Vatican makes ecumenism an obligation

 VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - Engaging ecumenically with Protestant and Orthodox denominations will no longer be "optional" but "a duty and obligation" for bishops, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity declared Friday.

The Vatican document, titled "The Bishop and Christian Unity: An Ecumenical Vademecum," extends the bishop's pastoral ministry "not just to the unity of his own church, but to the unity of all the baptized into Christ."

Directing Catholics to join Protestants "in each other's non-Eucharistic services," the handbook is a historic reversal of Pope Pius XI's encyclical Mortalium Animos (1928), which deemed it unlawful for Catholics to worship with Protestants "for if they do so they will be giving countenance to a false Christianity, quite alien to the one Church of Christ."

For Pius XI, engagement with non-Catholics meant recalling the "erring sons" of Holy Mother Church, "who has indeed nothing more at heart than to lead them back to her bosom."

"It is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it," wrote Pius XI.

"As a convert to the Catholic Church from Anglicanism it was the authority of the Church and the splendor of truth that drew me. I am sure this is the case for many other converts," Fr. David Palmer, from the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, told Church Militant...

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