Perspectief 2014-26

Perspectief 42 Prof. dr. Peter De Mey In the same exhortation he also indicates that this missionary attitude of the Church may have liturgical or sacramentological implications. He ends the ecclesiological opening chapter with expressing the hope that the Church should keep its “doors open.” (§ 46) His words, reminiscent of the teaching of Vatican II that communion in the Church is not an issue of all or nothing but allows for degrees, seem to envisage in first instance an as open access to the sacraments as possible for Catholic faithful: “Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason.” (§ 47) When Pope Francis deplores, however, that in our canonical regulations we frequently “act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators”, his words also remind the ecumenically attentive reader of the distinction made in UR 8 between “bearing witness to the unity of the church, and second, the sharing in the means of grace. Witness to the unity of the church generally forbids common worship, but the grace to be had from it sometimes commends this practice.” Therefore, implicitly the Pope maybe also expresses his concerns about the current norms on intercommunion valid within the Catholic Church. The missionary program which Pope Francis proposes to his Church also affects the content of its doctrinal and moral teaching. Reminding his readership of the paragraph of Unitatis Redintegratio dealing with the existence of a hierarchy of truths (§ 36) and of the distinction made by Pope John XXIII in his famous opening discourse of the Council between the deposit of faith and the way it is expressed (§ 41), the Pope asks the pastors of the Catholic Church “not to be obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed” but rather to “concentrate on the essentials.” (§ 35) It is difficult to harmonize this teaching of Francis with the much more Ratzingerian concluding section of the chapter on tradition in Lumen Fidei dealing with ‘The unity and integrity of faith’ (§§ 47-49). Does “professing the same faith” necessarily require that “we have a single insight into reality”? The pope – again probably Benedict XVI – continues: “Since faith is one, it must be professed in all its purity and integrity. Precisely because all articles of faith are interconnected, to deny one of them, even of those that seem least important, is tantamount to distorting the whole.” The concept of catholicity which follows from such a view seems to leave no room for unity in diversity: “Faith is thus shown to be universal, catholic, because its light expands in order to illumine the entire cosmos and all