Pope meets head of World Council of Churches

Pope Benedict XVI today met with the leader of the World Council of Churches in another indication of his attempts to improve relations with other Christians and heal the 1,000-year-old rift with the Orthodox Church.

The Reverend Samuel Kobia, a Methodist pastor and the general secretary of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, was in Rome for a four-day visit that included talks with Benedict’s top ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper.

Benedict has made reaching out to other Christians, in particular the Orthodox Churches, a “fundamental commitment” of his papacy.

The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of more than 300 churches from nearly all Christian traditions, including Protestants and the Orthodox. The Roman Catholic Church is not a member, but it participates in the fellowship on several levels.

In an interview ahead of his audience, Kobia said he was encouraged by Benedict’s commitment to ecumenism, particularly his comments that “concrete steps” and not just words were needed to unify Christians and help heal the rift with the Orthodox.

He said he was hoping for progress in one area in particular that has vexed some Protestant members of the World Council stemming from a 2000 document from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was headed by the pope when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The document, Dominus Iesus, which Ratzinger signed, framed the role of the Catholic Church in human salvation in an exclusive manner. It suggested non-Catholic “ecclesiastical communities” were “not churches in the proper sense”.

“There are many Protestant churches that are members of the WCC and are concerned that they are defined as ’ecclesiastic communities’ and not full churches,” Kobia said.

He said he wasn’t looking for Benedict to renounce the 2000 document, but said he hoped the two sides could “move beyond it”.

“I would seek understanding that in order to progress on unity, it would be important to speak another language, moving beyond what has been said,” he said.

Kobia referred indirectly to the issue in his prepared remarks to Benedict, who was a member of a joint Catholic-World Council commission on faith from 1968 to 1975.

Kobia said Orthodox members of the World Council of Churches are asked to reflect on whether there was “space” for other churches in Orthodox doctrine.

“Responses to these fundamental ecclesiological questions will certainly affect whether or not our member churches recognise each other’s baptism, as well as their ability or inability to recognise one another as churches,” Kobia said.

He said he encouraged discussion on the topic within the World Council “but also in our relationships with all our ecumenical partners”.

He concluded by saying faith “is more effective and vibrant when it is lived out together with our brothers and sisters in Christ”.

Kobia’s delegation included Bishop Eberhardt Renz from the Evangelical Church in Germany and Archbishop Makarios of Kenya and Irinoupolis, from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and all Africa.

Benedict has emphasised his pledge to ecumenism on several occasions in his nearly two-month-old papacy. In his first homily as Pope, on April 20, he said his “primary” task would be to work with all his energy to unify all followers of Christ.

He repeated that pledge on May 29 in Italy’s Adriatic seaport of Bari – a pilgrimage site for many Russian Orthodox – and called on ordinary Catholics to also take up the ecumenical cause.

Tensions between the Catholic and Orthodox churches have focused on charges by some Orthodox that the Catholic Church is encroaching on its territory. The rift prevented the late Pope John Paul II from fulfilling a long-held wish to visit Russia, the world’s most populous Orthodox nation.