25 years ago, in August 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Ratzinger published a famous document with the title “Dominus Iesus”. The subtitle is “On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church”, and its main topic is the relationship between the Catholic Church and the other Christian “churches”.
In this article, I am not going to analyze the entire document. Instead, I want to highlight a few of the most important sentences in the document and show how they contradict Catholic teaching. The article is heavily inspired by the analysis of Donald Sanborn, a former priest of the SSPX who is now a sedevacantist bishop.
The Via delle Conciliazione in Rome. Image by “N i c o l a”, CC-BY 2.0, here.
The document quotes paragraph 8 of Lumen Gentium, which was issued by the Second Vatican Council: “This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in [subsistit in] the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.” (square brackets in the original) (16)
The phrase “subsistit in” is a key phrase in Lumen Gentium. This phrase was deliberately inserted into the Council documents to open the door for the claim that the Church of Christ is somehow larger than the Catholic Church and that “elements” of it can be found in the other Christian “churches”.
The Catholic Church has always taught that she is the Church of Christ.
As Pope Pius XII wrote in Humani Generis: “[…] the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing.” (Humani Generis 27) There are many other documents from the Magisterium saying the same thing.
Sanborn explains it well: “It merely says that the schismatics and heretics who have broken off from the Roman Catholic Church form parts of the Church of Christ. They are other branches. It is heretical for the same reason that the ‘subsistit in’ is heretical. It completely alters the nature of the Church of Christ, and places a distinction between the Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church.”
“Dominus Iesus” then turns to the Orthodox:
“The Churches which, while not existing in perfect communion with the Catholic Church, remain united to her by means of the closest bonds, that is, by apostolic succession and a valid Eucharist, are true particular Churches.” (17)
He claims that the Orthodox churches are “particular Churches”. A “particular Church” is a traditional name for a local part of the Church, like a diocese. The Archdiocese of Cologne, for example, is a particular Church. Ratzinger is saying in effect that an Orthodox Church has the same value as a Catholic diocese.
“Therefore, the Church of Christ is present and operative also in these Churches, even though they lack full communion with the Catholic Church, since they do not accept the Catholic doctrine of the Primacy, which, according to the will of God, the Bishop of Rome objectively has and exercises over the entire Church.” (17)
There is no such thing as “full communion” and “partial communion”.
Pope Pius IX wrote in his apostolic letter Iam vos omnes about the other “churches”: “Now, whoever will carefully examine and reflect upon the condition of the various religious societies, divided among themselves, and separated from the Catholic Church, which, from the days of our Lord Jesus Christ and his Apostles has never ceased to exercise, by its lawful pastors, and still continues to exercise, the divine power committed to it by this same Lord; cannot fail to satisfy himself that neither any one of these societies by itself, nor all of them together, can in any manner constitute and be that One Catholic Church which Christ our Lord built, and established, and willed should continue; and that they cannot in any way be said to be branches or parts of that Church, since they are visibly cut off from Catholic unity.”
Pope Pius IX
The pope is very clear: all non-Catholic Christian “churches” are outside the Church of Christ.
In 1857, Anglicans founded a society in London with the name “Association for Promoting the Union of Christendom” with the goal of praying for the unity of Christians. They spread the idea that the Church of Christ is made up of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, which have a relationship to the Church like branches of a tree. This became known as the “branch theory”.
The Holy Office (the precursor of what is called today the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”) issued a letter in 1864, forbidding Catholics to participate. Cardinal Costantino Patrizi Naro, the secretary of the Holy Office, wrote:
“The principle on which it rests is one that overthrows the divine constitution of the Church. For it is pervaded by the idea that the true Church of Jesus Christ consists partly of the Roman Church spread abroad and propagated throughout the world, partly of the Photian schism [Orthodoxy] and the Anglican heresy, as having equally with the Roman Church, one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. To take away the dissensions which distract these three Christian communions, not without grievous scandal and at the expense of truth and charity, it appoints prayers and sacrifices, to obtain from God the grace of unity. Nothing indeed should be dearer to a Catholic than the eradicating of schisms and dissensions among Christians, and to see all Christians ‘solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph. iv.). To that end, the Catholic Church offers prayers to Almighty God, and urges the faithful in Christ to pray, that all who have left the Holy Roman Church, out of which is no salvation, may abjure their errors and be brought to the true faith, and the peace of that Church; nay, that all men may, by God’s merciful aid, attain to a knowledge of the truth. But that the faithful in Christ, and that ecclesiastics, should pray for Christian unity under the direction of heretics, and, worse still, according to an intention stained and infected by heresy in a high degree, can no way be tolerated.”
When Anglican priests protested the condemnation, Cardinal Patrizi wrote in a following letter:
“Furthermore, the Sacred Congregation is exceedingly sorry that you happened to think those Christian groups that boast of having the inheritance of the priesthood and the catholic name belong to the true Church of Jesus Christ, even though they are divided and separated from Peter. In that opinion, there is nothing that is more averse to the genuine notion of the Catholic Church. For the Catholic Church, as I advised in my letter to the English bishops, is the one that, built upon one Peter, rises up into one body joined together and compacted in the unity of faith and charity.”
And:
“She [the Catholic Church] always published her dogmatic definitions and proposed them as the certain and unchangeable rule of faith. As rules of faith, each person must give them his innermost assent without any doubt, suspicion, or hesitation. Indeed, those who in this very matter would stubbornly resist these same definitions would be considered to have suffered shipwreck in respect to the faith necessary to gain salvation, and they would be thought to belong no longer to the fold of Christ.”
“[…] it is logical to conclude that all groups entirely separated from external and visible communion with and obedience to the Roman Pontiff cannot be the Church of Christ, nor in any way whatsoever can they belong to the Church of Christ, namely, to that Church, which, in the Creed after the commendation of the Trinity, is proposed to be believed as the holy Church, the one Church, the true Church, [and] the Catholic Church […]”
There is another problematic passage, which quotes from both John Paul II’s encyclical “Ut unum sint” as well as “Unitatis redintegratio” of the Second Vatican Council:
“In fact, ‘the elements of this already-given Church exist, joined together in their fullness in the Catholic Church and, without this fullness, in the other communities’. ‘Therefore, these separated Churches and communities as such, though we believe they suffer from defects, have by no means been deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation. For the spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church’.” (17)
Here, the document claims that the Holy Spirit is using the other “churches” as “means of salvation”. As pointed out by Sanborn, this is heretical, since it would mean that those other churches have some legitimacy.
Someone might object that God can bring good out of evil and God can work in an individual person outside the visible Catholic Church. That is correct. But in this case, one can say that devils are a “means of salvation”. After all, God allows devils to tempt us so that He can bring greater good of out of it.