Some observers date the Catholic Church's involvement with the ecumenical movement to the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council in the mid 1960s. Others discern the roots of this breakthrough in contacts earlier in the century between Catholics and their counterparts in other churches in the local setting; this is particularly true of Catholic-Lutheran relations in nineteenth century Germany and of Anglican hopes for 'reunion' through the later nineteenth century, famously culminating in the Malines Conversations in the 1920s. There is also, of course, the foundation of the Church Unity Octave in 1908 as an unofficial and then official joint Anglican and Roman Catholic initiative, which transformed in 1993 at the hands of a French Catholic priest, Paul Couturier, into the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the centenary of which the Churches celebrate in January 2008.
Some are under the impression that, whatever the interest of Catholics from time to time, nevertheless the history of hopes for Christian unity is actually a movement which originates in the various national and distinctive confessions that arose in the post-Reformation period. As the history of the founding of the Catholic League indicates, the true picture is very different. The 'faith instinct' for reconciliation among Christians and the 're-integration' of the Church in unity is integral to the nature of Catholicism. Over the centuries the sharp divisions between different groups of Christians have led to polemics and rivalry, mutual persecution and proselytism, and a tendency to 'un-Church' the others, by excommunication, anathema, or condemnation of people's very Christianity. This approach has been completely discarded as both untrue and unworthy of the name of Christian. Without compromising on any principle essential to one tradition's or another's belief in the truth, and or its belief in themselves as the true and faithful Church of Christ, it has nevertheless been possible through dialogue to discover more and more our essential unity through the sacrament of Baptism and that this participation in Christ is none other than our communion, or koinonia, our fellowship in the one Universal Church of Christ. As Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev famously remarked, 'The walls of separation do not rise as far as heaven.' In other words, our scandalous divisions are all to apparent an impediment to the life and work of the Church in this world, but from the perspective of the Father, the Church is one in Christ. Its divisions here are harmful and disobedient towards the express will of Christ and the providence of God. So, for instance, the Catholic Church at Vatican II was able to discern that while this Universal Church of Christ perfectly 'subsists in' the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church's juridical boundaries are not all that is to be said of the life of the baptised, also members of the one Church, in other traditions and communities.
The aspirations for the unity of Christians and the various moves at times to realise it cannot properly be defined as either Protestant or Catholics - they arise from something intrinsic to the character of Christianity that constantly emerges in the life of the Church. Many Christian churches and communities recognise within themselves the essential marks of the universal Church of Christ, its holiness, its catholicity, its apostolicity. The ecumenical journey of dialogue and friendship has brought to the fore a considerable amount of agreement on these essentials, as well as revealing how very different they are interpreted and evidenced in the distinctive traditions. But it is the other essential mark of the Church, its unity, which returns again and again both as a rebuke to contemporary Christians in sinful separation and as a spur forward on the quest to render that unity visible before the world and corporate in the experience of all Christians and their churches and traditions, reconciled in Christ, 'according to his will, according to his means', as Paul Couturier envisaged it would eventually present itself.
But Christians find themselves in fact united in determination to discover this unity beyond the untruth of our present divisions. In the pages that follow, some of the story from an English perspective is traced, and especially the dynamic part taken by Catholics along the way and the essential role the Catholic faith, including the fullness of communion with the Bishop of Rome as successor in St Peter's unique ministry, mini will play in achieving an authentic ecumenism on the road to the visible and corporate unity of Christians in the one Church of Christ.
Introduction, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Next,
