Multi-Speed Ecumenism

For Protestants and some Orthodox, the ecumenical movement began with the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910. For Catholics and the general public, it dates from the Second Vatican Council some forty years ago. I say it began then for the general public because, until then, it was no big news that Protestants were getting together, whereas friendlier relations between Catholics and Protestants struck most people as a very dramatic change, and it was that. But what about the future of ecumenism? That question is addressed by Walter Cardinal Kasper, now head of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. “To a certain degree,” he said, “the crisis of the ecumenical movement is the consequence of its success. . . . The more we come closer to one another, the more painful is the experience of not yet being in full communion among ourselves, which creates a certain dissatisfaction and frustration.”

The other side of that, of course, is that many Christians lack a deep ecclesiology or doctrine of the Church that requires full communion, as in communio with Christ and his Body the Church. For them, friendlier relations was the goal of ecumenism, and that goal has been more or less achieved. In his address, published in the Italian biweekly Il Regno, Kasper notes that “the new generation of faithful and priests has not lived through the council and does not understand how things have changed.” For them, ecumenism is old hat; certainly it does not have the cutting edge excitement of even twenty years ago. Moreover, the results of the many ecumenical dialogues, says Kasper, “have yet to penetrate the heart and flesh of our church and of the other churches.” This is known as the problem of “reception.” It is one thing for theologians to arrive at breakthrough agreements, and quite another for such agreements to make a difference in the life of the several communions.

The situation with the Orthodox, says Kasper, is grim. “We are increasingly conscious of the fact that an Orthodox Church does not really exist. At the present stage, it does not seem that Constantinople is yet capable of integrating the different autocephalous Orthodox churches. There are doubts about its primacy of honor, especially in Moscow.” In a conversation with an ecumenical veteran in Rome a couple of years ago, I was told that the most important thing he had learned over years of working with the Orthodox is that they do not have anything like a Catholic understanding of “the universal Church.” In theory they do, of course, but not in practice. And in both theory and practice, he added, they do not reciprocate our recognition of their ecclesial fullness. Vatican II very deliberately did not say that the Church of Jesus Christ is (est) the Catholic Church but that it subsists in (subsistet in) the Catholic Church. There has been no comparable development in Orthodoxy, he noted. In addition, it is not a simple matter of going back to the formal division between East and West of 1054. As one ecumenical theologian puts it, “A thousand years is, after all, a thousand years, and not being in communion with Rome has become a constitutive part of the self-understanding of Orthodoxy.”

At Georgetown University in 1998, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople flatly declared that the Orthodox have an “ontologically different experience of the Church.” Ontological differences, one notes, are not easily overcome; and it may be that, by definition, they are not resolvable. In his address, Kasper says that relations with the Greek Orthodox have improved since the Pope’s visit there last year, and “in the Middle East, in the territory of the ancient See of Antioch, the situation is completely different, and there already is almost full communion.” The unhappy truth, however, is that probably most Orthodox in the world do not believe that Catholics, never mind Protestants, are even validly baptized.

The larger ecumenical circumstance is further complicated by the fact that theological dialogues with the mainline/oldline Protestant churches have not yet required institutional changes. As the dialogues move on to questions of ecclesiology—including apostolic order and the Petrine ministry exercised by the Bishop of Rome—agreements may run into institutional inertia on all sides. Then too, the mainline/oldline is a declining phenomenon, and ecumenism must now engage the evangelicals and pentecostals who are, far and away, the largest and fastest growing part of non-Catholic Christianity. Nor can it be forgotten that, especially with the mainline/oldline, some of the most divisive questions today have to do with moral issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and marriage. That was a point “controversially” touched on by John Paul II on his first visit to the U.S. in 1979, and thirteen years later it is even more urgent. This leads some to say that dialogue with the oldline will increasingly require a theologically serious engagement with Christian anthropology, man created in the image of God, male/female differences, and what John Paul II calls “the theology of the body.”

In his address, Kasper concludes that ecumenism in the years ahead will have to move at different “speeds.” “There is no realistic alternative,” he says. Orthodoxy, the oldline, the evangelical/pentecostal insurgency—and each of them engaged in their own internal developments—have all complicated the ecumenical play in unprecedented ways. But as John Paul II has repeatedly declared, the Catholic Church’s commitment to ecumenism is “irreversible,” and it may well be that, with so many unpredictable factors, the cutting-edge excitements of forty years ago will be seen as but the prelude to excitements to come.