I found this little article on the website of the Institute of the Good Shepherd, a French traditionalist clerical community recognised by Rome. These people are “getting with the program” and the old walls are falling as did the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.  The content is dated, but it shows these good priests have changed their paradigm. This is a translation I have done quickly, so it may read awkwardly in places.

Outreach to Anglicans: Benedict XVI invents reason-based ecumenism

By Pierre de Lapérusse | 14^th December 2009

In an article published by Le Monde on 28th October 2009, the Swiss theologian Hans Küng violently attacked the outreach by Benedict XVI towards Anglicans favourable to Rome. The main argument of Küng is pragmatic: “We are talking about half a million Anglicans and between twenty to thirty bishops. What about the remaining 76 million?” Putting things clearly, welcoming a few shock troops of conservatives would compromise reconciliation with the mainstream of the Anglican faithful. Coming from an eminent academic, former colleague and friend of Josef Ratzinger, one could have thought of a better and higher argument. But, since Hans Küng is attacking on the political field, it is not wrong to answer him here.

The article published by Le Monde bears the title “The policy of the Pope towards the Anglicans is a real drama!” This is a strong judgement of Vatican policy”, Küng said, “to put Rome and Canterbury against each other for a long time”. If there is a conflict, which is not proven, it would be difficult to know who started it. Doesn't the lasting, perhaps irreversible, rupture come rather from the Anglican movement, which with the ordination of women and homosexuals, put the hope of renewed communion into question?

For the rest, the quantitative argument of Hans Küng is questionable because Anglicanism includes a greater proportion of faithful from the former British colonies, particularly in Africa or Oceania. Many of these Anglicans of the south fight against the moral weakening of the Church of England to the extent of boycotting the Lambeth Conference in 2008, the decennial synod of the Anglican bishops, and to convene a counter-synod in Jerusalem. Admittedly, the dissidents, up to now, are less concerned by the Papal outreach than the faithful of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC). Still, we should follow the evolution of this internal opposition, which could one day contradict Küng’s argument and prepare, through the constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, many more joining the Church.

But that is not the essential point. What Hans Küng seems unable to understand is that this decision confirms the kind of ecumenism Benedict XVI is promoting. Everyone knows the classical distinction, established by Max Weber, between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. The ethics of conviction is initially concerned for respecting principles – and, in the extreme, is less concerned about knowing whether the actions carried out effectively tend towards the fulfilment of the intended goal. The ethics of responsibility, are concerned about the consequences of the action and, in this perspective, are also ethics of effectiveness, less exciting but more practical.

Benedict XVI’s gestures of outreach to the Society of Saint Pius X or the Anglicans, are motivated by an ecumenism of reason rather than an ecumenism of conviction, which characterised the action of his predecessor to a greater extent. This ecumenism of reason certainly imposes difficult decisions or questionable concessions. At any rate, the result is there: each act of outreach makes it possible to increase the number of Christians brought together within the same communion. Although the word is not pronounced, this is about a return to the policy of uniatism which, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, made it possible the Catholic Church to accept Eastern Christians – Greek, Syrian or Coptic, who kept their rites and their traditions but returned to full Roman ecclesial unity.

At the request of the Orthodox, uniatism had been denounced by the Declaration of Balamand in 1993 like a “method of the past”. This method of the past seems to have the promise of a certain future if it becomes the trademark of ecumenism of reason. Its effectiveness seems in any case better trusted than the project of a “Catholic Commonwealth” Hans Küng dreams about.

Related posts:

1. Summorum Pontificum Reloaded