The Catholic presence:

...Differences of perception even on social issues were apparent in Vancouver...

...To viewers in the national Canadian TV audience, excepting of course the ecumenical experts, the distinctions must have been invisible...

...Most satisfying and most exciting as always was to see the world Christian community gathered together in all its variety, even if only a tiny sample was present...

...No wonder the prayers and the hymns shook the poles of that tent and no wonder that the Roman Catholic elephant had at least an exploratory trunk inside...

...In fact, such gatherings have a different set of dynamics...

...Biblical prophecy it may not be, but this is how international organizations tend to function...

...She was eventually not granted a visa to attend, although the ostensible reason for her absence was illness...

...It might be a possibility for various episcopal conferences to join (as they have joined National Councils of Churches in some places...

...By and large, Vancouver was a good assembly...

...The public statements seem to be all that much of the U.S...

...Park, a Korean Presbyterian pastor who has spent time in jail for opposing his nation's military regime, had said flatly that "injustice is worse than war...

...There, at the WCC's Sixth Assembly, they would have come across about 4500 people from around the world who indeed sat earnestly in meetings much of the day and discussed a variety of the world's problems but who also seemed to spend quite a lot of time in a large yellow-and-white-striped tent engaged in, would you believe, worship...

...In addition, some observers claim to detect greater interest by John Paul II in relations with the Eastern Orthodox than with Anglicans and Protestants...

...Last year at Lima, Peru, they came up with a document on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry which was unanimously passed with no abstentions and sent on to the member churches for their "reception...

...A Roman Catholic staff member for the Commission is expected to be named by the Vatican soon...

...Nonetheless, it was clearly evident that a great many Roman Catholics in the congregation did receive communion...

...All of this led General Secretary Philip Potter to hail Vancouver as "the people's assembly," but the fact remained that many of the papers produced by the eight issue groups were mediocre and that the resolutions on public issues could have been better drafted...

...The extent to which worship became the center of the Assembly was probably a surprise even to its organizers...

...the mere fact that the place of worship was central, and yet separate in the distinctive tent, served to make the services visible...

...and Western press (with honorable exceptions and with the important proviso that this myopia is more common among management than reporters) regard as real events at church gatherings...

...Beyond this, however, the extent and variety of the worship pointed to the present state of the ecumenical movement...

...This is where some Protestants yearned for a little Roman Catholic intellectual rigor...

...About half of the speakers at the plenary sessions were women and there was a lively women's center called "The Well" which ran programs throughout the meeting...

...ARTHUR J. MOORE...

...It, too, has received wide attention across the ecumenical spectrum...

...Part of this impact was shown in the broad Roman Catholic participation in the Assembly, probably the widest Catholic representation in any of the WCC's six world gatherings...

...Catholics had a role in the worship services held by local parishes...

...The WCC has no world communions among its members but rather national churches from various countries...

...In accordance with current ecumenical norms, neither Archbishop Kyril nor Bishop Scheele participated in the communion portion of the service...

...This is not an easy task...

...It was very apparent at Vancouver that the persona...

...Since the WCC's Nairobi Assembly of 1975, a group within the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism which had both Roman Catholic and Protestant Evangelical membership produced a paper on "Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation...

...The Canadians, for their opening ceremony (televised live across the nation and'replete with the governor-general), invited Roman Catholic layman Jean Vanier to give the main address...

...The Assembly certainly worked hard to hold all these elements together...

...But the mere fact of such progress was bound to have an impact...

...media like Time or "60 Minutes' ' may think of it as a relentlessly left-wing political organization...

...The Vancouver Assembly was not asked to vote on either of these documents, since they are matters for the churches and the Assembly can legislate only for the Council itself...

...Where one side of a dispute is not represented and the other is present will lead to something like the Middle East statement...

...Dariene Keju-Johnson of the Marshall Islands, a victim of radiation sickness, made a strong impact as she talked about the effects of nuclear testing in the Pacific...

...Catholics worked on the Assembly staff...

...Thus he has more experience with the Orthodox...

...and in its praise of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua...

...The World Council insists that it is not a church version of Amnesty International but represents the will and desires of its member churches...

...As Paulist Father Thomas Stransky pointed out in Vancouver, the Central Committee of the WCC would be fifty-five percent Roman Catholic...

...Catholics served on the local planning committee...

...Thus, where churches are critical of their own governments, so is the World Council...

...heroes of the participants were Allan Boesak and Bishop Desmond Tutu, both leaders against apartheid in South Africa...

...In this it was both helped and hampered by the pressure of time and the fact that eighty percent of the delegates were attending their first assembly...

...This comment about background and interest points to another strain within the World Council, between a Western interest in church unity and a third-world emphasis on social questions...

...Probably the most dramatic example of the complicated RC-WCC relationship appeared during the eucharist, which was based on the Lima text and celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury...

...Where they are not so critical, neither by and large is the World Council...

...Of course," as one Catholic remarked, "it would have taken us four years to produce the drafts...

...He is the first pope in centuries who is not from the West but comes from the Slavic tradition...

...Rome, for example, has sent the document out to all its episcopal conferences, to theologians, and to each diocese with a request for study and discussion, and it is said that the statement has been given the widest circulation of any document since Vatican II...

...Part of this reflects the Canadian scene, where ecumenical working together is notably more relaxed than in the United States...

...It has been agreed for some years on both sides that this is not a wise idea...

...ALL OF WHICH raised in many minds the recurring question of Roman Catholic membership in the World Council...

...Nobody," he said, "wants that elephant in the garden...

...Less official participation was broad...

...The pope's visit to WCC headquarters in Geneva, postponed because of the assassination attempt on him, has now been rescheduled...

...No one would deny the importance of both these emphases in any Council of Churches worthy of the name...

...Since the Roman Catholic church is a full participant in Faith and Order (as are the Eastern Orthodox churches), the implications here are potentially huge...

...The assisting ministers were a Danish Lutheran woman, a Baptist from Hungary, a Methodist from Benin, a Moravian from Jamaica, a Reformed minister from Indonesia (also a woman), and a United Church minister from Canada...

...The evening worship services in the tent were planned by local churches...

...Asked to comment on each other's statements, Caldicott said Park's statement was "pre-nuclear thinking" while he reaffirmed his position...

...Caldicott, the tireless campaigner against nuclear weapons, had said that "the simple scientific and medical truth is that man can no longer fight...

...An example of the first position is the Vancouver statement on Central America, fiery in its denunciation of the U.S...

...The World Council, always worried about becoming simply a self-perpetuating clique of clergy and denominational bureaucrats, has been working hard to increase the percentage of women and youth at the Assembly...

...Part of this emphasis was certainly serendipitous...

...They would have undoubtedly been astonished if they had been dropped down on the campus of the University of British Columbia in late July or early August...

...Stransky feels that this is a matter of background...

...Still, it is hard to imagine future generations turning to these documents for guidance...

...This was vividly illustrated at a press conference following plenary session speeches by Helen Caldicott and Park Hyung Kyu...

...Even here, however, the question of size causes problems...

...While the Council's Program to Combat Racism was getting all the attention, the theologians in the Faith and Order Commission were laboring quietly away as they have been for many years...

...This does not mean simply the official "delegated observers," who remained at about the same number (approximately twenty), or the official greetings from Pope John Paul II, which were warm but no breakthrough...

...Papal interest in the proceedings was reportedly underscored by the fact that the pope personally added a Polish woman close to Solidarity to the observers list...

...We have opened Pandora's box, thus relegating war to one of the anachronisms of history...

...Boesak, who is well aware of both positions, spoke of the "concern of many Christians in the third world that the issue of peace will be separated from the issue of justice, making of 'peace' primarily a North Atlantic concern...

...Because he is less familiar with Western Protestantism does not mean dialogue with Protestants will be put in second place...

...The current Western liberal emphasis on nuclear disarmament is regarded with suspicion and some incomprehension by many in the third world...

...Russian Orthodox Archbishop Kyril offered the prayer and one of the Scripture readings was given by Roman Catholic Bishop Paul-Werner Scheele of West Germany...

...Catholic seminarians attended special programs run in conjunction with the Assembly...

...The trick is truly to meld the two strains so that they become mutually reinforcing rather than parallel tracks which might split apart...

...an example of the second is the statement on Afghanistan, a carefully worded diplomatic brief backing the UN Secretary General...