Vatican synod to examine when divided Christians can preach together
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
9/20/12
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The potential power, but also the limits, of an ecumenical proclamation of the Gospel and defense of Gospel values is likely to be a key topic during October’s world Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization.
The ecumenical focus will be particularly sharp Oct. 10 when — at the personal invitation of Pope Benedict XVI — Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury will deliver a major address to synod members.
While popes have long invited other Christians to be “fraternal delegates” and make brief speeches at the synods, Pope Benedict has begun a tradition of inviting important religious leaders to deliver a major address. In 2008, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Chief Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen of Haifa, Israel, addressed the Synod of Bishops on the Bible. Another rabbi and two Muslim leaders gave speeches at the 2010 special synod on the Middle East.
Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said the invitations demonstrate the pope’s recognition that the “challenges facing religious belief itself and church life are common — no church, no religion is an island — and we need one another and can learn from one another.”
In addition, he said, ecumenical and interreligious cooperation shows the world that “we are together in promoting the values of belief and the moral-ethical values that we stand by.”
Ecumenical cooperation is crucial when trying to transmit the faith in the modern world and to re-propose Christianity in areas, especially Europe and North America, which had a Christian tradition, but are becoming increasingly secularized.
“The mission that the Lord entrusted to the Apostles, to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth, has not been fulfilled — mostly because of divisions among his followers,” Bishop Farrell said.
The beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement usually are traced to a 1910 conference of missionaries “who had the experience of being seen as preaching against each other instead of preaching Christ,” he said. The missionaries recognized the scandal they were causing as they “exported their divisions” to Asia, Africa and other parts of the world.
The missionaries saw “their work being undermined by their own divisions,” which they increasingly acknowledged were violations of the will of Jesus that his followers be one, the bishop said.
Meanwhile, among some Catholics in the early 1900s, “there were the beginnings of a spiritual interest in the idea of prayer for Christian unity,” he said, but the quantum leap in the Catholic Church’s commitment to ecumenism came with the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council.
Bishop Farrell said the change in the church’s attitude reflected an “education of the bishops at the council, because most of the bishops came with the kind of theology that considered our Protestant brothers and sisters, and the Orthodox to a certain degree, as just outside the church.”
Through discussions and studies at the council, he said, the bishops gained “a new perspective: We have a common faith in Jesus Christ, we have a common baptism, and this is already a huge element of real communion in the faith.”
The ecumenical task, embraced by the Catholic Church, involves prayer and dialogue to move that communion “from imperfect to perfect,” he said.
Until the process is complete, however, there will be some limits to the possibilities for ecumenical cooperation in evangelization, because Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and other mainline Christians aren’t just inviting people to profess faith in Jesus Christ, but to live that faith in his body, the church.
“There is a kind of superficial ecumenism that says, ‘it doesn’t matter what church you belong to,’” Bishop Farrell said, but the Catholic Church and most of its dialogue partners reject that view.
Because Christians aren’t passing on “some Gospel of their own making,” but a faith they have received, “sharing one’s faith means sharing one’s belonging to a particular community that has given me that faith. It means sharing the conviction, in conscience, that the Gospel comes to me in its fullness in this particular community,” the bishop said.
The role of the church and, in fact, the definition of what it means to be fully church is at the heart of the ongoing, sometimes difficult, theological ecumenical dialogues, he said.
For the Catholic Church, Bishop Farrell said, “We can’t work for a common minimum denominator; nor can we say, ‘let’s keep our differences and just accept one another as we are.’
“We have to aim at whatever is required for the fullness of incorporation into Christ and into the one church he founded. But where is that church?” he said. “That is the question that will trouble us until Christian disunity becomes Christian unity: not uniformity, but true, grace-filled communion in faith and Christian living.”
…we are together in promoting the values of belief …
How in the world can Jews, schismatics and heretics being preaching the “values of belief” not only to common Catholics but to the Pope!
Back in the good ol’ days, the apostles preached to the Jews (and sometimes converted them). Now it’s vice versa. Hermeneutic of continuity?
EXACTLY the reason ( or at least one of the most important ) why RESISTANCE to any sort of “deal” with the current Management at 1 Vatican Central is CRITICAL!
St. John Chrysostum must be first in line, over at the Pearly Gates Armory, as we speak, signing out enough thunderbolts to equip a regiment!
And, with a number of holy popes and doctors of the Church reaching for their sidearms, as well, I’m sure the line forming up behind St. John is swelling already!
I spoke some weeks ago with a Traditionalist luminary, whose name is very familiar to members of this forum. I mentioned that I had had some hope back in 2005 when Papa Ratzinger was announced. He told me his reaction was exactly the opposite. He was anguished, since he had studied the writings and speeches of the new pope for decades and already knew what we would be in store for.
Everything this man has explained, predicted and warned of, concerning this particular pontificate, has been right on the money for the past 7 years, plus.
Only God’s only Church (Pius XII) is the ark of salvation.
This goes along so well with the release of the interview with Father Schmidberger in which he showed his true colors to Bishop Fellay. I was in Mexico when Ratzinger was elected, trying to get an indult for the traditional mass there and going to the bishop of Jalisco, who was wearing a masonic ring and had not a single Catholic item in his office or in the whole complex of offices, for that mater. And the news of the election came right then, he took a phone call that told him, and he turned to me and said (because he did not understand who I was or what I wanted yet, and I was American, a blond woman, and he assumed I was liberal, so he told me of the election. Tear sprang to my eyes, and he misinterpreted them, and he wanted to soothe me): “Don’t worry, don’t worry, he is one of us!” I never forgot it, that chilling office, that grinning mask of a man, the bright Mexican sun beating down overhead, the armed soldiers surrounding the compound (common in Mexico because of the drug trade, they always aver). And the gleeful response to Ratzinger’s election. And he too has proven to be right. The worst kind of ‘us,’ the kind who is willing to wolf the traditional mass right down, if it will help his cause.
As part of this “Church in the Middle East” he also said, once again, that our ‘god’ is the same, Islam, Jewish, and Catholic, and of course he called for those joint ‘services.’ He also spoke again of his mythical ‘good secularism.’ This will infuriate islam. It drives them wild. The first synod of bishops from the Middle East, last October, had some muslim observers, and it was reported that they chided the Holy See and asked that the Church ‘stand up’ and so forth, but I was not able to get the notes from which the summary had been made (reported in liberal Asia News).
The Catholics dying now in the Middle East are dying for secularism and the cause of Religious Liberty, not for the Church. We had peace when the Church also stood for a religious state, now our support of heresy (and of US troops, for homosexuality, for abortion, for economic rape, and of the destruction of religious society there) has caused this withdrawal of tolerance that we used to enjoy there. Every time we traditionalists go along with the crowd and attack Islam as ‘fundamentalists’ we parrot the US line, the same one that is closing our own schools and hospitals and forcing us to pay for sin. Benedict is attacking them, too, in his own liberal way, this is the way he does it. ‘Accept religious liberty, dissolve yourselves.’ It won’t work, to cure the situation, WE have to become ourselves again and stand for the religious state everywhere we are a majority–then we have to work like h*ll to regain what we once had.