CNS-The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity a held its 50th anniversary celebration Nov. 17 at the Vatican and its members met the pope the next morning. The evening celebration featured talks by Cardinal-designate Kurt Koch, council president; Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury; Orthodox Metropolitan John of Pergamon; and Cardinal Walter Kasper, retired council president.
Cardinal-designate Koch used a metaphor to describe 50 years of Vatican ecumenical activity. He said it is like a plane trip -- there is much activity and excitement in preparing for the trip, everyone feels something happening during take-off, but when cruising altitude is reached, no one notices how fast the plane is moving, and passengers start to fidget and wonder if they ever are going to arrive.
Cardinal Kasper said the sins of Christians throughout the centuries have fractured the body of Christ. "The great danger is that we get use to this situation of division, taking it simply as a fact," he said. "The existence of confessional churches, one alongside the other, is a reality that contradicts the will of the Lord and is the fruit of sin." Christians cannot take shortcuts to unity or gloss over differences that, in fact, may reveal they are not united in faith, he said. "Good-natured coexistence," cooperation in social service projects and shared events during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity are all positive developments, Cardinal Kasper said, "but they are not enough to fulfill Christ's will for his church."
In fact, both Archbishop Williams, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, and Metropolitan John, Orthodox co-chairman of the Catholic-Orthodox theological dialogue, expressed caution about a new trend in ecumenism -- "reconciled diversity." They warned that unity cannot be the result of believing differences are not important or too difficult to tackle, so that churches simply skip ahead to mutual recognition of ministers and full sacramental sharing.
The Orthodox churches, like the Catholic Church, have longer and more-detailed lists of the differences that they consider necessary to resolve before unity can be restored, but Archbishop Williams said the Anglican and many mainline Protestant churches also have trouble seeing how "reconciled diversity" can respond to each dimension of the "biblical foundation for a theology of Christian unity." Most Christians who support the "reconciled diversity" model of unity, he said, believe the problem of authority is too complicated to deal with, so they simply move on.
While some Christians "would be happier to remain separated," Metropolitan John,a top theologian and representative of the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, said that only serious dialogue can lead to the full unity Christ willed for his church.
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