True Ecumenism Leads To The One, True, Holy Catholic Church­

Jesus used the word “church,” singular, not plural. Not a Mother Church with 24,000 “denominations” or franchise locations.  Jesus has one, and only one, Church.

Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church (Jesus, God the Son; Matthew 16:18).

This is what each of us, baptized members of Jesus’s Church, believes and attests to every week when we recite the Nicene Creed:

Credo in . . . Et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. (I believe in  . . . one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.) (Nicene Creed).

Jesus, Catholic Church Founder, who said He was building one Church (only), also said:

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. (John 17:21)

How Can The One Church of Jesus Do Ecumenism?

Some are working toward one big, happy global church, non-judgmental, able to inclusively include everyone, no matter what they believe or say or do – and this is joyously called “ecumenism.” But, for Catholics, ecumenism is not:

The realization of one huge, worldwide happy church (“WHC”) of which everyone can be a member, the overwhelming majority of happy members professing a minimal set of core statements (which do not necessarily rise to the level of doctrines or beliefs)  that everyone accepts, no matter how few, and any individual’s contradictory beliefs or any group’s or denomination’s contradictory doctrines are either not beliefs or doctrines of the entire WHC, or the WHC says regarding those beliefs and doctrines, each person is free to accept or reject them, quietly,  silently, or vocally.

Jesus’s Church has dogmas and doctrines that must be assented to and believed by every member of the church. In many attempts at one-big-happy-ecumenical church, these dogmas and doctrines are totally negotiable, ignored,  irrelevant, or unimportant; but God inspired one of the writers of the Catholic Church’s book, the Bible,  to proclaim:

Bear not the yoke with unbelievers. For what participation hath justice with injustice? Or what fellowship hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? Or what part hath the faithful with the unbeliever? (2 Cor 6:14-15).

Anyone who proclaims a gospel that is not the Gospel of Jesus’s Church is to be condemned:

I wonder that you are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Which is not another, only there are some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.  As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema (Gal 1:6-9).

When Jesus taught about the unity of His Church, it was not a unity which would result in the rejection or denial of His Church’s doctrines and dogmas. Jesus’s Church, prior to the Second Vatican Council, defined “ecumenism” as an effort to convince those not in the Church to return to a unity that they themselves had brought about.

Logically and Theologically, Everyone-Happy Doctrines-Don’t-Matter Ecumenism Is Not Possible For Jesus’s Church

For a faithful catholic, ecumenism is the effort, in charity and in faith, to bring nonbelievers to the Catholic Church; the Church that is, in the words of the Catechism, “  . . .the sole Church of Christ,” [Catechism of the Catholic Church, 811, 816];  the “ . . . one Church,” [Id., 814];  the “ . . one and only church of God,” [Id., 817].

Going back to the early Catholic Church, evangelization was never to be accomplished at the cost of changing Church teaching:

Therefore, let there be growth and abundant progress in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom, in each and all, in individuals and in the whole Church, at all times and in the progress of ages, but only within the proper limits, i.e., within the same dogma, the same meaning, the same judgment[in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia] Commonitorium, Vincent of Lérins.

False Ecumenis

Professor Alan Montefiore recognizes another type of ecumenism for those of different religions, even for those whose religions profess dogmas and beliefs that explicitly contradict each other. (Professor Alan Montefiore in Ecumenical Movements and Truth. For him, believers of different religions – to achieve an ecumenical goal – can accept that all believers are on an “equally valid path to religious fulfillment.”  Religious truth, on this view, is relative, not absolute. This is based on an erroneous “equalization of truths.” Seeking unity at the expense of truth is false ecumenism.

In practical reality, “false ecumenism” requires that proponents of the various religions who want to engage in fruitful ecumenism resulting in one, almost certainly new, religion must jettison, or deny, one or some of their beliefs to create the new religion with a novel theology.  This false ecumenism cannot be based on any agreement for the ecumenical partners to simply ignore dogmas and doctrines. Without doctrine-defeating, dogma-destroying ecumenical metanoia, no new religion can be achieved.

The “Problem” Of Truth – No Problem For False Ecumenists

For Professor Montefiore, various beliefs of the ecumenical partners can, and often do, exhibit “mutual incompatibility.”  Montefiore calls this the “problem of truth.” To achieve the new religion, there must be an approach beyond “mutual toleration,” because, in reality, principled “mutual respect” is not really possible.

It may be that a true believer of one religion can separate the believer of another religion from his or her beliefs (as some do in loving the sinner, hating the sin), but in real life,  says Professor Montefiore,  there can be a “tension” in trying to do this.  This true believer who also wants an ecumenical solution to the disunity among religions must confront an inescapable conclusion. What there is about the other’s beliefs that is “genuinely incompatible” with the true beliefs “must be false.”

To achieve the ecumenical goal, the goal of false ecumenism, according to Professor Montefiore, this tension is to be resolved not by bringing the other believer to the true belief, but by compromising, rejecting, changing, or denying true beliefs:

If, then, full and equal respect for one’s ecumenical partner implies a recognition that their own spirituality and their own “way to God” is as religiously valid as one’s own, one may have in all consistency to accept the prospect of having to revise certain of one’s own basic and Jong-standing beliefs. (The same will, of course, be true for one’s partners as well.) It is not likely to be easy for It is not likely to be easy for all those concerned to admit that their ecumenism harbors within it an  acceptance of the  principle that there may be  more than  one equally valid expression of the recognition of God, more than one equally acceptable form of His worship, more than one superficially incompatible but in fact equally valid diffraction  of the one hidden Truth, but this, it does seem, must in the last resort be the inner sense of any really serious contemporary ecumenical  movement.

New Framework = New Paradigm

In recent memory, both Jorge Bergoglio and various of his spokespersons have proclaimed that there is to be a new “paradigm” for theology and ecclesiology in Jesus’s Church.  Bergoglian Cardinal Parolin has referred to the “new paradigm that Pope Francis is carrying out. Bergolgian Cardinal Cupich has proclaimed that the new paradigm is “nothing short of revolutionary,” and a “forced paradigm shift.” Based on Professor Montefiore work,  this is  a “serious” effort at false ecumenism which requires and demands a “new framework” within which even beliefs such as the Father’s sending of His Son Jesus Christ – alone – to redeem us must be rejected:

Their ecumenical commitment would seem, then, to include the perhaps initially hidden further commitment to the search for a new framework of discourse of God, a framework in the sense that it would somehow have to allow for, or make persuasively intelligible, an account of “God’s” necessary intervention in the ongoing contingencies of human history as having taken place at more than just one place and time and in more than just one way.

It is always the case – in science or in theology – that embracing a new framework, a new paradigm requires embracing new – i.e. different – truths and rejecting what was previously accepted as truth.

Conclusion

Here it is not a question of altering the deposit of faith, changing the meaning of dogmas, eliminating essential words from them, accommodating truth to the preferences of a particular age, or suppressing certain articles of the Creed under the false pretext that they are no longer understood today. 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. In the Body of Christ, ‘[He who is] the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6), who could consider legitimate a reconciliation brought about at the expense of the truth?”(St. John Paul II, Encyclical Ut Unam Sint, On commitment to Ecumenism, emphasis added).

There is no authority in Catholic Church scripture, dogmas, doctrine or laws to refer to any group or entity as the single, one church of Jesus Christ other than the Catholic Church. True ecumenism is the effort to help those who have, by their own actions, abandoned Jesus’s Church to return to it.