"Because He Was a German!" Cardinal Bea and the Origins of Roman Catholic Engagement in the Ecumenical Movement (review)

Rather than being another biography of Cardinal Augustin Bea, this book is a specialized study of the connections between the German ecumenical movement after World War II and establishment of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity in the spring of 1960. Jerome-Michael Vereb, a former member of the staff of the Secretariat (as it was then called), explains how the adversities of the Hitler years brought Protestants and Catholics together and aroused in some of them ardent hopes for an eventual reunion. In particular Vereb discusses the work of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Lorenz Jaeger of Paderborn, who relied heavily on the staff of the Johann Adam Möhler Institute at the Paderborn seminary. Another priest of the archdiocese, Monsignor Josef Höfer, providentially stationed in Rome, helped Bea to sort out the apparent discrepancies in Pius XII's teaching on church membership in the encyclicals Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei. This problem was a major ecumenical issue, and drew much attention at the Council.

The idea of a Roman office responsible for ecumenical affairs was already broached by Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh in a letter to Pope John XXIII on May 23, 1959, but the letter, passed on to the prefect of the Congregation for Oriental Churches, Eugène Cardinal Tisserent, was ignored. A further stimulus came from the so-called Rhodes incident of August 1959. Two Catholic priests, Johannes Willebrands and Christophe Dumont, were present as "journalists" at a meeting of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. When the two Catholics invited some members of the Orthodox representative to a friendly social meeting, the invitation was interpreted in World Council circles as an attempt to entice the Orthodox to abandon their membership in the World Council. The Holy Office in Rome, angered by the incident, proceeded to cancel other Catholic-Orthodox encounters, to the distress of ecumenists such as Jaeger. He and Bea, in private correspondence, agreed on the necessity of having a responsible ecumenical office for the Holy See.

The pièce de résistance of Vereb's book is a letter of March 4, 1960, drafted by Eduard Stakemeier of the Möhler Institut, revised and signed by Jaeger, and personally delivered to Pope John XXIII by Cardinal Bea. This letter formally recommended the establishment of a "Pontifical Commission to Promote Christian Unity" in the Roman Curia. Delivered on March 11, the letter prompted the Pope to set up what soon became the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.

For readers who are seeking a full account of the scholarly activities of Cardinal Bea, the massive biography of Stjepan Schmidt, S.J., may still be recommended. Vereb's book, as I have explained, deals with a limited aspect of Bea's career, and devotes almost as much attention to Cardinal Jaeger as it does to Bea.

Cardinal Bea in this account appears less as a theologian than as a consummate ecclesiastical diplomat, strongly committed to move forward on the ecumenical front. He is characterized as a gradualist, free from the utopian illusions of some of his cohorts, but nevertheless courageous, optimistic, and determined.

Father Vereb's study is replete with interesting details that cannot be enumerated in this brief review. The book is well researched, although a few names are misspelled (Valkenburg, Dambouriena, Semmelroth). The ordering of the material in the book is somewhat confusing. It often departs from the chronological sequence and falls in unnecessary repetitions. But Vereb tells an interesting story that fills in many facts about the background and genesis of the Secretariat for Promoting Unity.