Articles 6 (International Affairs/US-Israel Relations)

I apologize for posting two articles again, but I think they offer both complimentary and contrasting explanations for the U.S. commitment to Israel and the long sought "peace process" with the Palestinians. Many questions arise from taking a comparative look at these two articles. Is U.S. support for Israel rooted more in the "American civil religion" described by Skillen or the security calculations addressed by Friedman? What are the implications of explaining what drives U.S. relations with Israel in such different ways? -NB


Root & Branch (The Religion and Society Debate) “America and Israel” (June 2, 2008)
By James W. Skillen (Fellow, The Center for Public Justice)

Religions are ways of life and not merely the consciously intended practices of worship and pastoral service. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim ways of life are supposed to guide the adherents of those faiths in what they do all week long and not only in the ways they worship. Religions as ways of life generally function like the glasses through which we see things; we are not always conscious of the glasses (or our eyes) when we see things, even though they are what make it possible to focus on anything in particular.

In this light it is possible to understand why the American way of life is often overlooked when people talk about religion, even though it often challenges or conflicts with the ways of life called for by the scriptures and authorities of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communions. The American way of life might not structure our Saturday or Sunday worship services, but it certainly functions as the glasses through which many Americans see and make sense of their daily lives. Let me illustrate.

We will never adequately understand America’s support for the State of Israel unless we recognize that support as an expression of the American civil religion or way of life, which is often in conflict or tension with other religious ways of life. I am discovering the depth of the tensions among these religions as I write a paper on three Zionisms, a paper that will be part of a forthcoming book on religion in international affairs. The three Zionisms are (1) American new-Israelitism, (2) Jewish Zionism, and (3) contemporary Christian Zionism. These three Zionisms are very powerful influences shaping political practice and foreign policy decisions.
Consider the current American presidential campaign. In May, one of Barack Obama’s advisers on Middle East policy, Robert Malley, was strongly criticized by pro-Israel advocates (both Christians and Jews) for having said that Israel as well as the Palestinians had been responsible for the failure of peace talks during the Clinton administration and for meeting more recently with officials of Hamas, which now controls the Gaza region of the Palestinian territory and is considered a terrorist organization by the George W. Bush administration. Obama felt compelled to dismiss Malley immediately from any formal advisory role in his campaign and assured critics that he is as fully supportive of Israel as Hillary Clinton and John McCain are.

Commenting on the Malley-Obama incident, Gordon Rachman (Financial Times, 5/27/08) writes that it’s a shame the presidential candidates cannot even raise critical questions about Israel without fear of being denounced by the powerful Christian and Jewish pro-Israel lobbies in the United States. “This taboo is all the more bizarre,” says Rachman, “since the Israeli government itself is currently negotiating with Hamas.” Rachman adds that the “last time I was in Jerusalem, Israeli officials complained to me that the US’s refusal to talk to the Syrians was foolish . . . . Now it turns out that the Israelis themselves are holding talks with Syria—but sponsored by Turkey, not the US.” Rachman also quotes a McCain spokesman who said, “It is easier to have an open discussion on Palestine in Tel Aviv than in Washington.” “Why is the American debate so constrained?” asks Rachman. It is, he says, because Jewish and Christian evangelical voters are so “fervently pro-Israel.” But why, we must ask, are those voters so fervently and powerfully pro-Israel?

An adequate answer to the last question cannot be developed here, but it would move along the following lines. American Christian Zionists are convinced that the end of history and God’s final judgment of the world will follow the fulfillment of certain biblical prophecies, which include God’s blessing or cursing of America depending on whether America stands firm behind the State of Israel. American Jewish Zionists are strongly pro-Israel not for reasons of biblical prophecy but out of commitment to the success of modern Jewish nationalism, and they, too, demand American commitment to Israel above all else. And why are these two Zionisms so closely connected to the United States? This is where American new-Israelitism comes in. The American way of life is predicated on the conviction that God chose this nation to be a new Israel, a light to the world, a city set on a hill, to lead the world to freedom and democracy. And this new-covenant nation should now support the State of Israel (which represents God’s old covenant people returning to the Promised Land) in order that the fulfillment of end-times prophecies will include God’s blessing (rather than cursing) of America.

Now you may think that all of this is theological nonsense or beside the point, politically speaking. But you’d be wrong. Even though America’s actual influence in the Middle East has been declining and many of its pro-Israel policies failing, the unquestioned civil-religious faith of Americanism that helps to sustain Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism lives on and is even gaining strength among vast numbers of Americans. And if any candidate wants to succeed in politics, he or she had better toe this line if they want support from the pro-Israel lobby.
To open a genuine public debate about American policy in the Middle East, therefore, will take more than standard political arguments. It will require debates that go all the way down to the religiously deep ways of life that drive peoples and nations. And it will require coming to grips with the religious character of the American way of life.
James W. Skillen, President 
Center for Public Justice



The New York Times “Hobby or Necessity?” (March 28, 2010)
By Thomas L. Friedman

If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.

This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem. The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.

At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living. To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.

Why not? Newsweek’s Dan Ephron wrote in the Jan. 11, 2010, issue: “An improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally have, for many Israelis, called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it? ... Tourism hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the I.M.F. projected recently that Israel’s G.D.P. will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries. In short, Israelis are enjoying a peace dividend without a peace agreement.” Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.

Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either. The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran.

Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week argued that Israel should adopt a more integrated view — which he calls a “Palestine-Iran-Palestine” strategy: Israel should take the initiative with an overture to the Palestinians, which would make progress on that front easier, which would strengthen the U.S. coalition against Iran, which could ultimately weaken Tehran and its allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which would open the way for more progress on the Palestine-Israel front. He suggests that Israel reach an interim agreement with Palestinians on the West Bank or even consider a partial, unilateral withdrawal there.

“One way or another,” said Shavit, “Netanyahu should have made a genuine move on the Palestinian front that would have made genuine moves on the Iranian front possible, that would have made dealing with the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute possible at a later stage.” Indeed, Jerusalem, settlements, peace, Iran — they’re all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.

Articles 5 (Politics/Health Care)

I won't normally post two articles at the same time, but because of the expected House health care vote today, this is an excellent time to delve into the question of social justice in the context of a concrete social challenge. -NB


The Economist (Mar 18th 2010) "Pass the bill"

American health-care reform

Hugely expensive and full of flaws though it is, Barack Obama’s health-care plan is still worth having—just...

**GRAPH** Health Spending as % of GDP (2007): U.S. 16%, France 11%, Germany 10%, Canada 9.5%, UK 8.2%, Japan 8%

IT WILL cost close to a trillion dollars over the next ten years, a vast sum of money at any time and a heart-stopping prospect when America’s budget deficit is gobbling up nearly 11% of GDP and unemployment seems stuck at close to 10%. It takes only tentative steps towards controlling the relentless above-inflation rise in health-care costs that has gone on for decades, squeezing corporate and personal budgets alike and threatening, if unchecked, to overwhelm the federal budget entirely. It squanders a golden opportunity to shift away from a payment model that encourages doctors to prescribe too many overpriced tests. Its sponsors in Congress are likely to suffer in the mid-term elections, and it will probably always be cited as an example of Barack Obama’s leftish mismanagement during much of his first year as president.
So the latest version of health reform which Democratic leaders hope to vote on in a matter of days is, to put it mildly, a terrible disappointment. Despite that, the Democrats must summon up their courage and vote for reform. This poor bill is still better than no bill at all for two reasons.

One part basic decency, one part cost control
The first has to do with coverage. This newspaper loathes needless government intervention. But it also thinks that it is wrong for a country as rich as America to have tens of millions of people without health insurance. Beyond them is the much larger number of people who fear falling into that position through losing their jobs; and the larger number again who cannot get affordable insurance because they have an existing medical condition, or because they are too old, or because they have exhausted the “lifetime caps” imposed by insurance companies. The health-reform plan represents the last chance, perhaps for decades, of erasing one of the least creditable differences between America and the rest of the industrialised world. If this president, who came into office with solid congressional majorities and stratospheric ratings fails, neither he nor his successors will dare touch health care for many years to come; and that would be a tragedy.

The second somewhat paradoxical reason is that this bill will have to be improved on after it is passed—especially when it comes to costs. America’s health-care system is a nightmare of perverse incentives. Because employer-provided health insurance is not considered to be a taxable benefit, people feel insulated from the real cost of their coverage and consequently over-consume. Because hospitals and medical practices in many areas face too little competition, they charge absurdly too much even for simple procedures. Because of the rapacity of America’s lawyers, the fear of lawsuits encourages doctors to practise “defensive” medicine, again driving up costs.

The current bill chips away at all of these problems. Gold-plated insurance policies will in effect lose their tax-exempt status, though not for a while, and not in full. An independent presidential commission will have some power to force down the rates paid to medical-service providers—though, insanely, hospitals are exempted. Tiny steps in the direction of tort reform are also provided for. All these things could be expanded in due course. For instance Republicans elected in November may well return to the issue of malpractice costs.
Some health-reform purists will scoff at such incrementalism. They argue that it would be better to do nothing now, wait for an old-fashioned fiscal crisis to force the issue, and then start again. That is an alternative we think most Americans would rather not experience. Mr Obama’s bill does a morally desirable thing in expanding health coverage, and it does a bit on costs. That is, on balance, enough for it to deserve to pass.


St. Louis Post-Dispatch (March 18, 2010) "Whose Vision of Social Justice?" (article taken from www.eppc.org)
By Colleen Carroll Campbell (Fellow, Ethics & Public Policy Center)

Talk-show host Glenn Beck recently struck a nerve -- and ratings gold -- when he urged his audience to abandon any church that espouses social justice. The term is "code" for extremist political ideas akin to those of Nazis and Communists, Beck said, and churches that use it are promoting "a perversion of the Gospel" that privileges big government over individual charity.

Beck's controversial advice sparked a passionate backlash, particularly from the political left. Leading the boycott-Beck brigade is liberal social activist the Rev. Jim Wallis, who says Christians now should consider Beck's show as obscene and unworthy of their patronage as shock jock Howard Stern's. "Social justice is an integral part of God's plan for humanity," Wallis wrote on his blog, after admitting that "Christians may disagree about what social justice means in our current political context."

That caveat is crucial, and it's one that politicized pastors like Wallis often forget. A spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the rather presumptuously titled manifesto "God's Politics," Wallis is an intensely partisan critic of those who reject his statist vision of social reform. He's not the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- a preacher of ranting, anti-American sermons whose Chicago church Obama attended for decades and whom Beck cited as an example of a pastor promoting extremism. But Wallis has his moments of fire-breathing invective, directed almost always at Republican politicians and conservative Christians.

Beck makes his living by making provocative statements, so he probably was not displeased by the attention that Wallis' fury generated for his show. For Wallis, the controversy has given him a bigger platform to plead his case for the inextricable link between a Christian social conscience and leftist public policy. Lost in the fray is an interesting question worth pondering: What's the meaning of social justice? Anyone who has cracked open a Bible knows that justice is indeed a recurring theme. Calls for a just social order hardly qualify as a "perversion" of a Gospel that emphasizes, again and again, God's concern for the poor and marginalized. A religion premised on the idea of original sin does not promise its adherents a pain-free existence this side of eternity, but neither does it exempt them from the duty to build a better society here and now.

Still, there's a reason that the term "social justice" provokes sighs and rolled eyes among many Christians today. The promotion of leftist politics as infallible religious dogma by pastors such as Wright and, to a lesser extent, Wallis, goes a long way toward explaining public fatigue with the term. That fatigue stretches beyond Protestant circles into Catholic ones, where the phrase has its origins. The Catholic Catechism defines social justice as a situation in which people are able to "obtain what is their due" and says such justice "can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man." The church lays out a few non-negotiable principles when it comes to respecting this personal dignity -- defense of the right to life is preeminent among them -- while leaving many public policy decisions subject to the prudential judgment of individual Catholics.

Catholicism is not libertarianism by any stretch; government is expected to have a role in protecting the poor and weak. Yet the church also defends the principle of subsidiarity in political life -- the idea that the people closest to a problem should be the ones to solve it. Despite these careful doctrinal distinctions, many Catholics -- like many mainline Protestants -- assume that social justice demands their reflexive support for unlimited expansion of the social welfare state, even when a new government program may not be the most effective way to help the poor. Meanwhile, many of these same Catholics ignore the Church's clear admonition to defend social justice by defending the right to life of the unborn from abortion and the elderly from euthanasia.

The call for social justice is an outgrowth, not a perversion, of the Gospel. But the devil is in the definition. Christians concerned about mission creep in their churches should not abandon social justice. They should fight to reclaim a fuller understanding of it, one independent of any narrowly partisan political agenda.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host and St. Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.

Article 4 (Politics)

New York Times (March 12, 2010) "Getting Obama Right"
By David Brooks

Who is Barack Obama?

If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.

He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.
But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.
Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.

Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.

Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

Article 3 (Theology/Ecclesiology)

First Things (April 2009) "The One True Church"

By Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

The Public Square

Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8, 2009, at the age of seventy-two—a great loss to the magazine, to American public discourse, and to his many friends.

We present here a previously unpublished essay, “The One True Church,” which he wrote in New York during his last months, together with a few of our favorite While We're At It items from the nineteen years of his work in The Public Square.

My church is better than your church. It sounds like the stuff of schoolboy quarrels on the playground: My dad can beat your dad! Yet, sad to say, that is how many Christians have understood recent statements on Catholic ecclesiology. In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document called Dominus Iesus and then, in 2007, reiterated its main points in “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.”

The gist of these is that, with important qualifications related to Eastern Orthodoxy, non-Catholic churches are not to be called “Church” in the proper sense of the term but are better described as “ecclesial communities.” This was widely decried by many non-Catholic (and some Catholic) theologians as a departure from, if not reversal of, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It was, we were told, a body blow to ecumenism, the quest for visible unity among ­Christians.

I have on occasion offered this proposition: “The Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.” Some of my critics have questioned whether that is adequate. To say that it is the most fully and rightly ordered, they contend, implies or at least invites the inference that other communities are also the Church of Jesus Christ, albeit not so fully and rightly ordered.

To think more fully about this, we need to clarify what the Catholic Church claims for herself and what she does, and does not, acknowledge with respect to other Christian communities. My own thoughts are occasioned by two essays I read recently: one by Avery Cardinal Dulles in a volume called Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition and the other by Christopher J. Molloy, an essay titled “Subsistit In: Nonexclusive Identity or Full Identity?” that appeared in The Thomist.

Before we can get anywhere with this discussion, two stipulations must be firmly in place. The first is that we are not engaged in a rivalry between our side and some other side. Some years ago, when William F. Buckley heard that a prominent Protestant had entered into full communion with the Catholic Church, he exclaimed: “This is great news. It's like the Yankees stealing the star pitcher from the Red Sox.” That is an understandable tribal response, but it takes us back to the squabbling of boys on the playground. Questions of great theological moment are at stake. In these matters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike should have as their one concern the question of what Christ intended, and still intends, for his one Church—it being understood by all that, in the deepest meaning of the term, there can finally be only one Church, since the Church is the Body of Christ, of which Christ is the head, and there is only one Christ.

Tribalism has no place in this discussion. As John Paul II reminded Catholics in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, being a Catholic is not reason for proprietorial pride but for profound gratitude for a grace received, all undeserved on our part. Moreover, a Catholic who does not earnestly want to recognize and rejoice in the gifts of grace to be found in other Christian communities will almost certainly be more hindrance than help in this discussion.

The second and related stipulation is that we are not comparing an ideal depiction of the state of Catholicism with less flattering depictions of other communities—or vice versa. It is not a matter of what we like or dislike in this community or that. I have decided views on certain Orthodox and Protestant virtues that Catholics might well emulate. As Malloy writes, in reflecting on the uniqueness of the Catholic Church “one can affirm both the essential fullness of the ecclesial reality of the Catholic Church and the concrete poverty and woundedness of her lived life, together with her practical need of the expressive ecclesial riches found outside her visible boundaries.” Not only can one affirm both, one must affirm both.

Subsistit In

With those two stipulations firmly in place, one notes that the chief reason the documents of 2000 and 2007 were viewed as setbacks to ecumenism is that, for a long time and in many quarters, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council was gravely misrepresented. Cardinal Dulles writes that there still exists a general impression that Vatican II mandated a revolution in Catholic ecclesiology. He cites writings by John O'Malley as well as those by Gregory Baum, who claims the council reflects a “Blondelian shift” from “extrinsicism” toward experience and immanence. The Church is what you experience it to be. Richard McBrien speaks of “Copernican” and “Einsteinian” revolutions that overcame the unhealthy “ecclesiocentrism” of the past. Others claimed the council teaches that the Catholic Church is but one church among many. Some went further, saying that the Church is not only not the ordinary means of salvation; it is an extraordinary means for people who happen, for one reason or another, to be Catholic.

So what is to be made of all this? A good place to start is with what the Second Vatican Council actually said. Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, reads: “This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.' This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”

Much ink has been spilled in unpacking those three sentences, with most particular attention being devoted to the words “subsists in” (subsistit in). Much is made of the fact that the first draft of the constitution said that the Church of Jesus Christ is (est) the Catholic Church, which suggests that the final wording is a weakening of a straightforward identity of the Church with the Catholic Church. Both Dulles and Molloy point out, however, that subsistit in did not replace est but replaced adest in—“is present in”—a phrase that appeared in an intermediate draft. As a matter of fact, subsistit in was proposed by Sebastian Tromp, who had been a staunch proponent of the earlier est and the position that the Church of Christ is identical with the Catholic Church. In addition, the great majority of conservative bishops at the council voted in favor of the final draft, which clearly suggests that they did not think subsistit in was a watering down of the Church's self-understanding.

A few years before he became pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger explained it this way:

The word subsistit derives from ancient philosophy, as it was later developed among the Scholastics. It corresponds to the Greek word hypostasis, which of course plays a key role in Christology in describing the union of divine and human natures in the one person of Christ. Subsistere is a special case of esse. It refers to existence in the form of an individual subject. . . . With the word subsistit, the Council wanted to express the singularity and non-multipliability of the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church: the Church exists as a single subject in the reality of history. But the difference between subsistit and est also embraces the drama of ecclesial division: for while the Church is only one and really exists, there is being which is from the Church's being—there is ecclesial reality—outside the Church.

The elements of sanctification and truth to be found outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church are ecclesial elements. Can there be ecclesial elements without ecclesia? Obviously, some fine but important distinctions are in order. The late Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, longtime head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, was fond of saying, “Christ and the Church are coterminous.” I take that to mean that, if one is in a living relationship with Christ, one is also in relationship with his Church, for body and head cannot be separated. Therefore communities of faith outside the Catholic Church are ecclesial communities.

And therefore Lumen Gentium says that non-Catholics who are baptized and believe in Christ are in a “certain but imperfect communion with the Catholic Church.” The goal of ecumenism is not to create a unity that does not exist but to bring to fulfillment the very real unity that is already there between Catholics and non-Catholics who are brothers and sisters in Christ. (For purposes of this discussion I leave largely aside the situation of the Orthodox, who have valid ordination and other sacraments and adhere to apostolic teaching. Among the Orthodox, according to Catholic doctrine, there are not just ecclesial communities but “particular churches,” although they are, in the language of CDF, “wounded” by the lack of full communion with the ministry of Peter exercised by the bishop of Rome.)

Realizations of the Sacrament

Molloy and others speak of the “full,” “complete,” “total,” and “exclusive” identity between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. Such language can easily mislead and is understandably offensive to non-Catholic Christians. The intention, however, is to underscore that the Catholic Church is nothing less than the Church of Christ and to counter any suggestion that the Catholic Church is—albeit the most fully and rightly ordered—only one church among other churches. Again, this is not a matter of boasting or of ecclesial rivalry, which should have no place among followers of Christ. It is a matter of being as faithful as possible to what Christ intended his Church to be.

Since Christ is manifestly present in other communities, and since Christ, the head, can never be ­separated from his Body, the Church, how are we to understand the presence of the Church in these communities that possess “ecclesial elements”? One formulation is offered by John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint: “Insofar as these kinds of elements exist in other Christian communities, the one (unica) Church of Christ has an efficacious presence therein. On this account, the Second Vatican Council speaks of a certain, albeit imperfect, communion. The constitution Lumen Gentium highlights that the Catholic Church knows that ‘for many reasons she is joined' to these communities in a certain real communion of unity in the Holy Spirit.”

Molloy puts it this way: “Dominus Iesus states not that the Church of Christ exists only in the Catholic Church . . . but that the Church of Christ exists fully only in the Catholic Church. The same document affirms that non-Catholic communions with valid orders and a valid celebration of the Eucharist [i.e., Orthodox] are ‘true particular churches.' Therefore, the Church of Christ can exist elsewhere, though not fully.” Then one must ask, what Church is it that exists in the Orthodox particular churches and in the non-Catholic ecclesial communities? The answer would seem to be that the Church that exists elsewhere than in full communion with the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church.

An implication of that answer is that everyone who is baptized and believes in Christ is Catholic, although in imperfect communion with the Church. Some Christians who are quite sure that they are not Catholics may view that claim as an instance of outrageous ecclesiastical cheekiness, of recruiting by definition people who do not want to be Catholics.

Others, more charitably, may view it as the best that Catholics can do, given their peculiar ecclesiology. Yet others may recognize it as a consistent working out of what it means to be in continuity with the apostolically constituted Church as a distinct society through time. They might further recognize that the presence of the Catholic Church in their ecclesial communities gravitates toward full communion with the Catholic Church. Again the words of Lumen Gentium: “These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”

Does this mean that all Christians are members, or partial members, or something like honorary members of the Catholic Church? The Church does not say so. In the 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (On the Mystical Body of Christ), Pius XII addressed the meaning of membership in the Church, but, as Cardinal Dulles writes, Vatican II took a somewhat different approach. The emphasis of Vatican II is on the Church as sacrament, which, he says, is of “foundational importance” to the ecclesiology of the council, appearing four times in Lumen Gentium and six times in other documents of the council.

Dulles explains: “Avoiding the term ‘member,' which had become bogged down in controversy, [the Council] spoke of perfect and imperfect realizations of the sacrament. The sacrament of the Church is fully realized only in the Catholic Church, the visible and grace-filled society in which the bonds of professed faith, ecclesiastical government, and sacramental communion remain fully intact. These bonds belong together insofar as the true Church indefectibly possesses them all. But the bonds are separable in the sense that some may survive in the absence of others. Non–Roman Catholic communities may possess some authentic ecclesial elements and be able to make fruitful use of them as channels of grace.”

I would only offer what I am sure Cardinal Dulles would recognize as a friendly amendment, namely, that such communities do possess such elements and do make fruitful use of them. The Council teaching readily recognizes the evidence of Christian faith and holiness outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church; evidence, one might add, that is sometimes more conspicuous than the evidence found among some who are in full communion with the Church.

And yet there is no denying that Dominus Iesus of 2000 and “Responses to Some Questions” of 2007, both interpreting Vatican II according to the hermeneutic of continuity, were viewed by many as a cause of ecumenical scandal.

These documents said nothing new but simply aimed at correcting misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the Church's teaching that had occasioned serious ecumenical confusions. Some Protestants thought that repeating the points in 2007 was rubbing it in a bit, but I suppose CDF had its reasons. In any event, we do Christian unity no favors by fudging what we actually believe.

Moreover, most non-Catholic Christians in the West do not bridle at the claim that what is authentically Christian in their communities is derived, in one way or another, from the apostolically continuing tradition that is the Catholic Church, beginning with the canon of Holy Scripture and the Christological and Trinitarian definitions of the early councils. Of course, what they have selectively received from the Catholic Church they have revised and reformed according to their understanding of the Bible or of the needs of the time, and such changes are the subject of continuing ecumenical conversation. People of goodwill do not take umbrage at the claim that such elements are “gifts belonging to the Church of Christ [and] are forces impelling toward catholic unity,” although they have their own ideas about what form that unity should take.

All Christians can agree on the formula that there is finally only one Church because there is only one Christ and the Church is his Body. Of course, Catholics are insistent that the one Church is both visible and invisible. But all affirm the maxim extra ecclesia nulla salus—at least to the extent that one must have heard the preaching of the gospel or read the Bible, both of which are impossible without the Church. As for saying that these other associations are ecclesial communities rather than churches in the full sense—as, for instance, the “particular churches” of Orthodoxy are churches—this should cause no hard feelings. Such communities do not claim to be what the Catholic Church claims to be.

They readily acknowledge that they are human associations united by common belief and purpose. The Presbyterian Church USA was formed in 1983, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1847, and the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, while the Episcopal Church claims a more venerable, or at least longer, legacy reaching back to Henry VIII's styling himself Supreme Head of the Church in England in 1534. True, there are Landmark Baptists and sundry Campbellites who claim they have uniquely preserved or restored the true Church of the New Testament, but most of them do not take that improbable claim very seriously today, and those that do are not part of the ecumenical project.

Most Fully and Rightly Ordered Through Time

In sum, Catholics should not fear offending our ecumenical partners by affirming what we believe the Catholic Church to be. To be sure, that affirmation has weighty implications. For instance, Lumen Gentium also says, “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.” But that, too, should not offend non-Catholic Christians, since we can all agree that such a person would be acting against his conscience and his sure discernment of the will of God. If he continues on that course without repentance, he could not be saved. It is quite a different matter with those who do not know—i.e., do not recognize the truth—that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be. They are wrong about that, of course, but that, presumably, is one reason why they are not Catholics.

And so I think I'll stay with my admittedly provocative title, “The One True Church.” In accord with the Church's teaching and appreciative of the scholarship of such as Cardinal Dulles and Christopher Molloy, I will also continue to make the case for the proposition that “the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.”