A recently released Vatican document claiming that the Roman Catholic Church holds a monopoly on Christian legitimacy should not come as a surprise to the religious community, says Dr. Bert B. Beach, director of Inter-church Relations for the Seventh-day Adventist Church worldwide.

“There is nothing new here,” says Beach of the document that has prompted an outcry from many non-Catholic Christian denominations around the world. “The Roman Catholic Church has never affirmed the validity of Protestant churches. Despite its involvement in interfaith dialogues over the years, it has always claimed primacy as being the only ‘true church.’”

Beach points out that even the Second Vatican Council of 1962 to 1965, widely hailed as having liberalized the Roman Catholic Church in a number of areas, including its approach to ecumenism, consistently referred to other Christian denominations as “ecclesial communities” rather than churches. 

The declaration, called Dominus Iesus, was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican body founded in 1542 that is charged with the protection of doctrinal orthodoxy.  Speaking at a September 5 news conference at Vatican City, the head of the Congregation, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said the document is intended to counter “religious relativism.” 

According to the document, “there exists a single church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.”  Thus, non-Catholic churches are in a “gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the [Catholic] Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.”

The steadily growing involvement of the Roman Catholic Church in various ecumenical organizations, such as the World Council of Churches, over the past few decades has made this frank assertion of superiority shocking to many in the religious community, says Beach.

“But the Catholic Church’s participation in such organizations has always been based on a mono-centric view of ecumenism,” Beach explains. “This is an underlying belief that Christian organizations should work towards unity, but with the ultimate goal of coming together under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic Church the ‘one true church.’”

Beach says that, in one sense, such an open assertion is a good thing, providing a clear picture of where the Vatican stands on the issue.

Dr. Gerhard Pfandl, an associate director in the Adventist Church’s Biblical Research Institute, called the declaration “a bold move to counter the inroads of postmodernism and pluralism in the Catholic Church” and “an indication that the church has not changed its philosophy or doctrinal stand.”  Pfandl says that the document “comes close to saying that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, which was the position of the Church for centuries.”

“The document is an attempt to rein in certain Catholic theologians who have gone, or would like to go, beyond the limits the papacy has set in its ecumenical enterprise,” says Pfandl, who notes that the declaration is specifically directed to Roman Catholic theologians rather than the broader religious community.

A German magazine, Focus Weekly, has printed excerpts from a book by Ratzinger, to be published next month, reports Associated Press. The goal, Ratzinger states in the book, is to unite Christianity as a single faith. He adds that “we as Catholics are convinced that such a single church exists in its basic form in the Catholic church.”

Also published last week was an official “Note” written by Ratzinger and approved by Pope John Paul on June 9.  The four-page note, which was sent to the heads of Catholic bishops’ conferences around the world, warns against the use of the phrase “sister churches” to describe Protestant denominations. 

The release of both Dominus Iesus and the cardinal’s note has received wide media coverage and prompted expressions of concern from many Christian leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey and the chairman of the council of the Evangelical Church of Germany, Manfred Kock.