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Note #6462 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Catholics
27-March-2001
01106

Presbyterians travel to the Vatican in search of unity with Roman Catholics

Both sides pledge to disavow bitter historic denunciations

by Jerry L. Van Marter

ROME - In a historic three-day meeting, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic
officials inched closer to more visible unity between their churches.

The formal talks were sometimes simple and direct, sometimes as labyrinthine
as the streets of this ancient city.

At their conclusion, on March 22, the 15-member delegation from the
Presbyterian Church (USA) and five staff members from the Vatican's
Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity issued a joint statement in
which they pledged to continue working toward a theological agreement on
three major issues:

* The doctrine of justification 
* Mutual recognition of each other's baptisms 
* A joint study of Reformation-era documents in which the churches condemned
each other, culminating in a declaration "that they no longer reflect the
reality of our views of each other."

The conversations here - concluding with a private audience with Pope John
Paul II - followed the first-ever formal meeting between Vatican and PC(USA)
representatives in Louisville in December.

That meeting was held at the suggestion of the Pope, who in a 1995 papal
encyclical titled Ut Unum Sint invited other "Christian communities" to join
him in a search for "a new way of exercising the primacy" in the cause of
greater universal Christian unity. (The doctrine of primacy holds that the
Pope is the supreme authority over all of Christendom, and that his
teachings are "infallible."

During the December meeting, the Presbyterian delegation - appointed by the
General Assembly's Committee on Ecumenical Relations - presented a 24-page
paper, The Successor to Peter, for discussion. The document was written
primarily by theology professors Anna Case-Winters of McCormick Theological
Seminary and Lewis Mudge of San Francisco Theological Seminary.

That paper underscored the Reformed understanding that authority is centered
in Jesus Christ, Scripture, and the historic confessions of the church, in
that order.

During the follow-up meeting here, participants reviewed that paper and a
four-page response from the Pontifical Council.

Authority of the Pope is "main obstacle"

Both sides agreed, in the words of President Walter Cardinal Kasper of the
Pontifical Council - who between December and March succeeded the retired
Edwin Cardinal Cassidy - that "the primacy of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope)
is the main obstacle to ecumenical relationships."

Kasper said the doctrine of papal supremacy grew out of the "crisis" of the
mid- to late-19th century "when the church was threatened from all sides -
secularization of society and fragmentation of the church." Under normal
circumstances, he said, "more local autonomy is possible - the Pope is free
to act or not to act."

Joe Small, the PC(USA)'s coordinator for theology and worship, agreed with
that assessment. "The conversation is not advanced if we think of papal
primacy only as an ecclesial instance of absolute monarchy," he wrote in a
companion paper to The Successor to Peter.

Small said the Pope historically has served as a focal point for the
communion of local churches; as the preserver of church tradition; and as "a
primary guarantor of unity in the face of the centrifugal forces of
regionalism and theological particularism."

Monsignor John Radano, an American on the Pontifical Council staff, noted
that John Paul II has said that "the Petrine ministry (papacy) is only in
service to the Gospel" - what Radano called "an evangelical approach."

A heightened understanding of authority as pastoral care for the whole
church "can be a way forward," Mudge saide. "To view the task as producing
unity, not uniformity, is our hope."

Kasper agreed.  "Primacy is foremost spiritual," he said. "The Pope has to
recognize and defend diversity of expressions (of spiritual leadership)."

Ministry of oversight: bishops, or councils?

While the nature and authority of the Pope is a key sticking point for
Presbyterians, Kasper said "the main and fundamental problem between us is
the understanding and concept of the church."
For Catholics, he said, "episcope and episcopacy (in which church authority
and governance are vested in ordained bishops) are essential elements of the
church."

Small noted that "jurisdictional (governing) claims are at the heart of
Protestant objections to the papacy." Structural ecumenical dialogues - such
as the Consultation on Church Union - have foundered over the issue of
governance by councils (elected bodies of ministers and elders) vs.
governance by bishops.

"The Presbyterian Church (USA) has a ministry of oversight, but ours is not
lodged in a bishop," Winters said, referring to the governing-body system of
oversight.

Eugene Turner, recently retired ecumenical officer for the Office of the
General Assembly, was even more pointed. "We hope you hear," he told Kasper,
"that our episcope (ministry of oversight) is just as strong, but it is not
lodged in individuals. Is ours equally valid to you?"

"There are important episcopal elements outside the Catholic Church," Kasper
responded. "We acknowledge a similar function in your communion, but not an
equivalent one."

In future dialogues, said Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the General
Assembly, the Catholic Church "has to help our church rediscover the New
Testament concept of episcope and episcopacy. Our history has been to set
episcope against conciliar understandings of oversight."

"The question we could ask is how we might conceive of papal primacy within
a genuinely conciliar ecclesiology?" Small said.

Kasper noted that, since Vatican II (in the early 190s), "though bishops
still have the final say, the Catholic Church has adopted several conciliar
models, such as a Synod of Bishops."

Praising such moves, Robina Winbush, the PC(USA)'s ecumenical officer, said,
"The more we both emphasize the collegial role of bishops, the more progress
we will make."

Next steps

While no future meetings were scheduled, both sides agreed on "next steps"
in the rapprochement between the churches:

* The PC(USA) delegation will ask the upcoming 213th General Assembly to
urge the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to meet with Catholic and
Lutheran representatives this November to broaden the Catholic-Lutheran
agreement on the doctrine of justification to include the Reformed family of
churches. Kasper said he'd like to see such talks expanded to address the
doctrines of sanctification and glorification as well, "because those
doctrines are stronger in the Reformed tradition than in the Lutheran."

* The Pontifical Council urged the PC(USA) to meet with the U.S. Conference
of Bishops to develop an agreement on full recognition of each other's
baptisms. In a switch of policy, Kasper insisted that Presbyterians conduct
such conversations with U.S. Catholics rather than with the Vatican.

* Both sides agreed to seek "an appropriate means" for studying
Reformation-era documents in which the churches condemned each other.
Kirkpatrick and Kasper acknowledged that amending such historical documents
is probably out of the question; instead they will formally declare "that
(such documents) no longer reflect the reality of our views of each other."

* In the most convoluted discussion of the meeting, the PC(USA) agreed to
seek a declaration from the upcoming General Assembly that the Presbyterian
and Catholic churches "are in real but incomplete communion." The PC(USA)
delegation originally proposed a declaration of "in correspondence with"
(the traditional constitutional language) the Catholic Church, but the
Pontifical Council professed incomprehension of the term and suggested "real
but incomplete communion" as terminology that will make sense to Catholics.

Kasper expressed "deep gratitude" for the visit of the PC(USA) delegation
and called The Successor to Peter "an impressive statement … from brothers
and sisters in Christ who stand in the Reformed tradition and with whom we
share a profound degree of unity."

The PC(USA) delegation included Kirkpatrick; GAC Executive Director John
Detterick; Mudge; Small; Case-Winters; Winbush; former GA moderator John
Buchanan; Committee on Ecumenical Relations chair John Bartholomew;
Worldwide Ministries Division director Marian McClure; WMD staff member
Antonio Aja; PC(USA) missionary Lee Iverson, from Chile; Texas pastor Martha
Murchison; Columbia Theological Seminary student and World Council of
Churches Central Committee member Ashley Seaman; Interdenominational
Theological Center student Van Moody and Turner.

Also present as observers were; WMD Europe coordinator Duncan Hanson; Doug
Fromm from the Reformed Church in America; and ecumenical officers Randy Lee
and Lowell Alman of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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