Question 4.81

4.81 Do your travels, as well as your African roots, allow you to look differently at ecumenism?

You have to recognize that the emphasis on interreligious dialogue and ecumenism is very recent. The Second Vatican Council paid particular attention to these questions. Although the results seem meager, there is better understanding now between the different religions. Sometimes we can be very disappointed by the use of religion and of God to satisfy the violence that slumbers within every man.

Although there was real progress made with the Anglicans, some theological developments and the decision to go ahead and ordain women as priests and bishops are now an insurmountable obstacle. This mutation of Anglicanism has led a significant number of Protestant pastors to seek admission as priests in the Catholic Church.

Let us turn then to Orthodoxy. I know that Benedict XVI did great work to promote unity among Christians. Relations between the Orthodox and the Catholics are going forward; the question of the primacy and the jurisdiction of the pope could be accepted by Orthodoxy without great difficulty at the doctrinal level. Benedict XVI rightly recalled that Orthodoxy acknowledges that the bishop of Rome is the Protos, the First; this had already been enacted at the Council of Nicaea, in 325. It remains to be seen whether the bishop of Rome has specific functions and missions.

Certainly, the pontificate of Benedict XVI was too short to accomplish major progress. On March 14, 2010, he made a historic gesture of great ecumenical importance when he visited the Lutheran church in Rome that John Paul II himself had visited in 1983.

How can we forget, finally, that the Polish pope was the first successor of Peter to go into a synagogue? In the Holy Land, that man, who could not forget that many of his Ashkenazy friends from Wadowice had perished in the Nazi death camps, did not hesitate to declare that the Jews are our elder brothers in the faith. His successor, Benedict XVI, stressed in his Petrine ministry an appreciation for the spiritual heritage common to Jews and Christians. For they share much: both religions pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they have the same roots. As a symbolic action, Benedict XVI decided to plant an olive tree at the residence of Shimon Peres, the president of the State of Israel. In his farewell speech at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel-Aviv, the pope mentioned this gesture and recalled that the apostle Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, had described the Church of the Gentiles as a branch “from a wild olive tree, grafted into a cultivated olive tree” that is, the People of the Covenant (see Rom 11:17-24). The pilgrimage of Francis to the Holy Land was then a magnificent witness promoting peace.