Critics of ecumenism and interfaith relations often highlight the tendency to downplay theological issues. Who would have thought that Joseph Ratzinger would do the same thing? As John Allen reports, he’s joined the ranks of those who would rather act in unity than talk about substantial differences. In 2008, Benedict penned an introduction to a…
The General Conference of the United Methodist Church has been meeting this week in Dallas. They voted to retain current rules on homosexuality. They also approved Full Communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Someone had recently e-mailed to ask me about this latter. I don’t see that it’s any great change. Twenty years…
Now that Pope Benedict XVI has concluded his first visit to the United States, we can begin to reflect on the themes he addressed. My reflections are rooted in my own perspective as a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who, nonetheless, spent many years as a member and a lay leader within the Catholic Church. As I…
Pope Benedict XVI spoke to Christian leaders today. Even within the ecumenical movement, Christians may be reluctant to assert the role of doctrine for fear that it would only exacerbate rather than heal the wounds of division. Yet a clear, convincing testimony to the salvation wrought for us in Christ Jesus has to be based…
Report of a symposium at Catholic University of America. The gathering was the result of a request to Catholic University from Pope Benedict XVI in October 2004, before he became pope. It drew thinkers from several religious traditions and experts in philosophy, theology, ethics, politics and religion from several nations. In requesting the symposium the…
Suppose they gave a birthday party and no one showed up? Well, some did. But did you know the World Council of Churches has just celebrated its 60th anniversary? I didn’t.
John Allen reports: “If demography is destiny, Pentecostals are the ecumenical future.” Pentecostalism is certainly the only place where there’s any power or passion to ecumenism, and it played a role in my own path towards ecumenism–and then the Catholic Church. In the two years after I left the Adventist church, I visited a couple…
Houston Chronicle reports on last night’s “Amazing Faiths Dinner Dialogue,” in which over 800 participated. Interfaith dialogue is most alive in Houston at the grass-roots level. On the grander scale there are a couple of things that go on, like the social ministries of Interfaith Ministries of Greater Houston, and the pulpit exchange sponsored by…
Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore has disciplined Fr. Ray Martin. The family of a well known community activist asked him to celebrate a funeral mass, and they asked an Episcopal priest to read the Gospel. He was OK with that. The archdiocese wasn’t. Fr. Ray Martin has been removed from ministry for this, and was…
Alan links to Fr. Z.’s comments on a Canadian Press article about recent conversation between Catholics and Orthodox. A joint commission working to heal the 1,000-year split between the Catholic and Orthodox churches has agreed the Pope has primacy over all bishops but disagrees over just what that authority permits him to do. The Joint…
From First Things: Avery Dulles, “Saving Ecumenism from Itself.” It’s a hard-hitting critique of the method of “convergence,” and the attempt to go beyond historical dogmatic differences by coming out with a tertium quid rooted in historical-critical analysis of controverted Biblical passages. When the dialogues attempted to go beyond convergence and achieve full reconciliation on…
The bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion (claiming 500,000 members) are seeking reunion with Rome.
Vatican ecumenical officer Cardinal Walter Kasper seeks to do damage control. The CDF document, he argues, “does not say anything new. It explains and, in a brief summary, clarifies positions that the Catholic Church has held for a long time. Therefore, no new situation has developed.” If we’re going to dialogue, he says, we have…
Seventh-day Adventist responses: Adventist Church leaders said the statement merely clarified the Catholic Church’s traditional position. “There’s nothing surprising here,” said Kwabena Donkor, associate director of the Adventist Church’s Biblical Research Institute. “Following Vatican II, the modernization meetings of the Catholic Church in the 1960s, some people had the impression that there were some significant…
I was chastised on another blog for saying that Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church view Protestants as “heretics and schismatics” in my post on the recent CDF document. Well, here’s a point no one in the media or in the ecumenical world has paid attention to. That phrase, “heretics and schismatics,” comes from…
Let me give some personal reflections on the matter of indulgences and “temporal punishment,” which I began discussing in an earlier post. In today’s Catholic church, things are often not explained clearly by priests, lay catechists, and apologists. Rather than using the scholastic terminology, which requires some philosophical background to fully grasp, many often find…
Catholic News Service reports “Protestant groups dismayed at new document on identity of ‘church.’” In its analysis, the CNS (the official news agency of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) says: The Protestant communities, however, are not churches because they do not have apostolic succession — the unbroken succession of bishops going back to St.…
It was released without the sensationalism accompanying the motu proprio on the Latin mass, but is just as significant in that it, like the other document, asserts the continuity of Catholic teaching before and after Vatican 2. From the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Responses to Some questions Regarding Certain Aspects of…
Rorate Caeli reports (based on Il Giornale) that next week the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will issue a clarification of statement in the Vatican 2 document, Lumen Gentium, that the church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church. Some, including the late Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, the former President of the Pontifical Council…
The matter of the forthcoming motu proprio liberalizing use of the so-called Tridentine Mass raises other questions regarding the Catholic Church’s commitment to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. If one “brings back” that mass (I put it in quotes because it never left), does one also bring back pre-conciliar views on other Christians and Jews? A…
John Allen took a break from covering such mundane matters as the meeting of George Bush and Pope Benedict XVI to cover the meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He has a series of reports at NCR. The CTSA was addressed by an ELCA theologian, Michael Root of Southern Seminary, who pointed out…
John Allen: Hold your breath for the next media frenzy: The Latin Mass document is coming. New questions raised about implications of old prayers for current Jewish-Catholic relations. Servite Fr. John Pawlikowski, an American, wrote to Kasper on March 29 on behalf of the executive body of the International Council of Christians and Jews. Pawlikowski,…
Lutherans and Catholics have been discussing the Hope of Eternal Life. But no “common statement” yet.
The monks of Mt. Athos are upset at Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople because he welcomed Pope Benedict XVI “as though he were the canonical bishop of Rome.” George Weigel reports and comments.
Five years ago I documented the plagiarism of antisemitic sources by apologist Robert Sungenis. Since then, several men who worked for him at that time and since (Michael Forrest, Jacob Michael, Ben Douglass), and who once defended him, have left his organization and are making their own criticisms of his anti-Jewish writings, building upon what…
Paul McCain links to a post at Concordia blog about justification. He’s worried about things he hears within Lutheranism: I’ve been growing more and more concerned by articles and comments in Lutheran publications that wax on about the Incarnation but do not mention the Atonement, or articles that talk about “the real presence of Jesus”…
Aside from a couple of bloggers and my own mutterings, I’ve heard no mention this week of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Pope Benedict XVI wants all to be involved in the work of ecumenism, but he’s shouting into the roaring wind of the world’s collective yawn.
CNS report on Benedict’s audience remarks. The pope, speaking at his weekly general audience Jan. 17, said the road to Christian unity was a long and difficult one, but the important thing is not to become discouraged. Prayer is essential for ecumenical progress, he said. “Every Christian worthy of the name should unite with their…
Scotland’s Sunday Herald thinks the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is a response to recent discussions in Spain about Muslim use of churches. Following Escudero’s public pray-in on December 27, archbishop Asenjo made his counter-move, calling on Crdoba’s Protestant, Orthodox and Evangelical communities to join a week of prayer starting this Thursday. It was…
The Vatican hasn’t forgotten about the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The observance was started in 1908 by the Society of the Atonement at Graymoor–an Episcopalian community that was received into the Catholic Church the following year. In 1916, Pope Benedict XV gave permission for universal celebration of what was then called Church Unity…
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