Benedict XVI, Pope of Christian Unity

From the London Telegraph-

This week’s editorial in The Catholic Herald deserves to be reproduced in full. The practical steps taken by Pope Benedict XVI are doing more to achieve Christian unity than ARCIC’s decades of earnest and disingenuous waffle. Some professional ecumenists may be unhappy, which is a shame, but there you go.

When Jesus prayed that his followers may be one, He was praying for the unity of the Church whose leadership he entrusted to St Peter and his successors. He was not prophesying that this unity would be achieved by a particular model of ecumenism. In the 20th century, the Church mapped out a route towards unity which focused on ever closer links with other Christian communities, such as the Anglican Communion; the aim was to achieve a corporate reunion. Thus, the purpose of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, so far as the Church was concerned, was an agreement in which the Archbishop of Canterbury would once again become bishop of a historic see of the Church that Anglicans describe as “Roman Catholic”. Unfortunately, participants on both sides of ARCIC glossed over the fact that doctrines of transubstantiation and infallibility are unchangeable: one can do no more than tinker with the language in which they are defined.

More here-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100023487/benedict-xvi-pope-of-christian-unity/