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Its teachings, both before and after the Second Vatican Council, equate the one Church of Christ with the Catholic Church. Ecumenism takes as it starting point that Christ founded just one Church, not many churches; hence the Catholic Church has as its ultimate hope and objective that through prayer, study, and dialogue, the historically ...
Some elements of the Catholic perspective on ecumenism are illustrated in the following quotations from the council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio of 21 November 1964, and Pope John Paul II's encyclical, Ut Unum Sint of 25 May 1995. Every renewal of the Church is essentially grounded in an increase of fidelity to her own calling.
Pope Gregory X defined three aims for the council: aid to Jerusalem, union with the Greek Orthodox Church and reform of the Catholic Church. The council achieved a short-lived unity with the Greek representatives, who were denounced for this back home by the hierarchy and the emperor. A teaching on purgatory was defined.
Three of them – on ecumenism, non-Christian religions and religious freedom – were important advances in the Church's teaching. Mission Activity – The decree Ad gentes ("To the Nations", 1965) treats evangelization as the fundamental mission of the Catholic Church, "to bring good news to the poor."
Pope John Paul II refers to and builds on the teaching of Unitatis Redintegratio in his encyclical letter of 25 May 1995, Ut unum sint.. Cardinal Walter Kasper discussed the status of the problems by the document on the 40th anniversary of the promulgation of Unitatis in remarks entitled "The Decree on Ecumenism – Read Anew After Forty Years".
The Catholic Church does not consider the validity of an ecumenical council's teaching to be in any way dependent on where it is held or on the granting or withholding of prior authorization or legal status by any state, in line with the attitude of the 5th-century bishops who "saw the definition of the church's faith and canons as supremely ...
Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time (2015), sculpture by Joshua Koffman at the Jesuit-run Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, commemorating Nostra aetate.. Nostra aetate (from Latin: "In our time"), or the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions, is an official declaration of the Vatican II, an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church.
Francis reflected on the close relationship between the Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, saying that the visit "strengthens the bonds of friendship and brotherhood that already exist between the See of Peter and the See of Mark", and praised the Commission for Theological Dialogue for preparing ground for dialogue ...