Le Dialogue de l’Église catholique romaine et de l’Église Unie a publié un rapport sur le changement climatique intitulé l’Espérance en nous. Depuis octobre 2012, le Dialogue de l’Église catholique romaine et de l’Église Unie du Canada s’est réuni huit fois pour examiner les réponses de nos Églises à la crise écologique, en portant une attention particulière au changement climatique. Le rapport explore les ressources spirituelles de notre tradition commune pour faire face au changement climatique et travailler pour la justice écologique. Sans fermer les yeux sur les dangers réels des crises écologiques, le dialogue offre une vision d’ espérance fondée sur notre foi chrétienne commune, voulant qu’une nouvelle relation entre l’humanité et la création soit possible.
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The Third Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC III) has issued its first agreed statement with the title Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be the Church – Local, Regional, Universal. Since its first meeting in 1970, ARCIC has published thirteen agreed statements. The third phase of the dialogue began in 2011 with the dual mandate to explore “the Church as Communion, local and universal, and how in communion the local and universal Church come to discern right ethical teaching.” The current document completes the first part of this mandate.

Walking Together on the Way employs the method of Receptive Ecumenism to examine the structures by which Catholics and Anglicans order and maintain communion at the local, regional and universal level. It examines common theological principles that Anglicans and Catholics share, and the differentiated structures, based on these principles, by which they make decisions. This method invites both traditions to repentance and conversion, by looking at what is underdeveloped or wounded in themselves. It is also predicated on the belief that in our dialogue partner we meet a community in which the Holy Spirit is alive and active. We can therefore ask firstly, where our communities are in need of reform, and, secondly, what we can learn from the our dialogue partner to help us in this growth. The Commission described this process as “receptive learning.”
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According to a regional newspaper report, Archbishop Hans-Josef Becker of Paderborn has decided to allow Protestant spouses of Catholics living in his diocese to receive holy Communion “in individual cases.”

As the newspaper Westfalenblatt reported, the archbishop told his presbyteral council on June 27 that the document formerly known as a “pastoral handout,” which the German bishops’ conference has re-published as “pastoral guidance” following discussions with Rome, offers “spiritual help for the decision of conscience in individual cases accompanied by pastoral care.”

“At the meeting of the Council of Priests of the Archdiocese of Paderborn on 27 June 2018, I presented my interpretation [of the document] and formulated the expectation that all pastors in the Archdiocese of Paderborn will familiarize themselves intensively with the guidance document and will act in a spirit of pastoral responsibility,” the archbishop told the newspaper.
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After a day of touting ways in which Christians might share in greater unity, that commitment to coming together didn’t prevent Pope Francis from backing the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog in its decision to insist on caution regarding proposals for intercommunion with Protestants.

On a return flight to Rome on Thursday from a day-long ecumenical pilgrimage to Geneva, Francis said he supported the Vatican’s Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal-elect Luis Ladaria, in requiring a rethink of a draft proposal from the German bishops that would allow for non-Catholics to receive communion under certain conditions.

Among other items discussed during the 30-minute in-flight press conference was the global migrant and refugee situation – where, once again, Francis reiterated his support for the U.S. Catholic bishops in opposing the Trump administration’s hard line – as well as the challenges of nuclear weapons.
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The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) together with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU), as well as the Methodist, the Reformed and the Anglican communion will start a consultation process to discuss spiritual and ecclesial implications of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.

“We have now five signatories of this ecumenical declaration,” says Kaisamari Hintikka, LWF Assistant General Secretary for Ecumenical Relations. “We feel we are called to ask together what kind of spiritual and ecclesiastical consequences the JDDJ might have for our churches.”
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Pope Francis urged members of the German Lutheran Church, whom he received in the Vatican, to continue walking the path to unity.

Receiving a Delegation of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church in audience, Pope Francis on Monday recalled his positive 2016 visit to Lund in Sweden to mark the Common Commemoration of the Reformation.

Pointing out that “for the wounds of the past” the event could have provoked controversy and hatred, he said that instead it took place in a spirit of fraternal communion highlighting the fact that the last fifty years have been characterized by a “growing communion”.

“Thanks to the work of the Spirit, fraternal meetings, gestures based on the logic of the Gospel rather than human strategies, and through the official Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, it has been possible to overcome old prejudices on both sides” he said.
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Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople called on Christians to work together to build a culture of solidarity in the face of growing economic inequality and a lack of respect for the human dignity of the poor and of migrants.

The two leaders met privately May 26 before addressing an international conference sponsored by the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, which seeks to promote the teaching of St. John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical on social and economic justice.

“The current difficulties and crises within the global economic system have an undeniable ethical dimension,” Pope Francis told some 500 business leaders, theologians and proponents of Catholic social teaching.
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Dipping his bicycle tires into the Pacific Ocean on the morning of Saturday, May 19, Bishop Rob Hardwick of the Diocese of Qu’Appelle officially began a cross-country pilgrimage to the Atlantic coast to promote unity, healing, and reconciliation within the Anglican Church of Canada.

Over the course of a planned 62 days, the 7,877-kilometre cycling journey will take Bishop Hardwick from Victoria, B.C. to St. John’s, Newfoundland, during which he will meet and pray with thousands of people in hundreds of congregations.

“I’m hoping to gather people’s comments, what they understand those three words [unity, healing, and reconciliation] to mean in their own lives,” the bishop said.

“Obviously in our church, we are fairly conflicted in some issues. So what does it mean to be a church of unity? What does it mean to be a church of healing and reconciliation as well?”
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An informal but officially-sanctioned ecumenical dialogue between Anglican and Roman Catholic theologians has met to consider “the difficult question of Anglican Orders.” The Malines Conversation Group was originally established in the early 1920s by Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Malines-Brussels; some 24 years after Pope Leo XIII declared that Anglican Orders were “absolutely null and utterly void”. The 1920s Malines Conversations Group envisioned the restoration of communion between Anglicans and Roman Catholics in the phrase l’Église Anglicane unie non absorbée – united, but not absorbed.

Since then, a number of formal dialogues and relational groups between the two churches have been established, including the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), which undertakes theological dialogue; and the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), an episcopal commission which seeks ways to put joint agreements into practice.
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