Catholics and Evangelicals Together discuss...

    ... The Blessed Virgin Mary in Christian Faith and Life:

In 1994, after intense study, discussion, and prayer, we issued a statement titled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” In 1997, we bore common witness to “The Gift of Salvation,” underscoring God’s unmerited justification of sinners because of the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, true God and true man, and our only hope of salvation. In our third statement, “Your Word is Truth” (2002), we affirmed a convergence in our understanding of the transmission of God’s saving Word through Holy Scripture and tradition, which is the lived experience of the community of faith under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In 2003, we addressed “The Communion of Saints,” in which we confessed that our communion with Christ means that we are in a certain, albeit imperfect, communion with one another in his body, the Church. “The Call to Holiness” in 2005 lifted up our common participation in the life-transforming love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The statement “That They May Have Life” (2006) set forth the Christian mandate, based on biblical authority and clear reason, for the protection of innocent human life from conception to natural death.

In the present statement we turn our attention to the Virgin Mary as an example of God’s saving grace, the divinely chosen mother of our Lord and a model of discipleship. As in previous statements, we wish to emphasize that we speak from and to, not for, our several communities, and that we are determined honestly to engage differences between our communities, recognizing that the only unity pleasing to God, and therefore the only unity we may seek, is unity in the truth.

Read the entire statement.

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Comments

[Don]

This whole statement was nonsense. The evangelicals want to "revisit" statements that Mary was conceived without sin?

Why doesn't this group just admit that ecumenism as currently practiced is dead?

The can pray all they want, but the Church isn't going to repudiate Catholic dogma on the Virgin Mary.

[Mark Brumley]

Hmmm. While I am certain the Church is not going to repudiate her Marian dogma, I don't think it follows from this that ecumenism is dead or that the whole statement is nonsense.

[joe]

Ecumenism dead? Hardly. Look at the robust material printed at First Things of Touchstone Magazine. Look at the Protestants reading Benedict XVI, or the Catholics reading Lewis. ECT is based on the newer idea that Ecumenism does not have to succeed at the organizational level to breed a healthy appreciation of separated brethren. Of course Protestants don't embrace the Marian distinctives entirely. And of course in official statements the defensive staking out of positions takes place. But if they begin to at least heighten their appreciation of Mary, that in itself is a good development.

[Evan]

Joe, what I find peculiar as a Protestant is how all of the "good development" presumably occurs on the Protestant side. Were the Evangelicals to have said, as Mark does above of the Catholics, that "the Church is not going to repudiate her Marian dogma", I could only imagine what the reception would be like.

It strikes me that ecumenism is being engaged in much more seriously and generously on the Protestant side than on the Catholic side. Were our positions switched and the Protestants were the ones not budging on dogma while the Catholics spoke of "revisiting" doctrines of immaculate conception, etc., no one would think of the Protestants as anything but sectarian fundamentalists, and no one would think of the Catholics as anything but revisionist liberals.

And speaking of things I find interesting... I love that you couldn't help but change "ECT" to "CET" in the title of this post, Carl. Very mature.

[Carl E. Olson]

Twasn't immaturity, Evan, but a simple mistake. But I take comfort in the knowledge you are always looking out for me...