With reservations, joint Catholic-Lutheran text on ‘Baptism and Growth in Communion’
April 08, 2022
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CWN Editor's Note: The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation have issued an Baptism and Growth in Communion, an 80-page text which, because of Vatican reservations, has the status of “an open-ended study document not yet ready for reception.”
As part of the 2008-2019 phase of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity, the document was drafted by a group of clergy and theologians whose Catholic co-chairman was Auxiliary Bishop William Kenney of Birmingham (England).
The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “with the assistance of experts,” expressed “serious concerns” about “ecclesiological presuppositions and consequences as well as ambiguities and misunderstandings in the chosen terminology.”
Nonetheless, the document, according to the pontifical council, “includes important pneumatological impulses for ongoing theological and ecclesiological discussion. It makes a significant step in proposing a differentiating consensus on baptism.”
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