Subsistit in

Extract

Last January the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie was giving one of the addresses in the service being held at Westminster Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Referring to the ecumenical implications of the use of the words subsistit in, he said: ‘After Vatican II the Church “subsisted” in the Roman Catholic Church, a small linguistic change, but a world apart in self-understanding.’ He was echoing the thoughts of Fr Grillmeier, the distinguished Jesuit theologian: these two words ‘constituted a development of unforseeable dimensions’.

Sadly, it appears that there are those in Rome engaged in preparing the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church who would wish to change the words of the Council fathers. To understand properly what is going on we must go back over some familiar old ground.

Lumen Gentium, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, states that the visible Church, structured hierarchically, and the invisible Church, the Body of Christ, are not to be thought of as two realities, but as one complex reality having a human and a divine element:

Haec Ecclesia, in hoc mundo ut societas constituta et ordinata, subsistit in Ecclesia catholica, a successore Petri et Episcopis in eius communione gubernata, licet extra eius compaginem elementa plura sanctificationis et veritatis inveniantur, quae ut dona Ecclesiae Christi propria, ad unitatem catholicam impellunt.