In Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Ut Unum Sint, he reiterated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that God has established the bishop of Rome as the Church’s “perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity” (UUS 88, citing Lumen Gentium 23). This teaching has its origin in Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus makes Peter the foundational rock of his Church and gives him the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
The bishop of Rome is not only the visible foundation of unity for God’s people, he must also work to bring about and maintain such unity. Recall that Jesus gave Peter the command to “feed” and “shepherd” his sheep (John 21:15-17) and to strengthen the brethren (Luke 22:32). The work of Christian unity is therefore an essential part of the pope’s job.
Several times in his encyclical, St. John Paul refers to the papal ministry as the “ministry of unity” and calls the bishop of Rome “the first servant of unity.” The bishop of Rome “must ensure the communion of all the churches” (UUS 94).
But how is he to go about doing this? I think we can identify six practical keys that the popes of recent past have utilized in their ecumenical work. And, as we’ll see, they recommend them for us as well.
Before we get into the particulars, there are two general ecumenical approaches a pope could take. He could come in with a bat and start swinging, exercising his authority in an authoritarian way, accusing non-Catholics of heresy and making them stand barefoot in the snow to be reconciled with the Church.
I realize there are some who would like to see the pope do this. But I think servant leadership is the better and more effective approach. Jesus thought so too. He lays out this model at the Last Supper (see Luke 22:25-27). Jesus tells the apostles they are not to lord their authority over their subjects as the Gentiles do. For Jesus, the leader is the one who serves, just as he, the leader, served. Popes down through the ages have preferred this approach as well, referring to their ministry as that of servus servorum Dei—“servant of the servants of God.”
So, what are some practical keys the popes in recent past have used to exercise their service of unity?
Key No. 1: Maintain the essentials
The first practical key is maintaining the essentials. That’s to say, the pope cannot compromise when it comes to the infallible teachings of the Church. He must safeguard these at all costs, since there can be no unity if we’re not united in the truth. St. John Paul made this clear when he wrote, “The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God who is Truth” (UUS 18).
He writes that a “being together” that betrays the truth would thus “be opposed both to the nature of God…and to the need for truth found in the depths of every human heart” (UUS 18). He summed up this idea by concluding, “The obligation to respect the truth is absolute” (UUS 79).
The pope, therefore, is obliged by truth itself to maintain those teachings that the Church declares to be definitively true.
Key No. 2: Be flexible in the non-essentials
The second practical key for Christian unity is flexibility in the non-essentials.
For instance, there can be flexibility when it comes to articulation or expression of infallible teachings, since, as Pope St. John XXIII stated in his opening address at the Second Vatican Council, there is a distinction to be made between the “deposit of faith” and “the manner in which these truths are set forth.”
Take the dogma of purgatory. In the past, theologians emphasized the cleansing fire of purgatory—understandably so, since that’s the image St. Paul uses to describe purgatory (see 1 Cor. 3:11-15). Some were going so far as to say that the purgatorial fire was a physical fire—an argument, I think, that sputters out, since the soul is immaterial.
But in official declarations at the Second Council of Lyons (1272-1274) and the Council of Florence (1431-1449), the Church used the more general language of “purgatorial punishment” or “purifying punishment” to describe the suffering of purgatory. In his classic work Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, theologian Ludwig Ott says the Church avoided using the language of “purifying fire” out of consideration for the separated Greeks, who, although they believed in an intermediate state in the afterlife where souls suffer and can receive solace and refreshment, rejected the notion of a purifying fire. This shows that the Church, even at that time, was open to diversity as to how to articulate the suffering of purgatory.
The Church continues to permit a variety of articulation. In his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI offers an opinion of some recent theologians that the cleansing fire is Christ himself and that the pain we experience in purgatory is an acute awareness of our own impurity.
How does all this apply to ecumenism? Or, to use the words of St. John Paul II, how is flexibility in articulation of doctrine a “great help” in the ecumenical movement (UUS 81)?
First, it allows for the possibility that, regarding some doctrines, Catholics and Protestants could be expressing the same reality in different ways. And as long as our separated brethren don’t deny how we articulate the doctrine in question, and their formulation is sufficient to express the reality, then it wouldn’t be necessary for the pope to demand that our separated brethren change their formulation of the doctrine in order to come into full communion.
Second, it makes possible for our dialogue to be an exchange of gifts rather than merely an exchange of ideas. The Second Vatican Council stated that the various theological formulations are “often to be considered as complementary rather than conflicting” and that one tradition may come nearer than the other in “an apt appreciation of certain aspects of revealed mystery,” or in the clarity of expression (Unitatis Redintegratio, 17). St. John Paul called this exchange of ideas a “mutual enrichment” that “must be taken seriously into account” (UUS, 87).
A second illustration of our second practical key is flexibility in non-infallible aspects of doctrine. There are some aspects of a teaching that are infallible, and some that are not.
For example, the belief that Christ elevated the institution of marriage to a sacrament is infallible. There is no flexibility there. However, the question of who confers the sacrament, the spouses or the priest, is something that has not been definitively settled. The Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges the different positions on this between Eastern and Western Catholics in paragraph 1623. In the Latin tradition, it’s the spouses. In the Eastern tradition, it’s the priest.
This flexibility that the Church shows in non-infallible aspects of doctrine could extend in a similar way to those desiring to come into union with us. But it must also be noted that deference to the judgment of the Church would be essential, for the Church could definitively declare as true something that once was a non-infallible aspect of doctrine. In such a scenario, assent would be required.
Flexibility in non-essentials is illustrated in flexibility in liturgical traditions (e.g., different liturgical rites in the Catholic Church) and ecclesiastical law (e.g., different codes of canon law for Eastern and Western Catholics).
Pope St. John Paul II summed up well our second practical key: “Legitimate diversity is in no way opposed to the Church’s unity but rather enhances her splendor and contributes greatly to the fulfillment of her mission” (UUS, 50).
Key No. 3: Use a stepwise approach
The third practical key for Christian unity is the stepwise approach. Rather than promoting Christian unity in an all-at-once manner, it’s best to take a step-by-step approach that seeks unity in parts with the hope for eventual unity in the whole.
If our separated brethren can say, “Yes, we agree with this; we agree with that,” then eventually over time there will be so much that we agree upon they will be more inclined to say, “Let’s just make this official.”
There are several illustrations of this stepwise approach in the recent years of ecumenism. One is the various joint declarations that the Church has made with our separated brethren. For example, there is the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the Lutheran World Federation, which the document called a “decisive step forward on the way to overcoming the division of the church” (sec. 44).
There are also the joint declarations on Christology that popes Paul VI and John Paul II made with some of the patriarchs of the ancient Churches of the East, which in the past rejected the dogmatic formulations of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. For example, in 1971 Pope Paul VI signed declarations to this effect with Jacoub III, patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, and in 1973 with Shenouda III, patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Pope St. John Paul signed similar declarations in 1984 with Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I, supreme head of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church, and in 1994 with Mar Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. The pope called these joint affirmations “important points of references for the continuation of the dialogue” (UUS, 59).
The stepwise approach is also manifest in the current talk about how the Church is open to considering a change in its dating of Easter. This is discussed in an appendix to Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium.
In 2014, this topic was part of discussion between Pope Francis and Tawadros II, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. Francis remarked a year later (June 2015) that we need to come to an agreement. Aphrem II, patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch, met with Francis a week later and expressed interest in a common date. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced in 2016 that he, on behalf of the Anglican Communion, had joined the discussion.
If we were able to arrive at a common date of Easter, that would be one less barrier to union. And the fact that the Church is pursuing this shows that it sees the wisdom of a stepwise approach.
Finally, the stepwise approach is seen in the Church’s united action with separated Christians on social and cultural issues, whether it’s defending human dignity, promoting peace, applying the gospel to social life, or infusing the culture with the Christian spirit. According to the Second Vatican Council’s Unitatis Redintegratio, “Through such cooperation, all believers in Christ are able to learn easily how they can understand each other better and esteem each other more, and how the road to the unity of Christians may be made smooth” (sec. 12).
Key No. 4: Don’t focus on the faults of the past
Practical key number four is we can’t get stuck focusing on the faults of the past, but rather we should focus on the unity we have in the present and build on that.
St. John Paul II pointed out in Ut Unum Sint that, in order to move forward toward Christian unity, it’s necessary that past memories be purified through an exchange of forgiveness by all sides. And this has been done several times by the popes of recent past.
An example worthy of note is the 1965 joint declaration of Pope Paul VI and Athenagoras I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, in which they both lifted the exchange of excommunications from 1054: Rome’s excommunication of the patriarch of Constantinople and the patriarch’s excommunication of Rome’s two legates.
The language of the document is telling: “They commit these excommunications to oblivion.” This was a symbolic act to express forgiveness for past misgivings and that both sides are committed to continue working toward full communion.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of the four bishops ordained by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, thus recognizing that they, and the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), are no longer in a state of schism, even though they are in an irregular state. There are hopes that the SSPX may be regularized in the future by becoming a personal prelature such as Opus Dei.
This falls under our fourth practical key because Benedict recognized that the four bishops were no longer in schism without making them say, “We were wrong!” He simply acknowledged that we have sufficient unity with them to where they no longer need to be excommunicated.
The joint declarations mentioned previously also illustrate this key. The Church is in essence saying, “We’re not concerned about the what your community may have said in the past. We’re asking what do you believe now, and do we agree.” For example, the joint declaration with the Lutheran World Federation states that the Lutheran churches presented in the declaration “do not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent” (sec. 41).
In each of these cases, if the Church had restricted itself to playing the blame game, it would have missed the unity we have with these Christians in the present. Consequently, we would have been impeded in seeking to attain further Christian unity.
Key No. 5: Respect others’ demands of conscience.
Our fifth practical key is that we must have “respect for the demands . . . of the conscience of the other party” (UUS 39). Many times in dialogue we may present a doctrine, and the person to whom we’re speaking rejects it. But it’s possible that he doesn’t understand the doctrine as we do. In fact, he may have a false understanding of the doctrine that we would reject as well.
This happens all the time with Protestants. When Catholics speak of praying to Mary, for example, many Protestants immediately think we’re worshiping her. And no matter how much we say we’re not worshiping her, they still can’t get around associating the act of praying to Mary with worshiping Mary.
This is why we can’t go around condemning people to hell when they reject a particular Catholic teaching. Although their judgment of conscience might be wrong, we nevertheless have to respect the demand of conscience.
So, don’t get so upset when your Protestant friend still doesn’t convert after you’ve given your eloquent explanation of Church teaching. We don’t know what’s going on in his mind.
Key No. 6: They are brother and sister Christians, not enemies
Finally, but not least, we must recognize other Christians as what they are: brothers and sisters, and not strangers or enemies. In Ut Unum Sint, Pope St. John Paul II saw this recognition of brotherhood among Christians as one of the many fruits of the ecumenical movement over the past thirty years.
Christian unity is something that cannot be ignored. It belongs to the heart of Christ’s mission (John 17:21) and therefore must belong to the pope’s mission. But, as Pope St. John Paul II reminds us, it’s a mission that belongs to all Christians: “All the faithful are asked by the Spirit of God to do everything possible to strengthen the bonds of communion between all Christians…concern for restoring unity pertains to the whole Church, faithful and clergy alike” (UUS, 101).
Christian unity is not only the work of the pope. It’s our job too. With these practical keys as our guide, let’s get to work and make our own Jesus’ prayer “that they may be one” (John 17:21).
Sidebar:
The Power of Common Prayer
The practical key that Pope St. John Paul saw as the driving force for all other practical keys in ecumenical work is common prayer. He wrote:
Along the ecumenical path to unity, pride of place certainly belongs to common prayer, the prayerful union of those who gather together around Christ himself. If Christians, despite their divisions, can grow ever more united in common prayer around Christ, they will grow in the awareness of how little divides them in comparison to what unites them. If they meet more often and more regularly before Christ in prayer, they will be able to gain the courage to face all the painful human reality of their divisions, and they will find themselves together once more in that community of the Church which Christ constantly builds up in the Holy Spirit, in spite of all weaknesses and human limitations. (Ut Unum Sint 22)