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The greatest gathering of Christians since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent worked for 18 years to counter the Protestant Reformation, ends this week in New Delhi. It is the third Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Behind all the well-organized confusion — the hustling to and fro between auditorium and committee room, the 15,000 sheet daily blizzard of mimeographed paper, the lost traveler's checks, the distracting snake charmers and the non stop talking across language barriers — a vast regrouping of Christendom seems to be taking shape. One veteran churchman. President Henry Pitney Van Dusen of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, believes that "we are seeing right here one of the very early events in the second great Reformation of Christendom."
The first Reformation, in the 16th century, caused the breakup of a church so encrusted with corruption that it had lost much of its power to transmit the power and the glory of God to man. Into this glittering desert of faith the reformers threw their prophetic insights to have them seized and shared like bread among the starving; and the counterreformers on the Roman Catholic side pruned back their corrupt and dying tree of faith to a new life.
Scandalous Disunity. In the time of second Reformation, it is the scandalous disunity among Christians that has alienated men and cheapened the church. And in response to this, the scattered forces of the Christian faith are realigning and regrouping to make this the Ecumenical Century. The church, sharded by centuries of suspicion and prideful rivalry and man's inhumanity to man, is newly mindful of Christ's command "that they all may be one." The evidence:
> The Orthodox churches, after centuries of jealousy and vendetta among themselves, met last September in Rhodes (TIME, Oct. 6) to work out an agenda for a new Orthodox ecumenism.
> The Roman Catholic Church, pointing toward Pope John's historic Ecumenical Council (probably in 1962) is showing a new friendliness toward Eastern Orthodoxy and toward its "separated brethren," the Protestants. For the first time, the Vatican has sent official observers to an Assembly of the World Council. Within the past year, the Pope has received precedent-breaking visits from the Arch bishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church. In the U.S., a hew era of mutual confidence between Catholics and Protestants is symbolized by the election of the first Catholic President.
>U.S. Protestantism, riddled by sectarianism, is pulling together in the National Council of Churches. Meanwhile, individual denominations are merging in outright organic unity—there have been dozens of such mergers in the past generation—and interdenominational courtship is being stepped up by Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake's proposal for merger of the Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and United Church of Christ (TIME cover. May 26).
>And fortnight ago. the entry of the Russian and three other Iron Curtain Orthodox churches into the World Council of Churches placed Orthodoxy solidly within the ranks of ecumenical Christianity—and gave it a potentially powerful voice there.