Rosemary Ruether

Catholicism and Ecumenism

The unleashing of the waves of renewal through the Second Vatican Council was undoubtedly a crucial fact in my development at this stage. Instead of a church sealed off against self-doubt, there suddenly appeared a church engaged in intense self-questioning. This development made Catholicism an exciting and open community within which to contribute my insights. The 1960s occurred for me between the ages of 23 and 32. This means that a critical state of my adult identity coalesced both with the decade of Catholic renewal and the decade of American social crisis. If I had been born ten years earlier, I might well stand in a different place today.

The renewal of Catholicism meant that a whole host of teachings became open questions for at least a significant sector of Catholic Christians. These ranged from current pastoral conflicts over birth control to the basic questions of how we could speak of Jesus as the Christ. My thinking could be translated into a series of writings that were part of a community engaged in revising its identity.

But Protestants also wanted to hear about these and other questions in their own terms. I have come to work and teach both as a Catholic among Catholics and as a Christian among Christians. Today I teach simultaneously at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, an institution that amalgamates the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren traditions, and at the graduate program in religious studies at Mundelein College, a Roman Catholic institution. Previous to this I taught for ten years at a black seminary, the school of religion at Howard University (1966-76). I have also had visiting appointments at various other Catholic and Protestant institutions, as well as speaking engagements throughout the country. I have encountered American Christianity in much of its variety.

Being a Catholic Christian means, for me, being an ecumenical Christian. I identify myself as a Christian in terms of what I would call the “prophetic-messianic core” of biblical faith. This I see as the norm for judging both Scripture and tradition. I do not believe that Scripture is “enough” to create the content of Christian identity. The Protestant tendency to evacuate church history into the reapproximation of the Bible to one’s contemporary preferences I find self-deluding.

We are a people with a history, much of it bad. But its bad parts also teach lessons that we should not forget. One understands the full dimensions of Christianity only by appropriating the whole of this history in its various traditions—East and West, Catholic and Protestant, the Magisterial and the Radical Reformations. Each tradition emphasizes a major element that others neglect. This is not exactly the Tillichian dialectic of “Protestant principle and Catholic substance,” as though there were a dualism that could be apportioned to opposite communities. A living people exists through the constant fruitful interaction and reintegration of critical principles and historical tradition.

I would define Catholic Christianity as this whole ecumenical plurality. All particular churches exist within it as broken and partial sects. Even that communion which calls itself Catholic is also a partial and distorted reality. If I identify with this community first of all, it is not because it is the best, but because it is mine. The others are also mine in a somewhat lesser sense. This special claim on Catholicism does not mean that I have a special need to defend it. Rather it means that I have a special responsibility to question it, I have less of a responsibility to deal with the contradictions of Methodism, Lutheranism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

The prophetic ministry can be carried out authentically only within one’s own community. It is only when we struggle with and for what we love that we speak responsibly. The more distant one’s ties, the less one has a common base for critical conflict. What I have a right to say as a Catholic to Catholics is different from what I can say as a Christian to Protestants, as a sharer of biblical faith to Jews, as a religious person to Hindus. In each case we can engage in fruitful communication only when we have first established the ties that bind us together in community in a way that also respects the particularity of the other. Ecumenism means a shifting of the focus from attack on others to self-criticism. For example, the only group that could appropriately criticize the pope’s pastoral messages in the United States in October 1979 was not the Protestants, much less the “atheists,” but the Catholics. This is as it should be.