Cardinal-elect Kurt Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU), has accused Protestants of renouncing the original goal of ecumenism. They have succumbed to a relativistic view of ecclesiology based on shared communion between separate Churches, he said this week, and in doing so have abandoned the proper ecumenical aim of genuine unity.

“It is decisively in this postmodern mentality characterised by pluralistic and relativistic tendencies that is found the great challenge to the search for visible unity of the Church of Jesus Christ,” the Swiss archbishop said on Monday at the opening of the PCPCU plenary assembly in Rome marking the fiftieth anniversary of the pontifical council. In a theologically dense address to his first PCPCU plenary since becoming president last July, he said this mentality was found among not only Protestants but also “many Catholics”.

The PCPCU president, who is to be made a cardinal in today’s consistory, said the current crisis of ecumenism boiled down to what he called the two “profoundly different mentalities” that shape the way Catholics and Protestants describe the nature of the Church.

“The Churches and ecclesial communities born of the Reform have renounced the ori­ginal objective of ecumenism as visible unity and have substituted it with the concept of mutual recognition as Churches,” he said.

Cardinal-elect Koch said the Churches of the Reform were marked by the “grave phenomenon of ecclesial fragmentation” and had thus adopted an “ecclesiological pluralism”. He said this sees the goal of ecumenism as “reconciled diversity” of many Churches rather than the reconstitution of visible unity (while accepting diversity) in one Church. The ­cardinal-elect claimed that Protestant ­“pluralism” among different confessional Churches “contrasts with Catholic conviction that the true Church of Jesus Christ ‘subsists’ in the Catholic Church, in other words that she is already an existing reality”. “It is clear that there is a profound difference between this Protestant view and the Catholic and Orthodox interpretation according to which the ecumenical objective cannot be inter-communion but ‘communion’, within which eucharistic communion also finds its place,” he said.

Cardinal-designate Koch made no specific mention of the Anglican Communion in his 18-page address, but in an interview with Vatican Radio before the plenary, he answered questions on the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, that provides for Anglican laity, priests and bishops to join the Catholic Church as a group.

Asked by Mario Galgano – who was press spokesman of the the Swiss bishops’ conference from 2004 to 2006 when Bishop Koch was President of the conference – whether the married Anglican bishops who wanted to come over to Rome were not “an insurmountable obstacle” for the Church, Koch admitted that married bishops were a new factor: “We already have experience with married priests. They remain married priests. But there is a problem with married bishops as our tradition … has no experience of [them]”.

One of the Anglican bishops concerned had told The Times newspaper that several thousand Anglicans wanted to come over to Rome, Koch’s interviewer reminded him. Was that not a problem for the Anglican Church?

It was “certainly” a difficult situation for the Anglican community, Archbishop Koch admitted, “but as far as our Church is concerned it is a matter of helping people who are so to speak knocking at our door … This should not prove an obstacle for ecumenical dialogue as unity is still being sought.”

[ Note: Taken from the Tablet ]