Roman Catholic-Quaker Dialogue

Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Summer-Fall, 1999 by Jay Wesley Worrall IV

Roman Catholic Thought: Vatican II

The Roman Catholic theology that will be used in this essay will come almost exclusively from Vatican II for two reasons. First, Vatican II was a watershed moment for Catholic theology. Not only was Vatican II a serious attempt to articulate Catholic doctrine in light of the modern world, but it also expressed a new understanding of the relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to the world and to other Christian and non-Christian religions. Second, Roman Catholicism is similar to other religions, including Quakerism, in that it is made up of many different intellectual and theological strands. Symptomatic of this was the founding of two adversarial publications following Vatican II, the progressive Concilium and the conservative Communio. Many of these differing attitudes can be found in Vatican II, although others, particularly some of the more exclusivist and narrow-minded ones, were not articulated. Statements enunciated at Vatican II have attached to them both an authority and a sense of modernism that others do not. For this reason, along with the expectation that it will be in the documents of Vatican II that we will find the similarities to Quaker thought that we are looking for, the thought of Vatican II will serve as the thought of the Roman Catholic Church in this essay.

Religious Authority I: The Primacy of Conscience

Perhaps the most basic religious difference between various Christian understandings of faith lies in the area of religious authority. How can believers distinguish what is sanctioned by God and what is not? Protestants find this standard in the Bible. This is the meaning of the Protestant affirmation sola scriptura; that is, only scripture as God's Word has direct and absolute authority.

For the Quaker, the authority of God resides in the "still, small voice" or the "inner light" of what is sometimes called conscience. According to Rufus Jones, Quakerism began "[w]hen Fox started forth, in 1647-48 ... He had been convinced by his own experience ... that there is a direct illumination from God within man's inner being. He met the Calvinistic theory of a congenital seed of sin in the new-born child by the counter claim that there is a seed of God in every soul." [5]

Quaker religion does not arise from the outside and flow in, as it does in most Protestant theologies, but arises from within and flows out. There is no mediation of God's authority in Quaker theology. God is equally available to everyone as to the apostles and those who received biblical revelation. This is made obvious in the statement by William Penn: "The scriptures we highly value. But we believe not the things we often quote thence to be true only because there, but for that we are witnesses of the same operation, and bring in our experimental testimonies to confirm the truth of theirs." [6] Experience is the Quaker's starting point. God is known through experience, not through scripture or doctrine.

The official Roman Catholic position is somewhat different. Catholic understanding of religious authority is derived from a belief in apostolic succession. The authority of the Church is handed down from the Apostles to the papacy and the college of bishops: