Ut Unum Sint

Vatican II certainly did embark the Catholic Church on the journey of ecumenism. But ecumenism with whom? First and above all, ecumenism with those who maintain, as ecclesial bodies and not merely as the opinions or preferences of certain members, the transcendality of Divine Revelation in relation to human understanding, the definitions of the first seven Ecumenical Councils, the dogmatic principle and corpus as the context of day-to-day faith and life, the sense that salvation is more than temporal alone, a classical liturgical life, individual and collective devotion to the Mother of God, individual and collective devotion to the Angels and the Saints, the Threefold Apostolic Order, that Order’s essential maleness, the monastic heart of the Church’s life in the world, and the ascetic heart of all true spirituality. In a word, the Orthodox, of whom we must make ourselves worthy in practice by our return to each and all of those principles.

After and under that, we are called to ecumenism with those who uphold the priority of Scripture in faith and life, the sovereignty of God’s grace in salvation, the sole basis of that grace in the salvific work of Jesus Christ, the experiences of conversion and assurance (though not the insistence only on certain experiences thereof, an insistence condemned by the Council of Trent), the priority and urgency of evangelisation, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the constant reform of the Church under God through His raising up of minorities at the cutting edge, the reality that every Christian has a vocation, the integrity of the lay vocation and of the vocation to marriage, the need for a continuous succession of Biblical preachers and pastors defined by their sound doctrine from each generation to the next, the need for what those who use the term understand as parachurch activity, the centrality of the Preaching of the Word, the indispensability of a culture in which at least the primary defining narratives are those of the Bible, and the primary role of the family in passing on that culture.

We are called to ecumenism with those who, from the eighteenth century onwards, came to recognise that the righteousness of Jesus Christ was not only imputed, but imparted by Word and Sacraments, with that imparted righteousness issuing in Biblical preaching, sacramental spirituality, missionary zeal, musical excellence, practical social concern, and radical political action. And we are called to ecumenism with those who, arising out of that understanding of human sanctification, have come to a position particularly open to completion by, in, through and as the truth that the whole Church is both Pentecostal and Charismatic, having been baptised with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, and manifesting that baptism in a wide range of charisms.

Such are the marks of an ecclesial community within the understanding of the Council. Enormous is the number of local congregations thus marked. They are ecclesial communities. So is the worldwide community constituted by them and which they constitute. It, too, is an ecclesial community. So are the communities constituted by numerous parachurch agencies whereby members of the former serve the work of the latter. But the old “mainline Protestant” denominations, as such, in the United States? Or the old Nonconformist bodies, as such? Or whatever it is that is held together by the Anglican Consultative Council and the Lambeth Conference? Or the body, as such, defined by the present British State’s continuing ecclesiastical role in its predecessor-but-two Kingdom of England? Or the Erastian bodies, as such, in Scandinavia? Frankly, no. Probably not in the 1960s. And certainly not today. One need look no further than their adoption of the Open Table Policy, contrary to the teaching of their founders and forebears, and only ever a mark of a body in terminal decline. Our own lawless practitioners of “intercommunion”, whatever that means, take note.