Abstract
Mong is a Dominican priest who teaches in Macau and Hong Kong. The book title is provocative and possibly misleading, but Mong’s basic thesis is interesting. The title is misleading because Ratzinger privately as a theologian and as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (in charge of keeping true doctrine unsullied) never once taught that non-Christians will be lost. In fact, Ratzinger is on the record as saying that the fact that non-Christians can be saved is not at issue. The issue is how this salvation happens. He was always insistent that it must be through Christ and, in some manner, through the Church.
The second part of the title brings us to the meat of the book: Ratzinger was deeply critical not of the fact of religious pluralism (he’d have been red in the face very soon), but of the theological endorsement of other religions as saving structures in some way parallel or equal to Christianity. What is interesting about Mong’s thesis is that he takes this issue at the heart of the theology of religions and links it to the theology of culture and context. Mong argues that Ratzinger’s Eurocentric upbringing has shaped his views so that he is culturally unable to recognize theology as contextual. Over seven chapters he expounds Ratzinger’s approach to matters. The outcome: Asian theologians who develop an alternative approach to matters of religious pluralism are deemed ‘wrong’. The particular Asian theologians Mong has in mind are Jacques Dupuis sj (admittedly a Belgian, but who’d been deeply shaped by his time in India), Peter Phan (the Vietnamese theologian, now living and teaching in the United States) and Tissa Balasuriya omi (a Sri Lankan theologian and activist). Each has a chapter. They all incurred varying degrees of negative attention from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They all held views that in different manners endorsed non-Christian religions as salvific structures. Dupuis and Phan as ‘inclusivist-pluralists’ (Dupuis’s coinage) and Balasuriya more as a pluralist.
Mong’s conclusion is that the Catholic Church in fact endorses a world church with differing theological styles and contextual approaches. He celebrates this plurality, and with it the plurality of religions. In passing he mentions Pope Francis but it is difficult to assess what Mong’s attitude to Francis is. Francis has touched on these matters but with a difference of style and tone and gesture, while keeping intact the basic Catholic position (negatively expressed: against pluralism; positively expressed: endorsing all that is good in the religions and wishing to work together). I think Mong’s case would be strengthened if he addressed the question: does the endorsement of pluralism compromise the gospel of Christ? Also, the churches of the Eastern rites do not have a more pluralist position, even while being shaped profoundly by non-European cultures. Furthermore, Asian theologians are hardly united in upholding pluralism, so why be so selective? Mong is also somewhat uncritical of contextual theology: how does it gain its authority, if it is not to be self-referential or so local as not to interact with the universal? These are questions that require attention before Mong’s thesis wins the day, but it is a thesis that is bold and challenging and one that will not go away.