On New Movements

Thanks to a faithful, ever-helpful reader who passed this along – an article on New Movements by then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

This perspective also enables us to see the risks to which the movements are exposed as well as the means to remedy them. There is the risk of one-sidedness resulting from the over-accentuation of the specific task that emerges in one period or through one charism. The fact that the spiritual awakening is not experienced as one form of Christian existence, but as a being struck by the totality of the message as such, can lead to the absolutization of the movement, which can understand itself simply as the Church, as the way for all, whereas this one way can communicate itself in very different modes. Time and again, then, the freshness and totality of the awakening also leads almost inevitably to conflict with the local community, a conflict in which both sides can be at fault, and which represents a spiritual challenge to both. The local churches may have made peace with the world through a certain conformism, the salt can lose its savor, a situation that Kierkegaard described with mordant acuity in his critique of Christendom. Yet even where the departure from the radical demands of the gospel has not reached the point that provoked Kierkegaard’s denunciation, the irruption of the new is experienced as a disruption, especially when it appears with all kinds of childhood diseases and misguided absolutizations, as not infrequently happens.

Both sides must open themselves here to an education by the Holy Spirit and also by the leadership of the Church, both must acquire a selflessness without which there can be no interior consent to the multiformity in which the faith is lived out. Both sides must learn from each other, allow themselves to be purified by each other, put up with each other, and discover how to attain those attitudes of which Paul speaks in his great hymn to love (1 Cor 13:4ff.). Thus, it is necessary to remind the movements that—even though they have found and pass on the whole of the faith in their own way—they are a gift to and in the whole of the Church and must submit themselves to the demands of this totality in order to be true to their own essence. But the local churches, too, even the bishops, must be reminded to avoid making an ideal of uniformity in pastoral organization and planning. They must not make their own pastoral plans the criterion of what the Holy Spirit is allowed to do: an obsession with planning could render the churches impermeable to the Spirit of God, to the power by which they live. It must not be the case that everything has to fit into a single, uniform organization. Better less organization and more spirit! Above all, communio must not be conceived as if the avoidance of conflict were the highest pastoral value. Faith is always a sword, too, and it can demand precisely conflict for the sake of truth and love (cf. Mt 10:34). A concept of ecclesial unity in which conflicts are dismissed a priori as polarization, and in which domestic peace is bought at the price of sacrificing the integral totality of witness will quickly prove to be illusory. Finally, we must not allow the establishment of a blasé enlightenment that immediately brands the zeal of those seized by the Holy Spirit and their naive faith in God’s Word with the anathema of fundamentalism and allows only a faith for which the ifs, ands, and buts become more important than the very substance of what is believed. All must let themselves be measured by love for the unity of the one Church, which is only one in all local churches and appears as such again and again in the apostolic movements. The local churches and the apostolic movements must constantly recognize and accept the simultaneous truth of two propositions: ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia—ubi episcopus, ibi ecclesia. Primacy and episcopacy, the local ecclesial system and apostolic movements, need each other: the primacy can live only with and through a living episcopacy, the episcopacy can preserve its dynamic and apostolic unity only in ordination to the primacy. Where one of the two is weakened, the Church as a whole suffers.