New Roads from Rome
The Surprising & Unpredictable Pilgrimage of the New Ecumenism
by Kenneth D. Whitehead
We live in an age of ecumenism our ancestors of just a few generations ago could not have imagined. We are actively encouraged by our churches to respect and maintain good relations with other Christians, work cooperatively with them on common tasks in society at large, and, on appropriate occasions, even pray with them.
Visits back and forth by the leaders of various Churches and communions are the order of the day. Joint statements and agreements by church leaders are similarly quite frequent. Christian reunion may not have been achieved as yet, but this has seemingly not been on account of any lack of positive words and expressions of good will on all sides.
The atmosphere was once very different. Catholics considered Christians outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church “separated brethren,” and were forbidden to participate in their worship. Protestants were thought to be gravely mistaken in their religious commitments, if not actually perverse. Separation from them was regarded as a more or less fixed and permanent feature of the Christian scene—unless and until by some miracle they might come to see the light and be reconciled with the true Church of Christ.
Such feelings were widely reciprocated by many non-Catholic Christians—to the point where some did not even consider Catholics to be Christians. Catholics were considered proper subjects for evangelism. Though the polemical anti-Catholic language of the past was rarely employed, a new language was often used, in which the Catholic Church was narrow, reactionary, and authoritarian, and its most distinctive features outdated and obscurantist.
The quest for Christian unity was at a standstill. Christ’s prayer “that they may all be one” (John 17:20–21) was steadily disregarded on all sides and, indeed, was virtually forgotten.
A Scandal
In 1958, the new Pope John XXIII was scandalized by this rejection of our Lord’s express intention for his people. His service as a papal diplomat in Orthodox territories had convinced him that the time had come to seek a remedy for Christian disunity. He quite pointedly made the search for Christian unity one of his main reasons for convoking the Second Vatican Council in 1962. (The other two were the renewal and more effective dissemination of the church’s faith and the adaptation or updating [aggiornamento] of the church’s discipline and practices to better meet the needs of the present day.)
As a result of the council’s decisions, as exemplified in such documents as its Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio (“Restoration of Unity”), the Catholic Church moved into a new era of full-scale ecumenism. Where ecumenism was concerned, it is no exaggeration to say that the church fundamentally changed the stance that she had been consistently maintaining for the previous several centuries towards those professing Christians outside her visible boundaries.
Especially following the solemn definitions of the First Vatican Council in 1870 on the primacy and infallibility of the pope, the Catholic Church’s stance towards these Christians was quite simple: They needed to return to the fullness of Christ’s truth and grace present in the Catholic Church. In 1894, for example, Pope Leo XIII declared in his Praeclara Gratulationis “the yearning desire of Our heart . . . that the day is not far distant, when the Eastern Churches, so illustrious in their ancient faith and glorious past, will return to the fold they have abandoned.”
Kenneth D. Whitehead is the 2004 recipient of the Blessed Frederic Ozanam Award for Catholic Social Action of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (SCSS). He writes frequently on Catholic social and moral issues.
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more on ecumenism from the online archives
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