With a view toward the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, a pontifical committee has launched a worldwide treasure hunt.

Many of the more than 2,800 cardinals and bishops who participated in all or part of the 1962-65 council kept diaries, or at least notes; some wrote articles for their diocesan newspapers and most — in the days before emails and relatively cheap trans-Atlantic phone calls — wrote letters home.

The Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences is asking church archivists, and even the family members of deceased council fathers, to look through their papers to find reflections that can add a personal touch to the historical research already conducted on the official acts of the council.
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A top Vatican ecumenist said different types of divisions affect Catholic relations with the Orthodox churches and with those that were born from the Protestant Reformation, but both can be resolved with dialogue.

He also criticized the “anti-Catholic attitude” displayed by some Pentecostals and said Catholics must resist a temptation to adopt the “sometimes problematic evangelical methods” of those churches.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the Swiss-born president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, spoke at The Catholic University of America Nov. 3. The title of his talk was “Fundamental Aspects of Ecumenism and Future Perspectives.”
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Pope & Archbishop of Canterbury call for common Christian witness

Pope Benedict XVI and Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury knelt together before the tomb of an 11th-century Christian king after affirming the need for Catholics and Anglicans to give a united witness to society. St. Edward the Confessor, who is buried in the Anglicans’ Westminster Abbey, reigned five centuries before English Christians became divided.

The pope and the primate of the Church of England paid homage together to the Christian king Sept. 17 at the end of an afternoon that included public speeches, a 30-minute private meeting and a joint ecumenical prayer service in Westminster Abbey. Archbishop Williams welcomed Pope Benedict as the first pope ever to visit Westminster Abbey, which was home to a community of Catholic Benedictine monks until 1540 when King Henry VIII dissolved the monastic community.
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Cardinal asks dialogue partners if an ecumenical catechism might work

A Vatican official has floated the idea of a shared “ecumenical catechism” as one of the potential fruits of 40 years of dialogue among Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and members of the Reformed churches.
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In the midst of a protest by a small number of Orthodox monks and faithful, the official Catholic-Orthodox dialogue commission met in Cyprus Oct. 16-23. The meeting of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church focused on a key factor in the ongoing division between Catholic and Orthodox: the role of the pope as bishop of Rome. The protesters — who were arrested Oct. 20, the third day of their demonstration — claimed that the ongoing dialogue between the two churches was aimed at getting the Orthodox to submit to papal authority. According to a statement released by the dialogue commission Oct. 23, the commission’s Orthodox members discussed “the negative reactions to the dialogue by certain Orthodox circles and unanimously considered them as totally unfounded and unacceptable, providing false and misleading information.” The Orthodox delegates “reaffirmed that the dialogue continues with the decision of all the Orthodox churches and is pursued with faithfulness to the truth and the tradition of the church,” said the statement released in Cyprus and at the Vatican.
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Anglican leader’s concern for unity reflects Vatican concerns

Vatican concerns about how some recent decisions of the U.S. Episcopal Church will impact the search for full Anglican-Roman Catholic unity are echoed in a reflection by Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Communion.

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Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunication of four bishops ordained against papal orders in 1988 by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The move was considered a major concession to the archbishop’s traditionalist followers. The Vatican said the decree removing the excommunication, signed Jan. 21 and made public three days later, marked an important step toward full communion with the Society of St. Pius X, founded by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1970.

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The Vatican has announced the excommunication of certain members of the Army of Mary, a sect in Canada whose teachings have been deemed dangerous and erroneous by church authorities.
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The challenge of mixed marriage in American life—and how the communities are responding to its problems andpossibilities both for the couples and for the raising of children—was the major topic of discussion at the semi-annual meeting of the U.S. Catholic-Jewish Consultation Committee. With the mixed marriage rate rising to around 50 percent in the Jewish
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