German cardinals clash about centralisation of church

Two German cardinals, who are among the most prominent members of the Roman Curia, have differed publicly on the relationship between bishops and the Vatican.

Cardinal Walter Kaspar, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has said that "regrettably" Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, approached the issue from "a purely abstract and theological point of view".

In 1999 Dr Kaspar, who became a cardinal last February, published an essay On the Office of the Bishop. In a lecture last year, On the Ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Ratzinger "took a highly critical stance against my position", he said.

Last December Cardinal Kaspar replied in a further essay, On the Church - a friendly reply to Cardinal Ratzinger. This is published in the current issue of the Furrow magazine.

Cardinal Kaspar said that, "as a bishop (in Germany) of a large diocese, I had observed how a gap was emerging and steadily increasing between norms promulgated in Rome for the universal church and the needs and practices of our local church.

"A large portion of our people, including priests, could not understand the reason behind the regulations coming from the centre; they tended, therefore, to ignore them."

He continued: "No bishop should be silent or stand idly by when he finds himself in such a situation. He faces, however, an awkward dilemma. While his task is to be a bond of unity between the See of Rome and his people, he is pulled in two directions."

He felt "the bishop must be granted enough vital space to make responsible decisions in the matter of implementing universal laws". That was "within our tradition, not contrary to it", he said.

The local church was "neither a province nor a department of the universal church; it is the church at a given place. The local bishop is not a delegate of the Pope but is one sent by Jesus Christ. He is given personal responsibility by Christ . . . This is the teaching of the Second Vatican Council."

Such an understanding of the bishop's office "should have led to decentralisation in the church's government. The opposite happened: the trend toward centralisation returned after the council," Cardinal Kaspar said. The "right balance between the universal and particular churches has been destroyed".

Cardinal Ratzinger in his lecture had accused him of proposing an understanding of the church which had "no theological depth and reduces its essence to empirically developed separate communities".

That "badly misrepresents and caricatures my position", Cardinal Kaspar said. He had in fact "affirmed the opposite".