Joseph Ratzinger on divine providence and the divided church

But if this is how matters stand, what are we to do? In addressing this question, I have found very helpful the formula that Oscar Cullmann recently injected into the debate: unity through multiplicity, through diversity. Certainly, division is harmful, especially when it leads to enmity and an impoverishment of Christian witness. But if the poison of hostility is slowly removed from the division, and if, through mutual acceptance, diversity leads no longer to mere impoverishment but rather to a new wealth of listening and understanding, then during the transition to unity division can become a felix culpa, a happy fault, even before it is completely healed. Toward the end of my years in Tübingen, you, dear Mr. Seckler, as one of my colleagues, gave me a book to read that had been produced under your editorial direction, a study of Augustine's interpretation of the mysterious Pauline statement, "there must be factions" (1 Cor 11:19). The exegetical problem of interpreting 1 Corinthians 11:19 is not at issue here; it seems to me that the Church Fathers were not so mistaken when they discovered a generalization in this remark, which initially had a local meaning; H. Schlier is even of the opinion that Paul considered this an eschatological, dogmatic statement. If we may pursue this line of thought, then it lends particular weight to the exegetical finding that the biblical use of the Greek word dei always refers somehow to an act of God or else expresses an eschatological necessity. But then this means that even though factions are first of all man's doing and man's fault, there is also a dimension to them that corresponds to a divine arrangement. That is why we can make reparation for them only up to a certain point through penance and conversion; but God himself, the merciful Judge alone, decides when things are far enough along that we no longer need this split and the "must" is over.

Along the path marked out by Cullmann, therefore, we should first try to find unity through diversity, in other words, to accept what is fruitful in our divisions, to detoxify them, and to welcome the positive things that come precisely from diversity—of course, in the hope that in the end the division will cease to be division at all and will just be "polarity" without contradiction. But any attempt to reach this final stage too directly in a hasty and hectic do-it-yourself rush only deepens the division instead of healing it. Allow me to explain what I mean quite empirically and pragmatically with an example: Was it not a good thing in many respects, for the Catholic Church in Germany and beyond, that Protestantism, with its liberalism and its piety and its internal conflicts and its lofty intellectual standards, existed alongside her? Certainly, in the times of the religious wars, division was almost exclusively mutual opposition, but then it increasingly developed also into a positive factor for the faith on both sides, which helps us to understand something of the mysterious "must" of Saint Paul. And conversely: Could anyone really imagine an exclusively Protestant world? Is not Protestantism instead, in all its declarations, precisely as a protest, so completely connected with Catholicism that it would be scarcely imaginable without it?

This would result in a twofold approach to ecumenical activity. One line of action would necessarily consist of continuing efforts to find complete unity, to devise models of unity, while attempting to see oppositions in a fuller light that leads toward unity—not only in scholarly debates but above all in prayer and penance. Alongside this, however, there should be a second field of action, which presupposes that we do not know and cannot determine the hour when and the manner in which unity will come about. In this regard, Melanchthon's expression, "ubi et quando visum est Deo" [where and when God has seen fit] really holds true in the strictest sense. In any case, it should be clear that we do not make unity (any more than we achieve justice by our works); however, we must not twiddle our thumbs. Therefore, it is a matter of receiving again and again from the other as other, while respecting his otherness. Even as separated brethren we can be one.

—Joseph Ratzinger, "On the Progress of Ecumenism: A Letter to the Theologische Quartalschrift" (1986), in Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, trans. Michael J. Miller et al. (1987), 135-136