Abbé Claude Barthe is a French traditionalist priest who was ordained in 1979 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Incardinated in the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon in 2005 and therefore in canonical good standing, he is an accomplished author on ecclesiastical subjects and, currently, a professor at the international seminary of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.
Rorate Caeli published an informative interview with Abbé Barthe from which the following is excerpted. This gentle and calm critique is no less devastating for its brevity:
MJ: In your book, which deals at length with the Council, you point out that the decree on ecumenism contains no definition whatsoever of this concept. In the years that followed, did Rome ever attempt to define the concept?
CB: In fact, the closest thing to a definition in the Unitatis redintegratio decree is this truism: “The term ‘ecumenical movement’ is taken to mean those undertakings and initiatives provoked and organized in favor of Christian unity” (n. 4). The most important subsequent text is John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint, which deals at length with the ecumenical commitment, but without further defining its scope. The Church was launched on a tremendous “movement”, without being able to say where we were going, or towards what unity we were heading.
And that’s normal, because ecumenism is typically that liberal Catholic in-between, neither really Catholic nor really heretical. The dilemma was as follows: for Protestant ecumenism, as advocated by the World Council of Churches, the unity of the Church will take place in the Church of Christ, with which no existing Church can claim to be fully identified; for traditional Catholic unionism, unity can only be achieved through the reintegration, individually or as a body, into the Church of those who have left it. Well, the ecumenism of Vatican II wanted to go beyond unionism (I heard Cardinal Willebrands, President of the Council for Dialogue, say with my own ears that we should no longer speak of “return”), without falling into Protestant heterodoxy. Square circle. I once respectfully poked Cardinal Ratzinger in the eye on this point: return of the separated to the same Catholic Church the separated left, or return to another Church? He replied: “Return to the Catholic Church, but ‘forward'”.
But ecumenism is not nothingness, because theology abhors a vacuum. The decree on ecumenism states that separated Christians should enjoy “imperfect communion” with the Catholic Church (Unitatis redintegratio, n. 3). Ut unum sint goes even further: it would be the separated communities themselves that would be in imperfect communion with the Catholic Church (n. 11). This is impossible: communion, founded on faith, like the state of grace, founded on charity, exists or does not exist, and one is no more half in a state of grace than one is half in communion with the Church. Protestants are not 20% or 30% Catholic, Orthodox 60% Catholic, and so on.
