A mixture of fatigue and vitality

The 13th Assembly of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) (Lyon, France, 15-21 July), which has just ended, was also an occasion to celebrate the CEC’s fiftieth anniversary. The Assembly, with its gaze turned on the past, also tried to look to its future: a future inspired by the Hope enunciated by the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians (4:4). So, in the course of the Assembly, there was no lack of occasions to commemorate the decisive mission performed by the CEC over these last fifty years, especially in its attempt to “build bridges” (between East and West after the Second World War, during the Cold War and after the fall of the Iron Curtain). Nonetheless, in an historical context totally different from that in which it had been born, it was right that this European organization should feel the need to interrogate itself on what ought to be its future and its mission. And it is just in the current complexity of the world in which we are witnessing a revival of religious faith, and in which urgent replies are being demanded to the new challenges posed in the fields of the environment and increased human mobility, with its attendant problems of migrants and refugees (not forgetting asylum seekers and travelling people), and in which the European process of reunification has still to be completed, that the CEC must tackle, also within its own ranks, numerous tensions: between Protestants and Orthodox, between the Orthodox Churches themselves (the absence of the Russian Orthodox Church at the Assembly was significant), between minority and majority Churches, between national and migrant Churches, and between Churches with greater financial resources… A mixture of anxieties and hopes and the need to reform this European ecumenical organization thus characterized this meeting in Lyon. This was made particularly evident when it was decided to set up a workgroup which will have the task of proposing a complete reform of the aims, methods and even the structures of the CEC and its committees. It is in this sense that we can understand the speech given by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, characterized by its clear invitation to hope and its appeal, not a new one, for the Catholic Church to form part of “a Conference of all the European Churches”. On the other hand, it would be unjust to reduce the results of the 13th Assembly of the CEC (in which the undersigned participated in his role as General Secretary of the CCEE and representative of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity) to this fact alone. Nor would it be just to attribute the apparent fatigue of the ecumenical movement in Europe today to this lack of Catholic participation. It’s true that the Catholic Church is not a member of the CEC, but that does not mean it does not take seriously Christ’s prayer that those who believe in him “may all be one” (Jn 17:21). It’s true that the international and European institutions can display a certain fatigue in their ecumenical pilgrimage together, but the vitality of local realities testifies to a desire for unity that is far from having been exhausted. Therefore, if at first sight it may seem that the Catholic Church is dragging its feet in the ecumenical movement since it is not a member of such international ecumenical organizations as the World Council of Churches of the Conference of European Churches, the Holy See is by no means an absentee: it has promoted and/or participated in numerous ecumenical initiatives in recent years, and occasions for collaboration and joint witness of the desire for unity as the way to bear witness to the truth have not been lacking, also at the European level. It is enough to recall the three European ecumenical assemblies (Basel 1989, Graz 1997 and Sibiu 2007), the annual meeting of the Executive Committees of the CCEE and CEC and the realization of the Charta Oecumenica which continues to be for many Churches, at the local level, an agenda of joint commitment.I am certain that in this new direction being taken by the CEC, which will be even clearer after the next Assembly in 2013, when its whole new structure will be discussed, the CCEE will always be an attentive partner, open to any contribution, so that together we may better serve man and make a common Christian contribution to Europe.