A bit of a break

I’ll be taking a bit of a break for Advent/pre-Nativity fast. I will continue to look after the comboxes but there shouldn’t be new posts until after Christmas. A holy and blessed season to all.

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Bishop Hilarion on Ravenna

Here’s a report in rather confusing English from Interfax: “Bishop Hilarion requests the Theologian Commission to examine the ambiguous document adopted at the Orthodox-Catholic conference in Ravenna.”

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Reflections on the Ravenna Document

The Ravenna Document is stimulating great and profound thoughts in the Orthodox-Catholic blogosphere.
First, from an Orthodox perspective, John at Ad Orientem has two posts on Ecumenical Councils (post I and post II). I’m encouraged to see this sort of constructive, rather than nitpicky and dismissive, response from a fellow Orthodox.
Since Orthodoxy for whatever reasons (I [...]

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B16’s Liturgical Reform and Ecumenism

From the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson:

Two and a half years after the name “Josephum” came booming down from the balcony of St Peter’s, making liberal Catholics weep with rage, Pope Benedict XVI is revealing his programme of reform. And it is breathtakingly ambitious.
The 80-year-old Pontiff is planning a purification of the Roman liturgy in which decades [...]

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The Final Ravenna Document

RAVENNA, Italy, NOV. 15, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the final document of the plenary assembly of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held Oct. 8-14 in Ravenna. The statement, which was released today, is titled “Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: [...]

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Merton on Church Unity

I can unite in myself, in my own spiritual life, the thought of the East and the West, of the Greek and Latin Fathers, I will create in myself a reunion of the divided Church and from that unity in myself can come the exterior and visible unity of the Church. For if we want [...]

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The Desire for Christian Unity

The life of the Church reproduces on a large scale the life of the individual soul. The Christian Church in its two thousand years of existence has gone through the same religious experience as the Christian, the same crises and the same conflict.
I want to touch upon one aspect of this interior and intimate conflict [...]

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More from Ravenna

Rome, Nov. 15, 2007 (CWNews.com) – The final document produced by a joint Catholic-Orthodox theological commission is a “modest first step,” Cardinal Walter Kasper told reporters. The 46-paragraph statement approved by the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue at an October meeting in Ravenna, Italy, was released in Rome on November [...]

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B16 on Chrysostom

In August, Pope Benedict XVI released a letter commemorating the 1,600th anniversary of the death of Saint John Chrysostom. Until an official English translation becomes available, Father John Zuhlsdorf offers his own translation (Microsoft Word format), as well as some interesting comments on the letter (see especially his comments on the connection between the Roman [...]

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Christian Unity Involves the Whole Church

We speak increasingly of Christian unity but I wonder how many people understand what it means.
Ask a Christian, even an enlightened one, and he will almost always tell you: “If the heads of the churches reach agreement, we shall have union.”
At first sight this appears reasonable. We all have the impression that union would be [...]

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