Slap in the face to Ecumenism???

Not content to set liturgical tongues wagging, the Holy See has decided to give another slap in the face to the liberal agenda, this time on the Ecumenical cheek! I doubt they turned it willingly.

The content of this new document on the Church is fundamentally a question of definition. As Catholics we don't make up our own notions of 'what we think the Church is', or 'what it should be', despite what the Tablet says. The Church is what Christ gave us. It belongs to Him and we belong to Him through Her. This is basic catechism.

The Church is the Body of Christ, the hierarchically constituted and organised People of God who through Baptism and under the successors of Peter and the Apostles are called to imitate their founder in Holiness in order to be united with Him in Eternal Beattitude. (This is why I am a Catholic.)

If any one of these items is missing- you are missing a piece of the Church. And I do not mean that the other Christian communities are just one brick short of a Church and that some how they don't cut the ecclesial mustard. They are in the truest sense of the word- "de-formed". That is the their form, their definition, does not correspond to 'The Definition" that we in Faith hold to be what Christ left behind. (This is why I am not anything else.)

If you asked an Anglican what his definition of the Church was, it would leave out the part about Peter. Indeed any Christian (non-Catholic) definition of the Church would not correspond to the Catholic one. It is a different definition because it is a different reality. Something would be missing. If it were just our opinion then it would not be important. Since we as Catholics believe that it does matter, precisely because it is Christ's wish that it matters, then one can see why the Church can never say or be anything else.

Of course the document is a slap in the face to ecumenism- false ecumenism. One that seeks to make the Church into our own image and likeness, a definition that we just make-up for ourselves and brings us to abandon that which holds us together in the first place- Faith.