Catholics Among Protestants

It was a minor landmark in church history. Last week the Roman Catholic Church issued a new and explicit clarification of the conditions under which Catholics may be permitted to discuss religion and even pray with their Protestant brethren.

The new document, issued by the Vatican's Congregation of the Holy Office, was titled Instructions to the Episcopate on the Ecumenical Movement. Its four important points:

1) Bishops may decide on their own whether clergy and laymen may attend local meetings with Protestants at which matters of faith are discussed.

2) Special corps of priests and laymen may be trained in group relations with Protestants.

3) Roman Catholics may attend Protestant councils of a nonreligious nature without their bishop's permission.

4) Catholics may join with Protestants in prayer, providing the prayers said are officially approved by the Catholic Church. In the case of the Lord's Prayer, the Roman Catholic version must be used: i.e., "Our Father who art in heaven . . ." instead of the less personalized "Our Father which art in heaven . . ." of the Protestant King James version of the Bible!*

Faults & Foibles. The new directive made it clear that Catholics were permitted to carry on conversations with Protestants only to inform them about Roman Catholic doctrine with the hope of eventually bringing them back to the "true faith." And in exercising their discretion, bishops are expressly warned to "be on their guard lest, under false pretenses such as ... stressing things on which we agree rather than those on which we disagree, a dangerous indifferentism be fomented. They must beware lest from a spirit of ... peace at all costs, Catholic tenets . . . are so whittled down and made to conform ... as to jeopardize the purity of Catholic doctrine and obscure its genuine meaning."

Bishops should also "scrupulously take precautions and firmly insist that, in the history of the Reformation, the faults and foibles of Catholics be not overemphasized while the defects of the reformers are dissimulated . . . Nothing embraced in Catholic truth concerning the nature and means of justification . . . the Roman pontiff's primacy of jurisdiction, and the fact that real reunion can only be effected by the dissidents' return to the one true church, may be passed over in silence or told ambiguously."

Wider & Deeper. At least one Protestant leader welcomed the Vatican directive as a step--though not a very big one --in the right direction. Said the World Council of Churches' General Secretary Dr. W. A. Visser 't Hooft in Geneva: "The very fact that such a document is issued at all is a clear indication that the ecumenical movement has begun to make its influence felt among the clergy and laity of the Roman Catholic Church. We can only rejoice that such is the case." But he noted with regret that the directive "remains below the level reached by certain members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy . . . Christians outside the Roman communion should continue to pray that the Roman Catholic Church may be led to a wider and deeper conception of Christian unity."

*The pronoun is not likely to embarrass many U.S. gatherings. The American Book of Common Prayer and most Protestant denominations use the "who" as does the American Revised Standard version. More likely source of confusion: the Catholic version ends after "deliver us from evil."

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