God’s Ecumenical Co-Pilot | Michael J. Miller | Catholic World Report
Cardinal Kurt Koch has been very busy since being named President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in July 2010.
During a lecture in Rome on December 15, 2011, the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity likened ecumenical dialogue to air travel: the Holy Spirit is the pilot, and you hope and pray that the plane lands safely.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, formerly Bishop of Basel (Switzerland), has been jetting around Europe since his appointment to his present position in the Roman Curia in July 2010. He accompanied the Holy Father during his recent pastoral visit to Germany and at the ecumenical service in Erfurt on September 23 read the Gospel passage containing Christ’s prayer, “That all may be one.” On October 3 in Heiligenkreuz Abbey near Vienna, he lectured on “The Ecumenical Dimension of the New Evangelization of Europe” at the Philosophical-Theological College named after Benedict XVI.
In Assisi later that month he introduced the sign of peace at the conclusion of the Day of Reflection, Dialogue and Prayer for Peace and Justice in the World. From November 12 to 16 he participated in a conference in Minsk (Belarus) on the contribution of Christian ethics to the formation of Europe. Then in Istanbul he personally delivered to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople the Pope’s traditional greetings to the Orthodox Church on the Feast of St. Andrew, their patron.
In his lecture on December 15, Cardinal Koch put these wide-ranging efforts in a broader perspective. The talk might be described as his end-of-the-year, “State of the Reunion of Christians” message. In it he identified several changes and challenges in the Church’s ecumenical dialogue:
For example in several churches we have a new reflection on their own confessional identity. That can be a great advantage, because one must have a clear identity in order to be in dialogue. It can also happen, though, that a group distances itself somewhat from ecumenism.
A second challenge is that the actual goal of ecumenism is becoming increasingly unclear. We have various concepts of unity, but we have no common goal. And that makes it difficult. After all, we cannot act according to the motto of the [late] Viennese comedian [Helmut] Qualtinger: “Well, I don’t know where I’m going, but that way I get there sooner.” Instead we must seek anew what the real goal is. And the reason why we have no common goal is actually because each church has its own notion of the unity of its church, and therefore it is necessary for us to reflect on what the nature of the Church really is.
The third challenge is presented by the new dialogue partners of the Catholic Church.
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