"Ecumenical Follies" Update

Will Someone Please Pronounce the Patient Dead?

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        On May 29, 2005, the Sunday Times online edition reported that "homosexual priests in the Church of England will be allowed to ‘marry’ their boyfriends under a proposal drawn up by senior bishops, led by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury."

        According to the London Times, "the decision ensures that gay and lesbian clergy who wish to register relationships under the new ‘civil partnerships’ law — giving them many of the tax and inheritance advantages of married couples — will not lose their licences to be priests." They will, however, "have to give an assurance to their diocesan bishop that they will abstain" from their unspeakable carnal relations.

        This is the "church" that the Vatican has spent forty years — and who knows how much of the faithful’s money — wining and dining on the "ecumenical dialogue" circuit. This is the "church" with which the Vatican is seriously engaging in discussions on such issues as the papal primacy and the Marian dogmas. This is the "church" whose loony leader thinks he has "no choice" but to allow his homosexual "priests" to cohabit so long as they promise to behave themselves, when what he should really do is expel them all from the Church of England and then beg for a corporate submission to, and reunion with, Rome on the part of the rest of his Godforsaken excuse for a church.

        Really, now, how much more evidence does the Vatican need to realize that "ecumenism" is a folly, a joke, and an embarrassment to the cause of the Gospel? What will it take for Church authorities to see what any simple member of the faithful can see: that ecumenism is going nowhere but downhill, while at the same time it is causing the spread of a deadly indifferentism through the Church?

        In his inaugural enyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979), Pope John Paul II said this of ecumenism in its still-early stages:

"There are people who in the face of the difficulties or because they consider that the first ecumenical endeavors have brought negative results would have liked to turn back. Some even express the opinion that these efforts are harmful to the cause of the Gospel, are leading to a further rupture in the Church, are causing confusion of ideas in questions of faith and morals and are ending up with a specific indifferentism. It is perhaps a good thing that the spokesmen for these opinions should express their fears."

        It certainly was a good thing that the faithful expressed their fears, for those fears have been utterly vindicated. Ecumenism was "dead on arrival", since it began with a false principle: that the Anglicans, the other Protestants, and the schismatic Orthodox could somehow achieve unity with Catholics, yet not have to return to believing and professing publicly, whole and entire, the Roman Catholic faith.

        When will someone in the Vatican have the courage finally to pronounce the patient dead? When will they admit that the only path of Christian unity is the path to Rome, which must be trod by all those who left the Eternal City in a rebellion against divine authority? The answer to these questions lies in the Message of Fatima, particularly the yet-to-be-disclosed text of the words of Our Lady, contained in the Third Secret.