Friday, March 29, AD 2024 7:08am

PopeWatch: Ecumenism

The Pope states that ecumenism is not optional:

“Again, this year we are called to pray so that all Christians may once again be a single family, according to God’s will so that they may all be one’” he said.

Pointing out that “ecumenism is not something optional,”  he said it aims “to develop a common and consistent witness that promotes true justice and support for the weakest through responses that are concrete, appropriate and effective”.

Go here to read the rest.  Ecumenism not optional?  Try ecumenism is not possible.  All Christians haven’t belonged to one family since shortly after the Crucifixion.  The early Church was beset by heresies, and thus it has remained throughout more than twenty centuries.  Other recent popes have been infatuated with ecumenism, a truly bad idea arising in the last century.  It is, at best, a game of pretend where serious divisions in dogma and theology are papered over, at worst it is a movement based upon mendacity.  Pius XI summed up true ecumenism for Catholics:

 

“There is but one way in which the unity of Christians may be fostered, and that is by furthering the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it; for far from that one true Church they have in the past fallen away. The one Church of Christ is visible to all, and will remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it.”

None of this does not mean that the Church should not strive for good relations with other Christian denominations, working together on charitable projects, or allying to resist government encroachments on religious liberty, for example.  But always, the Church must remain true to herself and to Truth.

 

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Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Friday, January 18, AD 2019 7:07am

Ecumenism was a Vatican II novelty to help Protestantize the Church. There is not salvation outside the Church. We should not pretend it is anything else.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, January 18, AD 2019 8:12am

I would suggest one of the best examples of Ecumenism was the Common Christological Declaration between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, the oldest surviving dissenting body in Christendom.

“This is the unique faith that we profess in the mystery of Christ. The controversies of the past led to anathemas, bearing on persons and on formulas. The Lord’s Spirit permits us to understand better today that the divisions brought about in this way were due in large part to misunderstandings.

Whatever our Christological divergences have been, we experience ourselves united today in the confession of the same faith in the Son of God who became man so that we might become children of God by his grace. We wish from now on to witness together to this faith in the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, proclaiming it in appropriate ways to our contemporaries, so that the world may believe in the Gospel of salvation.”

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, January 18, AD 2019 10:14am

The Ecumenical Council of Florence (1438 – 1445) came close. To what extent it was motivated on the Greek side by a need to be defended from the Religion of Peace/Turk, I will not speculate.

Sadly, in 1453, Constantinople fell and the disunity continues today.

I think (my Theology is at a kindergarten level) the reasons (among which were that the Nicene Creed subordinated the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity, and their refusal to accept the Roman Pontiff – sounds like chauvinism) for the Great Schism were bogus, er, overblown. Plus, the Greeks refused to cease and desist drinking their bath water. :

3

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, January 18, AD 2019 11:06am

Ecumenism:
Being polite and talking like rational adults so the other groups have a chance to learn the truth and return to the Church.

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