Catholic and Ecumenical: History and Hope, Why the Catholic Church Is Ecumenical and What She Is Doing about It (review)

Frederick M. Bliss's Catholic and Ecumenical is a welcome addition to the theological library. This revised edition of an earlier work (1999) serves a variety of readers. For the new student of theology it is a textbook of the aide-mémoire of ecumenism. For the Catholic in the pew, it is a handbook about his or her Church's involvement in Christian unity. For the seasoned ecumenist it is a reference guide for research. Whoever, the reader is quickly introduced to the heart of the matter: ecclesiology, vis-à-vis the first words of the book's title. Midway in the title, the words history and hope reflect a hermeneutic and methodology by which the author anchors his portrayal of the Catholic Church as a church "catholic" and "ecumenical."What emerges is a triad of history, theology, and pastorality. History situates the theological narrative from the God-given gift of the unity of the Church, through the human sin of disunity and division, to the converting call to seek unity anew. History frames the pastoral praxis that engenders the hope that the Catholic Church has herself reformed, emerging from catholic isolation to ecumenical integration. For Father Bliss, the Catholic Church and all churches are each called to claim a self-understanding that identifies them as part of the one Church of Christ.

Let the reader, however, not be caught off-guard by the accessible writing style of the author, a veteran theologian and professor of ecumenical theology. Catholic and Ecumenical is no light reading. Its content is dense and its process intricate. At times the text offers a challenging wrestling match to the reader, especially when the author shifts from a diachronic account to a synchronic update. For example, chapter 6, "Reformation in England," opens with a review of ecclesial models of unity, a twentieth-century concept (pp. 123–25). Apart from one model, typos/typoi that describes Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, this has little to do with the English Reformation. This also is the case with what follows, i.e., an explanation of the notion of "hierarchy of truths" from the Second Vatican Council (pp. 125–27). Furthering the disconnection is the reference to "conciliar teaching" without identifying the council (p. 125). Why confuse the ecumenical reader, who encounters council and conciliar in relation to church councils and conciliar ecumenism? This introduction ends with mention of Trent, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and Orthodoxy as "background" (p. 127) for consideration of the English Reform. Even a seasoned ecumenist finds difficulty making connections. Perhaps the problem is the chapter's title. Of its thirty-two pages of text, less than one-third of them discuss the English Reform per se.

Other glitches and lacunae of times, events, sources, peoples, places, and so forth also make Catholic and Ecumenical a challenging read. Dates are sometimes incorrect (p. 33 has 1926 as the year of Jan Willebrands's death; he died in 2006), or missing (Raymond Brown, pp. 3, 36; his dates are 1928–98), or do not appear with the first citation (p. 39 first mentions Azusa Street Revival; p. 150 gives its date, 1906). Entries in the index have errors of page references ("Pentecostal" does not appear on p. 126). Some may be typographical, unfortunately missed in proofreading. However, the book has glitches of a more serious nature. For example, p. 145 bears a subtitle, "Methodist Signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification." The section and its question are misleading. The World Methodist Conference signed an association document on the doctrine; it did not sign the Joint Declaration.

Only because this volume is such an important contribution to ecumenical study in general that specific...