I. Attempts to clarify the issue
through a dialectic of principles

The duality of institution and event, or institution and charism, immediately suggests itself as a basic model for resolving the question. But if we try to elucidate the two concepts, in order to arrive at valid rules for defining their mutual relationship, something unexpected happens. The concept of «institution» falls to bits in our hands as soon as we try to give it a precise theological connotation. For what, after all, are the fundamental institutional factors that characterise the Church as the permanent organizational structure of her life? The answer is, of course, the sacramental ministry in its different degrees: bishop, priest, deacon. The sacrament, that, significantly, bears the name Ordo, is, in the last analysis, the sole permanent and binding structure that forms so to say the fixed order of the Church. It is the sacrament that constitutes the Church as an «institution». But it was not until this century that it became customary, presumably for reasons of ecumenical expediency, to designate the sacrament of Ordo simply as «ministry», with the result that it is viewed entirely in the framework of the institution and the institutional. But this ministry is a sacrament, and hence clearly transcends the usual sociological understanding of institutions. That this structural element of the Church, the only enduring one, is a «sacrament», means at the same time that it must be perpetually created anew by God. It is not something that the Church can dispose of herself; it is simply not there. It is not something that can be determined by the Church on her own initiative. Only secondarily is the sacrament realised through a call on the part of the Church. But primarily it comes into being by God's call, that is to say, only at the charismatic and pneumatological level. It can only be accepted and lived by virtue of the newness of the vocation and by the freedom of the pneuma. Since that is so, and since the Church cannot simply appoint «officials» by herself, but must await the call from God, it follows for the same reason —and for that reason alone— that there may be a shortage of priests in the Church. That is why it has been clear from the very beginning that this ministry cannot be produced by the institution, but can only be invoked in prayer from God. From the very beginning, what Jesus said has remained true: «The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few, pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers to his harvest» (Mt 9:37-38). This also explains why the calling of the Twelve was the fruit of a whole night spent by Jesus in prayer (cf. Lk 6:12-16).

The Latin Church has expressly underscored this strictly charismatic character of the service of the priest by linking it —in conformity with ancient ecclesial tradition— with celibacy, which is clearly to be understood only as a personal charism, and not simply as a qualification of office [2]. The demand that the two —priesthood and celibacy— be decoupled ultimately rests on the notion that the priesthood should not be considered charismatically, but as an office that the institution itself can fill in order to guarantee its own security and the satisfaction of its own needs. If priesthood be understood as wholly subordinated to the Church's own administrative machine and her own security as an institution, then the charismatic bond implied by the requirement of celibacy is a scandal that has to be removed as quickly as possible. But in that case the Church as a whole would be understood as a purely human organization, and the security that is supposed to be obtained by these means would fail to achieve precisely what it is meant to deliver. That the Church is not our institution, but the irruption of something else, that it is intrinsically «iuris divini», has as its consequence that we can never create the Church ourselves. It means that we can never apply purely institutional criteria to her; and that the Church is entirely herself only where the criteria and methods of human institutions are transcended.

To be sure, alongside this fundamental principle on which the institutional structure of the Church rests —the sacrament—, there are also institutions of purely human right in the Church. These institutions serve various roles of administration, organization and co-ordination, and each can and must develop according to the needs of the times. But it must be said that, while the Church does indeed need such self-created institutions, if they become too numerous and too powerful, they jeopardise the order and vitality of her spiritual reality. The Church must continuously examine her own institutional structure to make sure that it does not become top-heavy, to prevent it from hardening into a suit of armour that stifles her real spiritual life. Of course, it is understandable that the Church, if priestly vocations are denied to her over a longer period of time, should succumb to the temptation to create for herself what one might call a sustitutive clergy of purely human right [3]. The Church must also create emergency structures in cases of need, and has successfully done so time and again in the missions or in mission-like situations. To all those who have served and continue to serve the Church as spiritual leaders and evangelists in such situations of emergency we can only be grateful. But if the prayer for vocations to the sacrament is neglected as a result, if the Church gradually begins here and there to be satisfied with what she herself can do, if she makes herself, as it were, independent of God's gift, she would be acting like Saul, who, hard pressed by the Philistines, waited long for Samuel, but when Samuel failed to appear and the people began to disperse, lost his patience and made the burnt offering himself. He, who had thought that, given the urgency of the situation, no other course of action lay open to him and that he had no other choice but to take in hand the cause of God, was then rebuked for doing just that; he had thereby thrown everything away: to God «obedience is better than sacrifice» (cf. 1 Sam 13:8-14; 15:22).

Let us return to our question: How are we to characterise the relationship between the permanent structures of Church order and ever new charismatic irruptions? The dialectic between institution and charism is unable to provide any answer to this question, because the antithesis between the two terms gives no satisfactory description of the reality of the Church. Nonetheless we can deduce a few initial guidelines from what has been said so far:

1. It is important that the sacred ministry, the priesthood itself, be charismatically understood and lived. The priest himself should be a «pneumatic», a homo spiritualis, a man aroused and impelled by the Holy Spirit. It is the Church's task to make sure that this character of the sacrament be seen and accepted. Out of zeal for the survival of her institutions the Church should not place numbers in the foreground and lower her spiritual needs. She would travesty the meaning of the priesthood itself by doing so; a poorly performed service does more harm than good. It stands in the way of the priesthood and the faith. The Church must keep faith and acknowledge the Lord as her creator and sustainer. And she must do everything she can to help those called to the priesthood to preserve their faith beyond the initial enthusiasm, and not get slowly bogged down in routine. She must help them increasingly to become truly spiritual men.
2. Where the sacred ministry is lived pneumatically and charismatically in this way, no institutional hardening takes place: what exists, instead, is an inner responsiveness to the charism, a kind of instinct for the Holy Spirit and his action. And so the charism too can once again recognise its own origin in the holder of the ministry, and ways will be found for fruitful collaboration in the discernment of spirits.
3. The Church must create emergency structures in situations of hardship. But these structures must understand themselves as intrinsically open to the sacrament; they must strive towards it, not lead away from it. As a general rule, the number of administrative structures the Church herself has created must be kept as small as possible. The Church must not over institutionalise herself. She must always remain open to the calls of the Lord, which remain unpredictable and for which no plans can be laid in advance.

The question is now posed: If institution and charism can only partially be considered as a dialectical pair, and thus provide only partial answers to our question, are there perhaps other theological viewpoints that are better adapted to it?

The dialectic between the christological and pneumatological view of the Church is increasingly being pushed to the forefront in contemporary theology. In the light of this dialectic, it is asserted that the sacrament belongs to the christological-incarnational aspect of the Church, which then has to be supplemented by the pneumatological-charismatic aspect.

It is true, of course, that a distinction has to be drawn between Christ and the Pneuma. On the other hand, just as the three persons of the Trinity should be treated not as a communio of three gods, but as the one triune God, so the distinction between Christ and Spirit can be rightly understood only when their diversity helps us better to understand their unity. The Spirit cannot be rightly understood without Christ, but the converse is equally true.

«The Lord is the Spirit», Paul tells us in the second letter to the Corinthians (3:17). That does not mean that the two are simply the same thing or the same Person. It means that Christ as the Lord can only be among us and for us because the incarnation was not the last word. The incarnation was fulfilled in Christ's death on the cross and in his resurrection. That means that Christ can only come because he has preceded us in the order of life of the Holy Spirit and communicates himself through that Spirit and in it. The pneumatological christology of St. Paul and the farewell discourses of the Gospel of John have not yet sufficiently penetrated our view of christology and pneumatology. The ever new presence of Christ in the Spirit is the essential condition for the existence of sacrament and for the sacramental presence of the Lord.

This consideration, too, helps to throw light on the «spiritual» ministry in the Church and its place in theology, which tradition has defined with the term successio apostolica.

«Apostolic succession» means precisely the opposite of what it might appear to mean: It does not mean that we become, as it were, independent of the Spirit through the continuous chain of succession. The bond with the line of succession means quite the reverse: it means that the sacramental ministry is never ours to dispose of, but must be given each time by the Spirit. For it is the Spirit-Sacrament we can neither create nor institute ourselves. Professional expertise, functional skill, is not in itself sufficient for this: the Lord's gift is necessary.

In the Sacrament, in the Church's vicarious symbolic action, the Lord has reserved for himself the permanent institution of the priestly ministry. The quite specific link between the «once» and the «always», that holds good for the mystery of Christ as a whole, is here made visible in an exemplary way. The «always» of the sacrament, the presence in pneumatical form of the Church's historical origin in every age, presupposes the link with the «ephapax», with the unrepeatable event from which the Church derives her origin. This link with the origin, this stake planted in the ground of the once-only and unrepeatable event, can never be repudiated. Never can we take refuge in a free-floating pneumatology; nor abandon the solid ground of the Incarnation, the historical action of God.

But, conversely, this unrepeatable event is communicated to us in the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Risen Lord. It does not vanish, like something dead and gone, into the forever irretrievable past, but bears in itself the power to make itself perpetually present, because Christ has passed through the «curtain, that is, through his flesh» (Heb 10:20) and hence made accessible to us what is eternally renewable in the unrepeatable event. The Incarnation does not stop with the historical Jesus, with his sarx (cf. 2ª Cor 5:16)! The «historical Jesus» has eternal significance precisely because his flesh is transformed in the Resurrection, so that He can make himself present in all places and at all times in the power of the Holy Spirit, as wonderfully shown by the farewell discourses of Jesus in John (cf. especially 14:28): «I go away, and I will come to you». From this christological-pneumatological synthesis it may be inferred that a closer examination of the concept of «apostolic succession» will be of real help in resolving our problem.

Before we pursue this line of thought any further, we need to mention briefly a third interpretational model for explaining the relation between the permanent order of ecclesial life on the one hand and new irruptions of the Spirit on the other. Building on Luther's interpretation of Scripture in terms of the dialectic of Law and Gospel, there are those who place particular stress on the dialectic between the cultic-sacerdotal aspect on the one hand and the prophetic aspect of salvation history on the other. On this reading, the movements would be ranged on the side of prophecy.

This interpretation too, like the others we have considered so far, is not entirely erroneous. But it is extremely imprecise and hence unusable in this form. The problem thus raised is too complex to be dealt with in detail here. First of all, it would have to be pointed out that the Law itself has a character of promise. Only because it has this character could it be fulfilled by Christ and, in its fulfilment, at the same time «abolished». Second, the biblical prophets never meant to annul the Torah, but, on the contrary, to defend it against abuses by vindicating its true meaning.

Third, it is important to stress that the prophetic mission was always entrusted to individuals, and never became fixed in a particular «class». Insofar as prophecy claimed to be a class (as was sometimes the case), it was criticised by the biblical prophets just as sharply as the «class» of priests of the Old Covenant [4].

Any attempt to divide the Church into two wings, into a «left» and «right», into the prophetic class of the religious orders or the movements on the one hand, and the hierarchy on the other, can find no justification in Scripture. On the contrary: such a dualism is entirely alien to Scripture. The Church is built not dialectically, but organically. What only remains true is that there are various functions in the Church, and that God continually inspires prophetic men and women —whether they be laypeople or religious, bishops or priests— who would not derive the necessary strength in the normal course of the «institution» to make this charismatic appeal to the Church.

It is quite clear, I think, that the nature and tasks of the movements cannot be interpreted from this perspective. They themselves certainly don't understand themselves in this way. The result of the foregoing reflections is thus unsatisfactory for the elucidation of our question, yet it is important. It suggests that no solution to our problem is to be found if we choose a dialectic of principles as our starting point. Instead of trying to resolve the question in terms of such a dialectic of principles, we should, in my view, opt for an historical approach, as befits the historical nature of the faith and of the Church.