternal City recalls are also intertwined with early laughter and play, family intimacy and love. Childhood memories of my own Christian experience, including Rome as the home of the Popes and early martyrs, also “pierce through” again and again in my adult life. Yet Belloc described his path to Rome as a “return to belief” after the “reaction and indifference” of his youth. It would be inaccurate to describe my Christian experience as a return to belief. Adolescent questions never undermined my faith in Christ or in his Church. Rather it would be more accurate to say that the Roman part of my Catholic faith dates back to those earliest memories and constitutes a well travelled path which I have always known. The Via Cassia, the ancient pilgrimage road to Rome from the north, has been part of my spiritual landscape or map from the beginning. To take the image one step further, the years have offered me the grace of a deeper contemplation of the mystery of the Cross. I think particularly of the cross placed on the summit of the obelisk of Nero in the middle of Bernini’s all-embracing theatrum S. Petri. Since that Cross and the Roman imperial monument which it surmounts serve as a useful image of what I am planning to speak about this evening, I will reflect on them for a few more moments. It was the Cross which led me to that mature Christian experience which Paul Ricouer has described as “the second naivete.” For the past four centuries that great obelisk has stood before the tomb of Peter, crowned with the triumphant Cross of Christ. It is inevitably connected to Peter. Having built his circus or race-track at the foot of the Vatican hill near his Villa, the Roman Emperor Nero made the imposing Egyptian ornament its center piece. It became one of the major attractions on the right bank of the Tiber River, having been brought to Rome by the Emperor Gaius or Caligua to adorn their circus where games were played and where Christians were tortured to death. St. Peter met his death there by martyrdom in 67 AD. The obelisk was among the last things which Peter saw on earth from his place of crucifixion. The energetic Franciscan, Pope Sixtus V, had the obelisk removed from the southern flank of St. Peter’s near the present-day sacristy of Pope Pius VI, where it had been for over 1500 years, to its present position in 1586 under the direction of the architect Domenico Fontana. Sixtus had the cross placed where it now overlooks the entire square. It is a dramatic reminder that faith in the resurrection of Christ brought to fulfilment the prophecy of Jesus concerning Peter, “Truly, Truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (John 21: 18).
In a sense, my path in this mature faith to my second naivete has been to that imperial obelisk with its cross and the vortical dome outside the Basilica, and the confession sparkling with the burning lights inside. My path to Rome brought me to the Chair of Peter, adorned with the Struggles of Hercules and encased in Bernini’s Baroque masterpiece, and to the altar beneath it where I celebrated the first Mass as a newly ordained priest in December 1957.
What did I learn on my path to Rome?
While living in the shadow of Peter for over three years as a seminarian, I had further learned an immense mystery before I first offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The office of Peter and the other offices of episcopacy, priesthood, and diaconate, i.e., the sacrament of apostolic ministry through which the mission entrusted by Christ to his apostles continues to be exercised until the end of time (CCC 1536), are modelled on the Cross of Christ, independently of the persons who might hold those offices. The period after Belloc’s journey to Rome, namely the history of this ‘short century,’ has taught me that Christ with his Cross “has taken tragedy on himself and thus withdrawn it from the world; he wanted to live tragedy on behalf of all” (Reinhold Schneider, 283). The Paschal Mystery has bridged for me the distance between freedom and history. The Gospel of John speaks of two other distancings in identity: the first, the distancing in identity of the Son from the Father in bearing the sins of the world on the Cross and in his descent into hell; and the second, the distancing in identity of Christ and his Church, of the vine and the branches. In both these distancings the Holy Spirit unites the two separated entities in the bond of love. So now I will proceed to describe these two distancings in identity in the next sections.
2. THE HOLY SPIRIT HAS GLORIFIED CHRIST
In the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus addresses the following prayer to the Father: “Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify thee” (1). In his final ‘hour’, Jesus discloses the full truth of his mission: he, who has been handed over ‘to the end’ (13:1), is least capable to ‘do anything for himself’ (5:19). He depends wholly on another. The absolute obedience of the Son goes to the point of absolute powerlessness and is identified as the love of the Father for him. Jesus is incapable of attributing honor to himself. The revelation and mission of the Holy Spirit take place precisely in the absolute obedience of the Son who drinks the cup given him.
Jesus asks his Father for proof that his obedience coincides with the eternal love of the Father for the Son. The sending forth of the Holy Spirit becomes that proof. The Holy Spirit is their witness to the world that the Father’s love for the Son coincides with the Son’s obedience to his Father’s command. For it is the Spirit who unites the Father and Son in the bond of love. This unique revelation of the Holy Trinity is unfolded in the distancing of Father and Son during the passion when the Son enters into the darkness of the world’s sin and death. The proof rests with the same Spirit who will give witness to the world by informing the community at Pentecost with the fire of love. The mission of the Holy Spirit, including his mission of creating and preserving the unity of the Church, is essentially related to the Cross of Jesus.
The obedience of the Son unto death is one with his glorification by the Father. The unity of the Father and Son is their interior and indissoluble communion in the Holy Spirit. That his disciples might be one with him and behold his glory (17:23) is the intention of the prayer of Jesus for glorification. A prior love, the eternal love of the Father for the Son, the love within the immanent Trinity, constitutes the basis of the claim of Jesus for glorification in his obedience. His glorification is the love of the Father, which he already had with the Father “before the world was made” (17:5).
The prayer of Jesus for the unity of his disciples is an infallible prayer founded on the eternal love of the Father for Jesus. The entire New Testament understands that the majesty of the Father, his ruling authority, takes effect in the ‘lowliness’ of the obedience of the Son. The obedience of the Son is the glorification of the Father. Any self-seeking and any desire for self-honor are rejected since Jesus’s innermost understanding of himself is succinctly expressed in the phrase: “I do not seek my own glory.” He seeks only the glory of the one who sent him. Authority (i.e., the majesty of the Father in him) and poverty (i.e., the refusal to seek his own glory) coincide in Jesus. The goal of Jesus, decreed by the Father’s will, is attained in the self-offering of Jesus on the Cross, in the opening of his heart, and in the breathing forth of the Holy Spirit, all in the willingness of his being lifted up in obedience.
The Holy Spirit is only sent forth at the point of the Son’s absolute obedience to the Father unto death. The plan of the Father’s salvation for mankind is the sending forth of the Spirit, namely, his sanctifying mission in the economic Trinity. It is essentially related to the cross in all areas of the Church’s life, including the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The proof Jesus desires from his Father in the prayer (“Father, glorify thy Son”) will be fulfilled (“that the Son may glorify thee”) in the “agitation of soul” (12:27) when in the end the Son drinks of the cup (18:11). Thereby the Son will glorify the Father, for the Father will have shown forth his love for the Son. The Son has become sin in his obedience to the Father, and thereby reveals a distancing between the Father and himself. And yet, even then, and especially then, the Spirit of love binds the Father and the Son in an essential union of love. Their Trinitarian identity is bonded through the Person-Love, the Holy Spirit who is the proof desired by the Son that the world may know and believe (17:21 & 23). Their identity can only be demonstrated by another than the Father or Son. That is why the Cross is the greatest revelation of the Holy Trinity.
The Trinitarian God is revealed in his essence to be love and self-surrender. It is the expression of the classical theology of glory manifested in the love of the Father for the world in John 3, 16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
3. CHRIST IS GLORIFIED IN HIS DISCIPLES
The world of darkness has brought a lawsuit against the Holy Spirit, the ‘Advocate’ and witness of Christ. For “the world hates” and “persecutes” the disciples of Christ (15:18,20,25). The Spirit, who comes forth from Jesus only on the condition of Jesus’s departure from the world, is the same Spirit now at work in the world and in the Church. He bears witness in a world which hates God (15:25). This is also the message of Part II of the 1986 encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II Dominum et Vivificantem, On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World (DV). The Pope writes, “The same Counsellor and Spirit of truth who has been promised as the one who ‘will teach’ and ‘bring to remembrance’, who ‘will bear witness,’ and ‘guide into all truth,’ ... . is foretold [also] as the one who ‘will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgement”’ (DV 27). But my particular interest in this part is the witness of the Spirit in the communion of saints. The mystery and miracle of the unity of the Church are the work of the Holy Spirit. The second distancing, that between Christ and his Church expressed in the mysterious analogy of the vine and the branches, is bridged by the communion of the Holy Spirit. As the Father is glorified in the Son by the Holy Spirit, so the Son is glorified in the Church through the working of the Holy Spirit.
There is an inseparable link between the witness of the Holy Spirit in the world and the witness of the disciples of Jesus in the world. Jesus said to them, “The Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning” (15: 26-27). The Holy Spirit proves to the world the divine mission of Christ through the bond of love which unites the disciples of Jesus in the midst of the world. Their love for one another shares the same redemptive nature as that of Jesus. The redemptive nature of love is revealed in the new commandment of Jesus: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13: 34-35). The Spirit is the link between Christ and his disciples. The Spirit gives witness within and among the disciples to the love of Christ. It is the Spirit who interprets for them and helps them to remember that central truth: the divine Son, the life and light of the world, died on the Cross out of love for the world.
This redemptive love is central to an understanding of all the offices within the Church, including the ministry of Peter. Two ancient patristic descriptions of that office have defined that ministry for me over the years. One is from St. Ignatius of Antioch and the other from St. Gregory the Great. With the memory still fresh in his mind of the original wholeness of the Church in the community of the Twelve around Jesus, Ignatius speaks of the Church of Rome as receiving the special distinction of “presiding in love” over the whole Church. That Church determines what is essential to the Christian experience and shows the way of the new commandment of love. Likewise, with the meditation of years in his Benedictine monastery on the Coelian Hill, St. Gregory the Great captures in a crystalline phrase the authority of Peter: he is the servus servorum Dei, the servant of the servants of God. Both bishops speak of love, the redemptive, self-giving love, which places the tragedy of the Petrine office under grace.
4. THE POPE AS THE CONCRETE REPRESENTATION OF CHRIST
The authority given to Peter and to the successors of Peter is informed by the Paschal Mystery. For the Cross and the symbolic anticipation of the Cross in the washing of the disciples’ feet had changed everything in the community of believers, including the offices of those who exercise authority within the Church. But where does the New Testament teach that the office of Peter receives its form from the obedience of Christ’s suffering and death and his descent into the chaos of hell? Let’s look more closely.
Peter is the one disciple whose name was changed by Jesus. Suddenly, at Caesarea Philippi, without any warning, Peter is swept out of his person (“You are Simon the son of John.”) into office (“You shall be called Cephas, the Rock.”). There was a reason for this. In the Church of Christ mission alone, not roles, have place. Simon found it impossible to discover his identity as a disciple of Jesus simply by reflecting on his role as Simon. Even by exploring every aspect of his personality he would never have found Peter there, as von Balthasar has indicated. In this change of roles to mission, I am reminded of Jesus’s words to Andrew, Peter’s brother: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall be my servant also.” (Jn 12:24-26).
The mission of Peter was known only in the mystery of his call by Jesus. Jesus confronts Simon with it. With incredible firmness, he demands obedience. Only in the form of Peter will Simon be able to understand Christ’s call. Whenever Simon falls back on his old self-understanding as Simon he will go astray, whereas he will be on target when, refusing to confer with flesh and blood, he follows his call which reveals the Father’s mission for him. Here we meet an incredible fact. The one whom Jesus condemned bitterly as a ‘scandal’, as ‘a stumbling block’ among the Twelve, has been appointed by Jesus as the chief shepherd of the whole flock, as the foundation-rock of the entire Church. Peter and his successors have the right to claim authority in doctrine and leadership in the whole Church and to demand unity. This prerogative is Peter’s alone. His authority does not have to give reasons. However, he and his successors are not isolated from the others, especially from that immense cloud of witnesses in the ecclesial constellation who primarily model their lives on Mary of Nazareth, or on John the beloved disciple, or on other members of the Christological community, including John the Baptist and Paul. These biblical disciples also have founding missions and have no less a continuing life and representation within the Church.
The one who holds the Petrine office is a concrete representation of Christ. He has the power of fatherhood, of service, of salvation. In creating a community of redemptive love among the disciples, the Holy Spirit manifests their oneness through the unity of the many shepherds with the One Shepherd, Jesus Christ, whose concrete representation in the Church is the Pope of Rome. The office of bishop represents the unity of the local Church. He has a manifold mission, he reconciles those who have fallen away from the unity of love, and receives new members through baptism. Individual shepherds among the particular Churches are bound in a special manner to the One Shepherd, Jesus. St. Augustine expressed this unity in the phrase, “Good Shepherd-good shepherds.”
When Jesus entrusts his flock to Peter, according to St. Augustine, he “stresses the unity; because there were many apostles but only to one is it said, ‘Feed my lambs’. There are many good shepherds, but they are all in the One, they are one...The friends of the Bridegroom do not speak on their own but are full of joy because of the voice of the Bridegroom.” St. Augustine develops this theology of ecclesial office in another sermon. Office’s ultimate meaning is to be found in the union of the officeholder with Christ, in whom redemptive love and office are one and the same. The bishop of Hippo says: “Jesus himself is the shepherd who pastures through his shepherds. He can say, ‘I feed them’ because it is his voice that is heard through those who manifest his love. That is why he wanted to unite Peter—to whom he entrusted his lambs as man to man—so closely to himself that, despite having transferred the flock, he remained the Head. Peter is made the representative (figura) of the body, i.e., of the Church, and both become one flesh like Bride and Bridegroom. What did Jesus say, therefore, before transferring the flock, so that the transaction should not be like one between strangers? ‘Peter, do you love me?’...He confirms the love to strengthen the unity...hence the shepherds may boast, but only in the Lord.”
Over the centuries, many have been troubled by the exercise of the sacred authority of Peter. Dostoevsky expressed this preoccupation in The Brothers Karamazov where he narrates the famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. He spoke about the terrible price paid for the incongruence between the man in authority in the Church and the One to whom he bears witness. The inquisitor raises the question of the exercise of such sublime powers entrusted to the Pope of Rome.
I have found at least one response to Dostoyesvsky’ s question. The 15th century designs on the main doors of the Patriarchal Basilica of St. Peter in Rome depict the trial and condemnation of Peter. The Florentine sculptor, Filarete, in the silent bronze hints at a conversation during the trial of St. Peter before the Emperor Nero. It is useful to imagine that the conversation between the two might have centered on the use of earthly power in the service of the Petrine office.
In the scene of Peter before Nero’s tribunal on Filarete’s bronze doors two kingdoms meet. The Cross of Christ was ineradicably being planted in the capital of the Caesars. The question which their conversation raises and which Von Pastor’s Lives of the Popes constantly addresses is the same as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: Can earthly power be administered without guilt in the service of heavenly power and powerlessness? How is human authority exercised on behalf of the power of the keys without violating the objective holiness of the Petrine office? It is a question which in the first millennium confronted Popes like St. Gelasius I, St. Leo the Great, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Leo IX, and in the second millennium confronted Popes like St. Gregory VII, Innocent III, St. Celestine V, Boniface VIII, Julius II, Clement XIV, Pius VI, Pius VII, Pius IX, Pius XII and others.
Pope John Paul II has consistently addressed the question of the relation between Imperium et Sacerdotium since the beginning of his pontificate in 1978. He has urgently raised it more recently in his encyclical letters, Evangelium Vitae and Ut Unum Sint (43, 90-96). In the section of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae entitled, “We must obey God rather than men”(AA5:29): civil law and moral law,” the Pope writes, “Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection” (his italicization, 73).
In Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul acknowledges the unbearable tension from the beginning between the divine authority of the Petrine office and the sinful men to whom it has been entrusted. He says that the evangelist “Luke makes clear that Christ urged Peter to strengthen his brethren, while at the same time reminding him of his own human weakness and need for conversion (cf. 22: 31-32). It is just as though, against the backdrop of Peter’s human weakness it were made fully evident that his particular ministry in the Church derives altogether from grace” (UUS, 90).
Later the Pope adds another element, “I am convinced that I have a particular responsibility in this regard, above all in acknowledging the ecumenical aspirations of the majority of the Christian communities and in heeding the request made of me to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation” (UUS, 95).
My imagined conversation between Nero and Peter on the bronze doors led me to Ludwig, Freiherr Von Pastor, and his magisterial 40 volumes History of the Popes from their time at Avignon (1307) to the emergence of Pope Pius VII in the Conclave held in 1800 in Venice. Von Pastor concludes with a profoundly persuasive statement on the question of divine power being exercised by men. His response appears in a comment on the forced exile and imprisonment of Pope Pius VI during the French Revolution. “The defenceless successor of the Galilean fisherman had won a lasting battle over the Terror of the Revolution and the tyranny of a world-conqueror.”
For Christ still walks with Peter on the waves, and for his successors the words still hold good: “Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eum.” The Lord wants the Church, including the papacy, to come into contact with power, to be familiar with its working, and to show not only the simplicity of a dove but also the cunning of a serpent. Peter’s path is possible because Christ willed it and guaranteed it. It is not rendered invalid by the errors of history.
The office of authority was bestowed on Peter with his threefold guilt. If one who has been given an ecclesial office truly serves his Lord and fastens his gaze unwaveringly upon him, then, like Peter sinking among the waves, he will not stumble fatally even in the labyrinth of power. For the power of the keys is essentially related to the powerlessness, the folly of the Cross of Christ. In the imagined conversation between Peter and Nero on the exercise of authority, its substance, from Peter’s point of view, would have been informed by the “folly of the Cross” which he was about to embrace.
5. MISINTERPRETATIONS OF VATICAN II
We are all aware of the misinterpretations of Vatican II. Few of us have been wise enough to have avoided them ourselves. They read like a litany to which is attached the refrain, Libera nos, Domine: the misinterpretation of ’subsistit in”; the misapplication of the ends of marriage; the misuse of the historical-critical method in biblical and theological reflection; the continued separation of theology and spirituality; the misunderstanding of the nature, origin and purpose of episcopal conferences; the imbalance between individual duties and rights; the refusal to affirm the universality and immutability of the moral commandments, particularly those which prohibit always and without exception intrinsically evil acts; the misrepresentation of the nature and origin of episcopal and papal authority; the imbalance of the relationship between conscience and the truth, between freedom and history; liturgical abuses; the assertion of the absolute autonomy of man in the world, etc.
However, I will limit my discussion to only one area, the postconciliar misinterpretation of the meaning of human freedom. I will develop this topic in light of what the ancient Catholic tradition has called the libertas Romana.
Some Catholics have responded to the question of their role in secular society in light of the II Vatican Council by focusing upon the meaning of that foundational freedom we call religious freedom. They assert that the Council taught that the act of human freedom is fundamentally more creative and assertive than receptive, that freedom is anterior to truth. The priority to receptivity revealed in the Marian fiat has no place in the public conscience in any public human endeavour.
Catholics of this persuasion tend to live in the heart of the world, but only on the periphery of the Church. Such Catholics have been described by David Schindler as “articles of peace” partisans. They insist that the rationality of law and a certain level of natural civic virtue alone provide the basis for a civil community. “Articles of Peace” persons assert that the only legitimate public engagement is to separate and remove the distinctively Catholic contribution from the public dialogue which is leading to the creation of the novus ordo seclorum.
The Council allegedly has a purely juridical understanding of religious freedom which logically disposes the state toward an ‘indifferent’ status before God and away from any positive orientation toward him.
Furthermore, in a pluralistic cultural setting they might insist in their private life on the centrality of Christ. But with equal insistence they call for a theological-philosophical neutrality in political, economic, academic and familial/marital institutions. An example of the “articles of peace” position is their response to state-approved abortions: “I personally am opposed to abortions, but I will not impose my view on others by law.” Another example of this interpretation is the approach to academic freedom in the “Land of Lakes” declaration of many U.S. Catholic Universities and Colleges. For “the articles of peace partisans” Gaudium et Spes #36 is the interpretive key to conciliar and postconciliar Catholicism. It mentions the just autonomy of the world and the human person. They consider the embrace of secularization as nothing more than the Church’s long-overdue rapprochement with modern western culture. The extension of the articles of peace to the process of western secularization, now everywhere, is judged to be no more than the acknowledgement of the legitimate autonomy of the world. As I earlier indicated, they claim that such a position is consistent with the 36th section of the II Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes. However, they do not advert to #22 of the same constitution. Pope John Paul II quotes it in virtually every one of his encyclical letters. And no wonder! For it calls for a totally christocentric anthropology for the Christian layperson living out his secular character in the modern world. Their misinterpretation of GS 36 distorts the Catholic understanding of the family, politics, the university, and economics. The central message of Christianity is reduced to the radical identity of the love of God to the love of neighbor. Indeed the love of neighbor substitutes for the ancient Catholic faith. The mystery of soteriology, of universal salvation in Christ’s redemptive death, is reduced to the mystery of the Incarnation. The Cross is devalued together with sin.
The form of all universities, secular and religious, according to the “articles of peace partisans”, requires the priority of the terms of rationality and the critical methods, advocated in the academy. Theirs is the heritage of German idealism mediated through the Johns Hopkins University (cf. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University). This holds true also of Catholic faculties and students in all universities.
“Articles of Peace partisans” give priority to method over content and to method’s formal procedures. They end up with the mechanization of order and the subjectivization of love. For them love is outside the objective order of Logos or meaning.
Finally, the understanding of freedom in the later writings of John Stuart Mill dominates their understanding of “lay secularity”. It is putatively empty of any ideology. Their imagination, informed by a secular consensus, is at ease with what George Steiner called the “manifold discourse of uncertainties” in the public square. Political constitutions must not espouse any world-view at all. The formal-juridical definition of religious liberty is presented as neutral toward religious theory. And the hallmark of any authentically human-ethical economic system is aggressive creativity, especially capitalist entrepreneurship and its latest creation, economic globalization.
Critical assessments of this position by Schindler and others, make clear that its formal interpretation of religious freedom is only putative and that its purely rational foundations are not neutral. In reality, the kind of religious freedom advocated by the ‘articles of peace’ persons already contains a theological understanding of human nature which is not coincident with a Catholic understanding. Reflection on this position has demonstrated that an initially negative or indifferent relation to God in the field of public discourse cannot be accepted as “neutral” about the question of God. This is especially true in the exercise of political authority as I indicated above. There is another tradition of libertas in the Church, one which, in its own way, anticipated the conciliar teaching in Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes. Our Christian ancestors were aware of the danger of distortion of freedom’s exercise on the local level.
Their solution was found in what the ancient tradition has called the libertas Romana. Libertas Romana dates back to the European monks of the early Benedictine Abbeys. They sought after a freedom, the exercise of which would allow them to “show that [they] have some degree of virtue” (The Rule of St. Benedict, Chap. 73). They understood libertas to be essentially integrated with the pursuit of virtue. It transcended the merely formal and putative notion of religious freedom. These Benedictines sought and gained through the libertas Romana not simply a freedom from local civil coercion in the exercise of their religious faith, but a freedom in public society for the living out of The Rule of St. Benedict in the first line of which one finds the word “libenter”, “freely welcome, my sons, the advice of a father who loves you.” Many Benedictine abbeys from the tenth century onwards (especially the abbeys of the Cluniac reform) enjoyed the canonical prerogative of libertas Romana. Under the direct protection of the Roman See it guaranteed the utter freedom of the local abbey from any district, national or imperial control in living out The Rule. Actually its earliest historical roots can be traced to the Late Roman Empire, and to the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. Libertas Romana was not simply freedom from coercion, as I have already mentioned, but more importantly, the freedom arising from the service in the public forum to one to whom active subjection was due. The more exalted the lordship, in this instance, the two Apostles of Rome and the successors of St. Peter, the more excellent the freedom. Ultimately, it was a freedom guaranteed by the Petrine ministry permitting the monks to live the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict’s vision has been amply described by St. Gregory the Great in his Dialogues, 2, 33. St. Benedict received an understanding of the proportions of the divine plan of salvation: “The whole world was presented to his eyes as if united in a singular ray of sunlight.” The Abbey of Cluny, to cite one example, was exclusively subject to the two Coryphaei of the Roman See, Peter and Paul. The vicars of St. Peter actively exercised their duty of protection over the Abbey in order to give the libertas Romana the greatest possible reality.
Pope St. Gregory VII describes the public effects of the libertas Romana: the Abbey of Cluny “shines more clearly than daylight through almost all parts of the world, because of the fame of its religion, reputation and dignity.” The public effects of the libertas Romana upon another particular community of monks were described by no less an authority than Alphonso VI, King of Leon-Castile: the monastery of Sahagun “has been as it were raised up…from the dead and devoted to the liberty that is proper to the Church.”. In their freedom the abbeys were popularly recognized and known by the beautiful and public title, “the refuge of the penitent” (Asylum poenitentium).
But that is not all. As a sign of the Libertas Romana they enjoyed, the abbeys agreed to pay each year to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome a tax sufficient to keep the oil lamps before the ‘confession’ in St. Peter’s Basilica burning. The historian, H. E. J. Cowdrey, in his The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform, reports on this matter: “Of St. Peter’s lordship the payment of an annual census to provide lights to burn before his tomb was the symbolic recognition”. This public and ancient tradition comes to mind each time I see the ninety-five burning lamps before the tomb of the Apostle Peter in the Basilica that marks his grave in Rome.
Why bring up the libertas romana now? Simply because I believe it is relevant today. In one of his writings, Msgr. Luigi Giussani made the point that a local Church and its “people cannot endure in the face of the dominant culture; it can do nothing but submit to it. A culture becomes dominant only by means of values imposed with force or with a claim of universality. The local Church, precisely because it is limited, cannot help but be caught up in the game: her universal values are drawn from the ’catholic’, as John Paul II expressed in his address to the Italian Church together with their bishops and their representatives at Loreto in 1985.”
The local Churches can breathe more freely in the bosom of the holy mother Church of Rome. The local Church can fully enjoy the peace of Christ to the honour of Almighty God under the intercessory protection of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul. The sanctity of the local Churches and of their bishops is guaranteed by the intercession of the two Apostles. Under such auspices, they can never permanently accept the yoke of governments. Since these Churches are under the special protection of St. Peter, their public liberty is to be found in subjection to St. Peter and his successor. Some contemporary criticisms of the See of Rome tend to weaken this gift of the libertas romana to the local Churches. It is evident that the local Churches and their people stand in ever more serious need of the libertas romana. Local or regional Churches cannot escape what Walter Percy called “the terror of political correctness” and its totalitarian pretensions. Local churches frequently stand too close to the powers of the organized and determined economic, political, academic, and social orders of cultural change.
Even the concept of freedom is determined according to the images, definitions or impressions of the dominant culture. Its bitter fruit is becoming increasingly obvious.
According to Msgr. Giussani, “What the love between a man and woman is, what fatherhood is, motherhood, obedience is, companionship, solidarity, friendship, what freedom is-–all these words, in the majority of people, generate an image or opinion or definition taken, literally, from the common mentality, which is the same as saying that they are taken from power” (87). How does the Church face these pretensions? That challenge is what the libertas Romana responds to today as it has done for centuries in the past.
6. ECUMENISM AND EVANGELIZATION
Pope John Paul II has emphasized the close relationship between evangelization and ecumenism, i.e., the search for Christian unity. Throughout the encyclical Letter, Ut Unum Sint (UUS), the Pope makes reference to the Last Discourse of Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel of John, the one to which I made extensive reference in my earlier remarks. He places special emphasis upon the prayer of Christ in the 17th chapter, “I pray...that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (20-21). The Pope comments, “The ecumenical movement in our century...has been characterized by its missionary outlook….[I]t is obvious that the lack of unity among Christians contradicts the Truth which Christians have the mission to spread and, consequently, it gravely damages their witness. This was clearly understood and expressed by my predecessor Pope Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi: ‘As evangelizers, we must offer Christ’s faithful not the image of people divided and separated by unedifying quarrels, but the image of people who are mature in faith and capable of finding a meeting-point beyond the real tensions, thanks to a shared, sincere and disinterested search for the truth. Yes, the destiny of evangelization is certainly bound up with the witness of unity given by the Church…At this point we wish to emphasize the sign of unity among all Christians as the way and instrument of evangelization. The divisions among Christians is a serious reality which impedes the very work of Christ”’ (98).
Conclusion.
I am grateful to the organizers of this conference for the opportunity of highlighting the gift which God has given to the Universal Church in the office of Peter. I am especially grateful to Father Graham Leonard, the President of this Conference, for the witness which his life and ministry have offered to the Church and to the world. He has scrutinized the mission of the Apostle Peter. In the measure of his own Christian experience Dr. Leonard has found the papacy and the exercise of its authority shining brightly in the glory of the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Like Peter, Mary’s Christian faith is archetypal. Her experience at the Annunciation began with a blind sense of touch, with the bodily sensing of a presence. The sense of touch is foundational to Christian faith—and Mary’s experience was intensified first during the nine months of pregnancy and then it embraced also her experience of seeing, hearing and foundling her infant Son who was also the Son of the eternal Father. Her experience shares in the elliptical character of all genuine Christology. It was in the chiaroscoro of her powerless, receptive fiat that the manifestation of the glory of God was first seen.
The Marian experience of faith existed prior to the Christian experiences of Peter and the other Apostles. The maternal dimension of every Christian’s faith thus wholly conditions those later experiences, both the Apostolic and the Petrine traditions. For Mary as the Mother of the Head, is also Mother of the Body, the Church. Her womanly experience begins with the sense of touch. Because of her immaculate nature, also called her immaculate heart, Mary always felt and sensed that which is unsurpassably truthful. May the Immaculate Heart of Mary be the touchstone for all those who exercise the office of authority in the Church.
J. Francis Cardinal Stafford
President, Pontifical Council for the Laity