c. 1998 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ The Roman Catholic Church called on seminaries and Catholic universities Monday (March 9) to beef up their efforts at teaching ecumenism, saying the search for Christian unity will be imperiled unless Catholic priests and laity at the parish level become more fully engaged in the movement.”Ecumenism cannot just exist at the highest levels of the church because that would be artificial,”said Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.”It has to penetrate the clouds and be among the laity.” But above the clouds, where popes and patriarchs rule and theologians split hairs, friction has reigned for nearly a millennium, since the”Great Schism”in 1054.
The gaping divide resurfaced Sunday when the head of the Russian Orthodox Church appeared to thwart any possible meeting between himself and Pope John Paul II. Russian Patriarch Alexii II said he would not meet with the pope until the Catholic Church ceases proselytizing on it’s soil.
Claims of peddling Catholicism in Orthodox countries like Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, make Catholic leaders bristle. They contend Protestants and new religious movements _ not Catholics _ are the most aggressive religious salespeople.
The pope has made Christian unity a principal goal of his pontificate as the new millennium draws near, but even he has acknowledged that full communion among the splintered denominations is unlikely by 2000.
Nonetheless, in accenting the need to better educate Catholic students and laity on their Christian siblings, church leaders say they are trying to set the stage for a future of better understanding.
The recommendations on how to achieve the goal are contained in a new document,”The Ecumenical Dimension in the Formation of Those Engaged in Pastoral Work,”released Monday.
It calls on all Catholics to seek an”interior conversion and participation in the renewal of the church,”which can be accomplished through”formation in ecumenism (that) is crucial in order to enable each person to be prepared to make his or her own contribution to the work of unity.” Among the recommendations are mandatory introductory courses in ecumenism for Catholic seminary and theology students and practical ecumenical experience; student exchange programs with other churches; occasions for common prayer; and joint seminars.”Ecumenical formation,”it said, should also include learning fully about the different pastoral and practical issues, such as sacramental sharing, celebration of mixed marriages and conducting funerals.
Likewise, the document said, students should better understand the doctrinal differences among the Christian churches in liturgy and other areas.
Despite those differences, the most common impediments toward communion cited by Orthodox and other Christian churches include the Catholic claim to supreme teaching authority and the primacy of the Roman pontiff, which John Paul has maintained must not be diluted.
Cassidy said in an interview that the Orthodox churches of the former Soviet Union pose the greatest obstacle to full communion, in part because they were oppressed under communist rule and now see the invasion of other religions as a threat to their survival.”For me, the basic thing is whether we can say the Orthodox churches have a commitment to ecumenism,”he said.”They’re coming out of a long period of isolation and feel besieged on many fronts. We, on the other hand, have developed normally, gradually.”I don’t think the Orthodox have come yet to understand what it means to have communion,”he said.”I think we have to be patient and recognize the difficulty of finding common understanding.”
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