Desk of the Executive Director
Dear Visitor
Welcome to all of you who are visiting the website for our secretariat at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Our secretariat serves the Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs which oversees seven ecumenical bilateral dialogues, two standing consultations with rabbinical associations, and three interreligious dialogues with the Muslim community here in the United States. In addition to these bilateral relationships, our Bishops work with teams of scholars and other Catholic representatives to support the efforts of multilateral exchanges such as the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Christian Churches (NCCC) and Christian Churches Together (CCT). At a time when many secular governments, as well as religious leadership, is recognizing the indispensable role that religion can play in peacefully resolving conflicts, the work of our Episcopal Conference in these arenas has a special urgency.
We invite you to peruse our website, which contains the latest press releases of our dialogues as well as study documents on a range of topics. The links to partner religious bodies and organizations allows for a comprehensive view of the ecumenical and interreligious landscape today. Our staff stand ready to assist you in any way we can on particular matters of research or pastoral application of the Catholic Church’s ecumenical and interreligious principles. Do not hesitate to call us if you think we can be of some help.
On September 4 I will be in the Netherlands for an academic fest honoring the centennial of the birth of Cardinal Johannes Willebrands (d. 2006), one of the great pioneers of Christian unity at the time of Vatican II. You may recall that Willebrands was the first Bishop-Secretary of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, which was established by Blessed John XXIII in 1960 and given an influential role in preparing for the council. Under the direction of Cardinal Augustin Bea, the Secretariat helped to coordinate the ecumenical observers at the council and ushered in a sea change in the Catholic Church’s views of other Christian communities. Willebrands himself was especially involved in building bridges to the Anglican communion and the Orthodox Church. On December 7, 1965, he read out the declaration by which the Catholic and Orthodox churches "remove from memory and from the midst of the Church" the mutual excommunications of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople.
Bernard of Chartres famously said that “we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” As we in the USCCB’s secretariat look back on the generation that led the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement, as well as into a period of reconciliation with the Jews and the followers of other religions, we can give thanks to God for their witness and fidelity to the will of Christ. As we engage new challenges in the moral and cultural spheres - which are no less arduous than those faced by our forbears who began on this journey more than a half century ago - we can draw strength from the “giants” who provide us with the peaceable, reconciling vision of Christ’s kingdom.
Father James Massa
Executive Director
[Father Massa is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and a graduate of Fordham University, where he earned his Ph.D. in systematic theology in 1997.]