(5 of 11)
The Vatican would like to achieve unity with the Eastern Orthodox Church before turning to Canterbury or the Lutherans. Says Orthodox Bishop Eirinaios of Crete: "I consider the unity of Christians a vital condition for peace on earth." John Paul no doubt agrees, and has declared that he wishes union between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches by the year 2000. But the process is agonizingly slow. The meeting of the Orthodox-Catholic joint commission this month in Munich will only be the second such discussion since the Council of Florence in 1439. The always suspicious Church of Greece is wary, and the Russian Orthodox Church would never be able to unite with Rome unless the Kremlin agreed. The prospects for that have hardly been enhanced by a Pontiff who is by birth Polish and by public announcement a supporter of the Solidarity union.
Against all these political and ecclesiastical realities stands one plain fact: these churches more and more need one another. Divisions that developed over the centuries appear hopelessly confusing and senseless to young Third World churches. And they make the Christian Gospel considerably less attractive to the growing number of skeptics in the West. Most fundamentally, the churches recognize the vision of Christian reunion in Jesus Christ's prayer for his followers before his Crucifixion: "That they may all be one ... so that the world may believe." This, says Archbishop Runcie, is "an imperative of the Gospel."
More than perhaps any of the other groups, the Anglican Church has viewed the prospect of reunion with Rome as a feasible transformation. The Anglican-Roman Catholic negotiations have thus moved most rapidly. Two months ago, delegates of Rome and Canterbury, representing twelve years of talks, released their final report and concluded that the old doctrinal feuds no longer provide grounds for continued division. In a joint declaration of astonishing unanimity, the delegates agreed that there is no reason in principle why Anglicans cannot unite with Catholics under the universal primacy of the Bishop of Rome. (The title of Pope was avoided.)
This document, though not solving all the problematic differences between the two churches, raised the prospect that ultimate reunification may be possible. If reunion could be achieved between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, the example would go far toward encouraging others to consider reunion possible in their cases as well.