Folia Canonica 4. (2001)
STUDIES - John D. Faris: A Canonical Examination of the Acquisition, Consequences and Loss of Membership in a Church - A Catholic Perspective
136 JOHN D. FARIS Disputes involving Ecclésial Membership Christianity as Communion Because Christianity is essentially an assembly2 of believers, it is not surprising that membership in this ecclesial assembly is a topic of interest today and has been the crux of disputes throughout the history of the Church. A controversy of the apostolic period that was resolved during the Council of Jerusalem (c. 52 A. D.) was fundamentally concerned with membership in the Church, specifically whether circumcision and adherence to the Mosaic law were required to be a Christian (Acts 15:5). During the persecution of Decius (250-251 A. D.), Christians who denied their faith (lapsi) were the source of controversy because of the rigid approach taken by Novatian (c. 200 - c. 258 A.D.) who refused to re-admit the lapsi to the Church - again an issue of membership. The Novatianist Church that spread across the Roman Empire and endured for centuries gave rise to still another dispute as to whether the baptism administered in that church was valid: In other words, was a person baptized in a Novatianist Church a member of the Church? One of the consequences fifth-century Christological disputes and the 11th century Great Schism with the subsequent creation of multiple hierarchies - and, therefore, churches - was a complication of the issue of ecclesial membership. During the Reformation, certain Protestant theologians defined the Church as the faithful predestined by God or justified by faith alone, thereby emphasizing the invisible elements of ecclesial membership. To balance what was considered by Catholics as a one-sided vision of the Church, St. Robert Bel- larmine (1542-1621) argued that the Church is visible and that the conditions for membership in it are tangible: the Church is a community of believers joined by the same faith, sacraments, and allegiance to the Roman Pontiff.3 The logical 2 Although obscured in the etymology of the English term Church (which like the German term Kirche has its origins in the Greek, to kúriákon a place or thing “pertaining to the Lord”), the nomenclature of the Romance languages, e.g., ecclesia, église, iglesia, and chiesa clearly resonates the original Greek ekklesia, a translation of the Hebrew term qahal, a religious assembly. During the classical period, the Greek term ekklesia was applied to a political assembly of persons. The Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament applied the term to a religious assembly (e.g., Deuteronomy 9:10, 18:16) and the New Testament employs the term to designate the body of Christians in its entirety (Matthew 16:18) or a community of believers in a specific locale (e.g., Acts 5:11). SeeS. Hornblower- A. Spawforth (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford 1996, s.v. ekklesia. 3 “The one and true Church is a community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and conjoined in the communion of the same sacraments, under the government of the legitimate pastors and especially the one vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman Pontiff (sub regimine legitimorum pastorum, ac praecipue unius Christi in terris vicarii romani pontificis).” Roberti Cardinalis Bellarmini Opera Omnia, vol. 2, De ecclesia
