Telling churches they are not proper is not helping ecumenism, synod told

Nobody can claim to be ecumenical "while telling other churches that they are not churches in the proper sense and that their clergy are not proper clergy and that they do not have the real Eucharist", the General Synod was told.

Bishop John Neill of Cashel diocese was speaking about the Vatican's Dominus Iesus document of last September which said Reformed churches were not proper churches and its One Bread One Body document, published in September 1998, which said Catholics should not take communion in Reformed churches.

"You cannot build up the Body of Christ by making negative statements about the deficiencies of other churches," he said. The real damage to ecumenism was done by statements that "unchurched" other Christians.

"We all behaved that way in the past, but there has been a significant shift away from that in the last century," he said.

The ecumenical spirit that was alive and well in so many places "cannot take many more [Vatican] statements in the spirit of the two to which I have referred," he said.

Earlier, Mgr Patrick Devine, who attended as a representative of the Catholic Church, told delegates that for many it was "perhaps only now that it is really being brought home to us that Christian unity is not something that the churches can construct on their own but, rather, something for God to give."

It was his hope that people could "acknowledge . . . our common call to live as sisters and brothers in Christ and . . . to recognise that we are all very definitely united with one another in the communion of the church, even though it may be an extent known only to God."