I never have tried to tally the official output of the 21 ecumenical councils, but my sense is that Vatican II produced more words than the previous councils combined. At least it seems that way. I hope it is not taken as a slight to the council fathers if I say that the sixteen documents they gave us would have been more effective (and less abused) if only one-third the length. Concision has its virtues. The verbosity of the conciliar documents has allowed Catholic dissidents and non-Catholics to select from the text what they want to see and to ignore what they don’t want to see.
This was evident in the reaction to Dominus Jesus, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on September 5. When I read the document, I was surprised that there was no surprise. Most of the words are lifted from Vatican II or the Bible. There is little connecting tissue, which means there is little not already known by any informed reader. Dominus Jesus broke no new ground, but you wouldn’t know it from those who said the CDF contradicted Vatican II.
The leader of the Anglican communion, Archbishop of Canterbury George L. Carey, sighed that the CDF had put a roadblock on the path to unity. He was miffed that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted that all Christian groups other than the Catholic Church are “defective,” which is to say they are missing something (sometimes many things) the Catholic Church has.
This should not be news to anyone who has studied Christian history. Every Protestant church is either a direct offshoot of the Catholic Church (as is the case with the Lutheran Church) or is an offshoot of an offshoot (Pentecostal churches are offshoots of Holiness churches, which are offshoots of the Methodist Church, which is an offshoot of the Anglican Church, which is an offshoot of the Catholic Church).
The chief defects of the Protestant churches are that they are missing five sacraments. They have valid baptism and matrimony, but they do not have the other sacraments. This means that the “Lord’s Supper,” as celebrated by them, is a memorial meal of bread and wine—but nothing more. Christ’s body and blood are not present.
That particular defect arises from another: the absence of true priests. Some of the Protestant churches call their ministers priests or bishops, but we know that those are terms of courtesy, not reality. Archbishop Carey is addressed as “Archbishop,” but only because he claims to be in apostolic succession, not because he really is. In fact, he is a Christian layman, not even a priest—a consequence of the defects his church has.
I use “church” in a colloquial sense when referring to the Anglican or other Protestant bodies. Official Catholic documents, including those of Vatican II and Dominus Jesus, reserve the word “church” for bodies that maintain all seven sacraments, which means, as a practical matter, that the word is used for the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Protestant “churches” are termed “ecclesial communities” or “ecclesial communions,” which means that they are “church-like” but are not true churches.
I found Dominus Jesus refreshing precisely because it reiterates what Vatican II said nearly four decades ago: There is one true Church, and there are many faux churches.