05276
May 19, 2005

WCC leader to meet with Pope Benedict

Vatican aide urges council to make theological dialogue a priority

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

GENEVA — The leader of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Samuel Kobia, will meet with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome on June 16, the WCC announced on May 19.

     The announcement came soon after a senior Vatican official urged the Geneva-based ecumenical organization to make theological dialogue a more prominent part of its work.

     “This will be Kobia’s first meeting with the head of the Roman Catholic Church since he became WCC general secretary in 2004,” the WCC said in a statement issued on May 19. The group represents most of the world’s Orthodox and Protestant churches.

     The Roman Catholic Church does not belong to the WCC, but has members on some of its bodies, including its Faith and Order Commission, which seeks to bring churches into theological dialogue to promote church unity.  

     Vatican official Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, last week described the WCC as an “essential partner” in the ecumenical movement. 

     “But,” added Farrell, “it is no secret, I think, that we have had criticisms of the WCC that are also shared by some others.” He urged the strengthening of the council’s work on Faith and Order. 

     “When Faith and Order was central to the life of the World Council, we believe that the organization was more effective as an instrument in the quest for Christian unity,” Farrell said during a May 9‑16 meeting in Athens, the World Conference on Mission and Evangelism.  

     After Benedict’s election in April, Kobia said he hoped the new Pope would “initiate new ways of cooperation between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches.” 

     In the early 1970s, Benedict, then German theology professor Joseph Ratzinger, was a member of the WCC Faith and Order Commission. 

     Later he became the first Catholic co‑chair of a Catholic‑Protestant commission in Germany that helped pave the way for a global Catholic‑Lutheran agreement on the doctrine of justification, a key divisive issue at the time of the Reformation. 

     Still, as the Vatican's guardian of doctrine, Ratzinger was criticized for a 2000 statement that Protestant denominations are not “churches in the proper sense.” 

     After being elected Pope, however, Benedict said he wants to promote Christian unity.