The fourth and finalSession of the Vatican Council hascometoanend. The mind of the Council, and therefore of the Church as a whole, is now expressed in the sixteen official documents personally promulgated by the Pope in its name, four in the third Session and the remainder in the fourth. Most of these documents include, in a greater or lesser degree, outstanding new or revived insights into the nature of the Church and its place in the world. Many of them reflect the differing outlooks, in their various phases, of the bishops of the world and of the People of God they represent. Yet, on the whole, we may be deeply grateful for what the Council has given to the Church and to Christianity, as we stand at the beginning of what must be the momentous post-conciliar era. For in a very real sense the documents are seminal, seed planted in the soil of the life of the People of God. A long period of careful cultivation, within the sensus fidelium, now awaits them, before the fruits they may produce can be fully estimated and judged.

What will be the outcome? Will there be a real renewal, the emergence of a far more distinctive Christian character and attitude, manifesting more clearly the radical nature of the Church’s impact on contemporary life, in our own nation and in the world beyond it? Or will the work of the Council remain largely on paper, in its Decrees and Constitutions? That depends on the Holy Spirit, who will not fail, and on a resultant response to spiritual leadership among clergy and laity, which could. At present, at diocesan and parochial level, among priests and people, little of what the Council’s measures might involve is thought out, or the necessary steps to implement them realised.

By the time these words are in print the Vatican Council will be about to enter on its fourth, and presumably last, session. Undoubtedly this session will be an important one, its decisions are likely to make or mar the full realization of all its previous work. Pope John had two principal aims in calling together Vatican II. The first was the renewal of the inner life of the Church. A striking manifestation of such renewal would reveal its native truth and splendour to the world, not in pomp and pageantry, but in humble service of mankind. That native truth and splendour have been too often obscured by the slow unrecognized pressures of history, and by human limitation and failings. Their remedy, by sincere self examination, would enable the Church's eternal message to penetrate the world it lives in more acceptably. The progressively widening divorce of world from church might then, in some measure at least, be narrowed and bridged.

The second aim, equally important, but subsidiary to the first, was to promote by a change of heart and mind the unity of all Christians in the one Church, as Christ the Lord wills it and designs it to be. These two aims were of course intimately connected in Pope John's mind, though no doubt he himself learned much, during his short pontificate, of what this first step, so clearly indicated to him, would ultimately involve.

In his recent book Mr Hales has done much to clarify these two aims of the late Pope and how they formed themselves in his mind.

It is not quite forty years since I produced my first published writing concerned with Christian unity; it was a review article on the Report of the Malines Conversations, which the then editor of Blackfriars asked me to undertake, soon after I finished my studies for the priesthood. But my thought and ideas about ecumenism – the clumsy word had not then been invented – have deep roots in my Anglican background. I have always been profoundly grateful for the religion I was grounded in by the Church of England; and that I was able to take it with me into the Catholic Church whole and entire. With a minimum of detailed adjustment – but a complete re-orientation of mind – I was received, without conditional baptism, in 1917.

What I took with me was a religion essentially biblical and liturgical. From earliest childhood – in our daily family service at home, and in similar daily services at school and at Cambridge, I learned to recite the psalter and listen to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Built into this biblical background was the training, more by atmosphere and surroundings than by explicit teaching, of a happy home life, in a large family, with parents at the heart of whose religious practice was the deep personal love of Christ characteristic of the sober Tractarianism of Keble and Newman.

When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.

This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.

In a notable speech at the Vatican Council on November 20 last, the Archbishop of Westminster undertook, in the name of the hierarchy of England and Wales, to promote a fuller and more frequent dialogue with all Christians in this country of whatever denomination. The occasion was the opening debate on the Constitution de Oecumenismo. The Archbishop said that the hierarchy, for whom he spoke, gives its ready approval to this document and receives it with joy. It gives us the guidance of the Church’s supreme authority, which we have been awaiting, and clearly shows us its mind. Without this our ecumenical work could not make progress.

Soon after the publication of this speech it was announced from Lambeth Palace that the Archbishop of Canterbury had set up a Commission on Roman Catholic Relations, to be composed of experts from strategic areas throughout the whole of the country. They will be responsible, from the Anglican side, for the arrangement of dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. It can hardly be doubted that there has been a causal connection between the Vatican speech and the Lambeth announcement, and we may hope therefore for the setting up, on our side, of a similar body to co-operate in organising this work.

It will not be out of place then to consider, on as wide a basis as possible and in a spirit of experiment, not only what are the most suitable topics, at the theological level, to embark on in dialogue, but, and this is more important, what are the presuppositions on either side with which eirenic discussion of these topics will inevitably be approached.

A Catholic, whose interest in the movement for Christian unity urges him to make ecumenical contacts with other Christians amongst whom he lives, will find himself, at least in town and city areas, confronted by Presbyterians, by Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists, and with a certain dominance of prestige by Anglicans. For his encounter a Catholic ecumenist will want to know about some if not all of these differing religious bodies; what sort of people are they, what divides them from each other, on what are they agreed? He will probably need knowledge to supplement his vague ideas of their history and how they came into being. He will be interested in their antecedent presuppositions, but still more in what are their aspirations, hopes, doubts and fears today concerning the prospect of future unity; its possibility, the changes it would involve and its dangers.

The Star Books on Reunion a series of six inexpensive paperbacks on unity as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists and Roman Catholics see it, contains the substance of this information in accessible and readable form. It is a pity that a seventh volume, on the Eastern Orthodox, was not included in the series, for full understanding of unity problems, especially the theological ones, requires the witness of these ancient churches. The authors are well chosen, highly qualified, theologically and pastorally, to represent the position of their respective communions. All of them share common ground in their conviction of the paramount importance of the ecumenical approach between Christians.

In recent months there has been controversy in the Catholic press casting doubt on the expediency of the ‘reunion’ or ecumenical work taking place within the Church, and promoted by the Secretariat for the Unity of Christians at the Vatican Council. It is said to be drying up the normal inflow of conversions, because some potential converts are encouraged to stay where they are in order to work for eventual unity between the Church and their own dissident communion. It has been asserted, though the authority for this does not appear widely based, that in Germany, for this reason, there is a calculated refusal on the part of some priests to accept prospective converts for instruction and reception. Whatever the truth may be in this matter the question is certainly being asked by a number of priests and lay people in this country whether this new apostolate is not encouraging a kind of indifferentism, in the minds of Catholics, concerning the uniqueness of the one true Church as the way of salvation for all men and so hindering individual conversions.

The question came up for discussion at the Heythrop Conference and, as far as I know, the general conclusion reached was that the work of attracting, instructing and receiving individual converts, and the work of mutual penetration and understanding between ourselves and other Christians, which is the aim of ecumenical encounter, are specifically different from each other in technique and approach, but in the long run compatible because they are complementary. Catholic ecumenism is a preparation of the ground, on a wide and corporate scale, for a conversion to truth, which will ultimately lead by God’s grace to unity in faith.

The year 1962 has seen a remarkable step forward here in England in the recognition of ‘unity’ or ‘reunion’ work as ‘a particular charge and duty of the Church’; an ‘excellent work’, which ‘should daily assume a more significant place within the Church’s universal pastoral care’. In these words the Instruction of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on the Ecumenical Movement describes the place of Catholic Ecumenism in the Church’s apostolate. This important Papal document was published in December 1949. It was addressed to Local Ordinaries, the Bishops of the Church, and its first concern was to remind them that Bishops, whom the Holy Ghost has placed to rule the Church of God, ought to make this ‘reunion’ work a special object of their care and attention. They must not only use great diligence in keeping it under effective supervision, they must also give it prudent encouragement and direction, with the twofold purpose of assisting those who are in search of truth and the true Church, and of shielding the faithful from the dangers which so easily accompany the progress of this movement.

To implement this directive of the Holy See more effectively the hierarchy of England and Wales appointed from among their number, a year ago, a committee for Unity to represent them in the guidance and promotion of unity work. The President of this committee is Archbishop Heenan of Liverpool, and he and his fellow bishops who are members of it have lost no time in getting to work on their important task. It is this that is responsible for the considerable movement forward of Catholic Ecumenism in England which this year is witnessing. Several meetings have been organized, with the committee’s sanction, of Anglican and Catholic scholars, for the discussion of ecumenical questions at a deep theological level.