Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, announced on October 7 at the Pontifical Antonianum University in Rome that the interreligious day convened by John Paul II in Assisi on October 27, 1986 “enters the ordinary teaching of the Magisterium.” The entry title is footnote 200 of Magnifica humanitas, the first encyclical of Leo XIV, which praises the spirit of Assisi without mentioning the date or format of that day. At the same conference, the prefect recalled that integralist circles turned the day into one of the reasons for a schismatic rupture, and that others feared syncretism and continue to fear it. The operation has two stages: a gesture of governance rises to doctrine, and whoever questions it stands one step away from schism.
It is worth taking the criterion seriously, because it has consequences. If an event enters the ordinary teaching of the Magisterium because a later pontifical document mentions it with appreciation, even if only in a footnote, the cadaver synod has better credentials than Assisi. In January 897, Stephen VI had his predecessor Formosus exhumed, seated him on the throne vested in pontificals, and assigned him a deacon to answer for him. He condemned him, annulled his pontificate and his ordinations, amputated the fingers with which he blessed, and ordered the body thrown into the Tiber. It was not the work of an integralist milieu. It was a reigning pope, in Rome, in synod.
What came afterward completes the picture. Theodore II annulled that synod at the end of 897. John IX annulled it again in 898 and forbade judging the dead thereafter. Sergius III, of Stephen’s party, restored the condemnation during his pontificate, between 904 and 911, and once more invalidated Formosus’s ordinations. By the cardinal’s method, ordinary magisterium taught in little more than ten years that Formosus had been pope, that he had not been, that he had and that he had not. One therefore understands that the cadaver synod was also ordinary magisterium. With one advantage over Assisi: it did not need a footnote, because another pope confirmed it in another synod.
The joke has depth. The episode of Formosus proves precisely what the cardinal evades: that an act of governance by a pope, however solemn, does not thereby become teaching. The Magisterium proposes doctrine on faith and morals to be believed or upheld. A day of prayer, its staging, and its distribution of churches belong to the order of governance and prudence, and in that order the Church admits error without scandal. The instruction Donum veritatis, signed in 1990 by Cardinal Ratzinger and approved by John Paul II, acknowledges that in interventions of a prudential nature some magisterial documents may not be free of deficiencies. Assisi is not even a document.
There remains the problem of the others, those who, according to the cardinal, feared syncretism and continue to fear it. Among them is the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986, Joseph Ratzinger, who did not attend Assisi, later criticized the multi-religious prayer, and, as Benedict XVI, suppressed the common public prayer in the 2011 edition. If the 1986 day is ordinary magisterium, in 2011 a pope corrected ordinary magisterium. If it is not, the prefect has decreed its elevation on his own, and he has done so by omitting, in the survey he devoted to the spirit of Assisi under successive pontificates, the datum that most hinders him.
Regarding schism, the cardinal is right on the fact and wrong on its use. Marcel Lefebvre counted Assisi among his reasons for consecrating bishops in 1988, and he put it in writing. But Rome did not excommunicate him for criticizing Assisi, but for conferring the episcopate without pontifical mandate. Tying the objection to the rupture serves another purpose: turning a prudential judgment shared by a pope into an indication of schism, precisely when the word reappears in the decrees of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith after the Écône consecrations last July. One week before the anniversary, the warning is clear. Disagreeing with Assisi would cease to be an opinion about a day and become disobedience to the Magisterium. Formosus, who also could not defend himself, would recognize the procedure.
What is ordinary, universal, and twenty-century magisterium is that there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we can be saved. That needs no footnote.
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