Pope Francis appoints 66-year-old Spanish Bishop Miguel Ayuso Guixot as the new President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Bishop Miguel Ayuso Guixot succeeds the late Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who died in July 2018, as the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. He has been serving as Secretary of the Vatican dicastery. Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot was born in Seville on 17 June 1952. A Combonian Missionary of the Heart of Jesus, he was ordained priest on 20 September 1980. He was a missionary in Egypt and Sudan until 2002. He obtained a degree in Arabic and Islamic studies at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome in 1982, and a doctorate in dogmatic theology at the University of Granada in 2000. From 1989 he was professor of Islamology, first in Khartoum, then in Cairo. Later he taught at PISAI, where he held the office of Dean until 2012. He has presided over various meetings of inter-religious dialogue.
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Axios, Church! Receive this news from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. On Saturday May 11 2019, “the Holy and Sacred Synod, continuing its work, proceeded to fill the vacated seat of the Archdiocese of America following the voluntary resignation of its shepherd, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios Geron of America.

Therefore, following the suggestion, permission and exhortation of His-All Holiness, the holy synodical members upon invocation of the Holy Spirit, duly casted their votes and unanimously elected as Archbishop of America His Eminence Metropolitan Elpidophoros of Bursa, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Halki and Professor of the Theological School of the Aristoteleian University of Thessaloniki.”
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Participants at a historic gathering of church leaders from five Christian World Communions have issued a statement recommitting themselves to communicating the biblical message of salvation in new ways to contemporary society. We “wish to make more visible our common witness, in worship and service, on our journey together towards visible unity, walking together, praying together and working together.”
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The five Christian denominations closely associated with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) are taking part in a private consultation and public events this week to discuss how to take the document further. The JDDJ was originally agreed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999. The significant ecumenical text has been described as resolving the doctrinal dispute at the heart of the Reformation; and has since been adopted or affirmed by the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the World Methodist Council and the Anglican Consultative Council.
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Shrinking congregations and rising maintenance costs force old churches to be closed, sold or repurposed. A national charity that works to save old buildings estimates that 9,000 religious spaces in Canada will be lost in the next decade, roughly a third of all faith-owned buildings in the country. National Trust for Canada regeneration project leader Robert Pajot says every community in the country is going to see old church buildings shuttered, sold off or demolished. “Neighbourhoods are going to have multiple churches closing,” Pajot said. “Some people qualify this as a crisis, and I kind of agree. It is going to hit everybody.”
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Cardinal Augustin Bea was the first President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and worked tirelessly in the field of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Cardinal’s death, the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies in collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have been holding a series of scholarly lectures.
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Faith leads a believer to see in the other a brother or sister to be supported and loved. Through faith in God, who has created the universe, creatures and all human beings (equal on account of his mercy), believers are called to express this human fraternity by safeguarding creation and the entire universe and supporting all persons, especially the poorest and those most in need.

This transcendental value served as the starting point for several meetings characterized by a friendly and fraternal atmosphere where we shared the joys, sorrows and problems of our contemporary world. We did this by considering scientific and technical progress, therapeutic achievements, the digital era, the mass media and communications. We reflected also on the level of poverty, conflict and suffering of so many brothers and sisters in different parts of the world as a consequence of the arms race, social injustice, corruption, inequality, moral decline, terrorism, discrimination, extremism and many other causes.
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The “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” signed on Monday afternoon in Abu Dhabi by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad el-Tayeb, is not only a milestone in relations between Christianity and Islam but also represents a message with a strong impact on the international scene. In the preface, after affirming that “Faith leads a believer to see in the other a brother or sister to be supported and loved”, this text is spoken of as a text “that has been given honest and serious thought”, which invites “all persons who have faith in God and faith in human fraternity to unite and work together”.
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It is not uncommon to read optimistic appraisals of how the cause of Christian unity is progressing. There are in fact undeniable signs of continuing progress in relations between the divided churches as set out, for example, in the study document From Conflict to Communion, describing the substantial advance of relations between Catholics and Lutherans in fifty years of dialogue.

But not all is plain sailing. To the careful observer there are also signs of frustration and even retrenchment. To not a few, the traditional ways of doing ecumenism seem no longer capable of meeting new challenges coming from developments both within the Catholic Church and within the other Churches, our ecumenical partners.
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