Vatican City, Jul 13, 2007 / 09:23 am
The president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, Cardinal Walter Kasper, said this week the new statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Questions on certain aspects of the doctrine on the Church,” “says nothing new, but rather expounds and explains in a synthetic way, the position which the Catholic Church has held up to now.”
In response to negative reactions by some Protestant leaders, Cardinal Kasper said the document is “an urgent invitation to continue in serene dialogue” and that “no new situation exists and therefore there is no objective reason to be resentful or to feel mistreated. All dialogue presupposes clarity about the different positions,” he said.
He noted that many Protestant leaders have recently called for ecumenical dialogue with clearly defined positions. “The present statement expounds and proclaims the Catholic position, that is, the issues that from a Catholic perspective unfortunately still divide us. This is not a limitation but rather it favors dialogue,” the cardinal said.
“A close reading of the texts clearly shows that the document does not say that Protestant churches are not churches, but rather that they are not churches in the proper sense, that is, they are not churches in the sense in which the Catholic Church understands the term church. This is totally obvious to anyone with a certain amount of ecumenical formation,” he added.