c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Five years ago, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger lobbed a theological hand grenade at Christians around the world in a document that said non-Catholic churches “suffer from defects” and are “not churches in the proper sense.”

Broadening his critique, Ratzinger, the longtime prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, also asserted that only Catholics have “the fullness of the means of salvation.”

With Ratzinger’s election Tuesday (April 19) as Pope Benedict XVI, some church observers say the document, “Dominus Iesus,” is one of the themes that will set the tenor of his papacy. It may not, however, portend a doomsday scenario for Catholics’ relations with other churches or the broader world, veterans of the ecumenical movement said.

“I’m not going to measure this pope’s commitment to deeper unity in the Body of Christ solely on the basis of that document,” said the Rev. Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and president of the Lutheran World Federation.

In the same way that Nazi-occupied Poland shaped the outlook of the late Pope John Paul II, Ratzinger’s roots in Germany _ birthplace of the Protestant Reformation _ have shaped his. Some say the world will find surprises here.

Ratzinger helped orchestrate a 1999 agreement between Catholics and Lutherans that settled centuries-old disputes on the nature of salvation. That agreement, Hanson said, is much more important than Dominus Iesus, which contained portions that “were somewhere between bewildering and of concern.”

“The fact that he was a theologian in Germany and a bishop in Germany means he … knows Lutherans,” Hanson said. “He brings to our relationship a deep theological understanding, as well as contextual experience.”

Dominus Iesus, a weighty 15-page treatise that was intended to clarify the Catholic Church’s views on salvation in a world of religious pluralism, was approved by John Paul II with Ratzinger as its chief architect.

The document deeply angered Protestant and Orthodox Christians, who wondered if they were now viewed as second-class Christians. Many Jewish groups questioned if the document was a retreat on Pope John Paul II’s warming relations with Christianity’s “elder brothers.”

Hans Kung, the dissident Swiss theologian, dismissed it as a “mixture of medieval backwardness and Vatican megalomania.” The Lutheran World Federation called it “painful.” The Anglican Communion said it “does not for one moment accept” any inferior status.

In many ways, the document was pure Ratzinger, who served as John Paul’s chief doctrinal watchdog and disciplinarian for a quarter-century. Echoes of Dominus Iesus could be heard in Ratzinger’s homily that opened the conclave on Monday, in which he condemned the “dictatorship of relativism” that challenges the church’s claim on absolute truth.

Dominus Iesus was an attempt, from one theologian to others, to clarify how the church related to other faiths. It minced no words, saying “followers of other religions … are in a gravely deficient situation” compared with Catholics.

Even amid their criticism, however, some Christians applauded the document for reaffirming in no uncertain terms that salvation is found through Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone.

The tone, however, struck many as a betrayal of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, and of John Paul, whose 1995 encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, asked other Christians to help imagine “a new situation” for how the pope might exercise his authority.

Terry Tilley, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio, said Dominus Iesus broke little new ground, but was a complete disaster in its delivery. “Most of us think it was a diplomatic blunder, yet only a blunder in diplomacy, not in substance,” Tilley said.

Dominus Iesus intensified the rivalry between Ratzinger and another German cardinal, Walter Kasper, John Paul’s chief ecumenist, who said in 2001 that the document “could and should have used less harsh and more friendly language.”

But while the document reflects Ratzinger’s theological DNA, veteran ecumenists caution that it was not intended as an ecumenical statement and should not be mined for ecumenical implications.

“What I think we all have to understand is that Cardinal Ratzinger, his mandate, was to be the church disciplinarian,” said the Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America and architect of a new Catholic-Protestant ecumenical group, Christian Churches Together in the USA.

“His own role was devoted more internally to those doctrinal issues of discipline and less devoted to the church’s external and ecumenical relationship.”

Other ecumenists said the 1999 Lutheran-Catholic pact reflects Ratzinger’s deep commitment to strengthening ties between Christian churches, and that the furor over Dominus Iesus may be much ado about nothing.

“This is not a man who in any way would dismiss this very clear heritage that we all have together,” said Ann Riggs, the associate general secretary for faith and order of the National Council of Churches.

LF/RB END ECKSTROM