Pope tells Ratzinger more collaboration needed - World - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 1, 2002 by John L. Allen, Jr.

VATICAN CITY: In unusually candid remarks Jan. 18 to members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's doctrinal agency, Pope John Paul II urged greater collaboration with bishops and bishops' conferences, and acknowledged that recent doctrinal statements have run into "difficulties of reception."

"Reception" in Catholic theology is a term denoting the response from the church at large to doctrinal statements from authorities. The statement came at an audience with members of the congregation finishing a weeklong meeting in Rome.

In opening remarks to the pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the congregation's prefect, set an upbeat tone. Ratzinger pointed to recent investigations of theologians Jacques Dupuis, Marcel Vidal and Reinhard Messner as examples of "a fertile collaboration between the magisterium of the church and theologians."

While thanking the doctrinal guardians for their work, the pope nevertheless used the word collaboration five times in his 1,000-word address, urging closer working ties with bishops, bishops' conferences, and religious superiors.

"There is a problem of assimilation of the contents of the documents and of collaboration in the diffusion and the application of the consequences that arise from them," the pope said. In accounting for "these difficulties of reception," the pope identified four possibilities:

* The dynamic of the means of mass communication.

* Particular historical situations.

* The severe demands of evangelical language, "which, however, has a liberating force."

* A problem of style, of a possible contradiction between styles of life and the love of Christ, which "obscures the persuasive force" of doctrinal statements.