The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth (Saint Thomas Aquinas, +1274)
If there is a patron saint of ecumenism, Saint Francis de Sales fits the bill, with his gentle yet firm – suaviter et fortiter – evangelization of the hardened Calvinists of Geneva. As the saint put it, one attracts more bees with an ounce of honey than a jar of vinegar.
All good, and we should be patient, charitable and kind in our dealings with our ‘separated brethren’ in Christ, cooperating in whatever good works present themselves, fellowship, even prayer in common, when fitting opportunity arises.
Yet, like Saint Francis, we should be under no illusion that the ultimate goal of the ecumenical movement is to convert them to Catholicism, which means doing what we can to bring them into the Catholic Church, with all the three bonds of unity, profession of faith, participation in the sacraments, and submission to the Magisterium in the apostolic succession. (cf., CCC, #815)
The Church does not quite put it that way, for, well, ecumenical reasons. The Vatican II decree, Unitatis Redintegratio, defines the ecumenical movement as “the initiatives and activities planned and undertaken, according to the various needs of the Church and as opportunities offer, to promote Christian unity. But we should be clear that the Catholic Church already has this unity, and, indeed, lacks none of the means of salvation, even if we may be reminded of what we have, and inspired to live by it more fully, by other religions (Protestants’ devotion to Scripture), or, more to the point, by Christians in those religions.
But the end point, may we say it again, is to make them Catholic. One cannot be saved, strictly speaking, by Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or any other Protestantism. If members of such are saved, they are saved as Catholics, in some way. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, is a still a doctrine, even if Father Feeney’s rigorous interpretation of this was condemned. It means one must be joined to Chris by grace and charity, as flowing through His Church and sacraments. The best way – indeed, the only way revealed to us by Christ – is to belong fully to the Catholic Church. Anything else is, if we might put it so, taking your chances, barring invincible ignorance – which is to say, ignorance that one cannot overcome.
As Lumen Gentium puts it:
Whosoever, therefore, knowing (non ignorantes) that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved (14)
Hence, it was with some irony that I perused the article by the visiting Anglican scholar, Matthew Barrett, to the Dominican House in Washington, D.C. He seems a good and open soul, and it is heartening that he is there to delve into Saint Thomas’ doctrine with his disciples. Also, that he wants to found an Anglican house of Thomistic studies. Hmm.
But one must also wonder, for Anglicanism is not reformation, nor a ‘denomination’ of Christianity, but a deformation and distortion. The Angelic doctor would have had seen right through the façade of Henry VIII’s usurpation of ‘full, supreme, universal’ spiritual power, to say nothing of the same in the temporal sphere, which runs right through Anglicanism, and is its spiritual principle, and its disastrous effects, from the tyrant Henry, through his daughter Elizabeth and their successors, are there for all to see. The English people wanted their old Faith, and the ‘new religion’ had to be foisted on them, by brutal force – as Eamonn Duffy proved beyond reasonable doubt. Thomas would have no time for female ‘priests’, and a female bishop would have made him blanche – and this before we get to active homosexuals. Thomas would also have predicted the heresies that have crept in – moral and doctrinal – from permission of contraception to acceptance of any number of other errors.
Saint John Henry Newman also saw all of this on the horizon, back in the 1840’s, as he was striving to find a way to stay within the religion of his family, his childhood and his beloved country. But he could not. As he put it, ‘to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant’.
We can only hope that in this ecumenical endeavour, and his study of the Church’s theological foundations, Dr. Barrett and many others come to such a realization in the depths of their own conscience, and the scales fall from their eyes, by the grace of the good God and the intercession of Saint Paul, Saint Francis, Saint Thomas and Saint Newman and the host of heavenly witnesses. Who can resist such a cohort?
