Since, however, Oakes thinks words have enough meaning to make it worthwhile to distinguish between the orthodox and those selling out the Church, we can look for his standard. He decrees it explicitly: “When the Western Church fissiparated in the sixteen century, the Reformers took a portion of the essential patrimony of the Church with them, and they thereby left both the Roman Church and themselves the poorer for it.” The Catholic Church has been “robbed of key portions of its patrimony”–so not only have some of Mother Church’s children become estranged, but, Oakes suggests, they have also made off with part of the deposit of faith, leaving the pantry half-empty. In short, Oakes’ standard for orthodoxy is additive: The yin of the Romans must be brought together again with the yang of the Reformers for truth to be complete.
Which puzzles me. For Oakes surely knows Vatican II clearly taught that “the sole Church of Christ . . . subsists in the Catholic Church,” and that “nevertheless many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines.” (For an up-to-the-minute analysis of the Council fathers’ understanding of the controversial “subsists,” one may refer to the 2007 tesina of Fr. Robert Fromageot at the Angelicum.)
From the official Catholic perspective, then, the Catholic Church conserves the whole truth, while the “separated brethren” share in many elements of it. The contribution to a deeper appreciation and appropriation of Christ’s truth that can result from Protestant emphases on different aspects of the shared truth might then be likened, in an anemic analogy, to fluorescent highlighting on portions of a text: The words were there but merit more attention. Then again, if Fr. Oakes’ standard is what he says, it doesn’t puzzle me that he finds “greater doctrinal fellowship among many Protestants” than among “far too many Catholic theologians”: His standard is one of Protestant ecclesiology.
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