The will of God in the life of Christians. This is the central theme of the 29th Ecumenical Meeting of Bishops, friends of the Focolare Movement, which is taking place between the 9th to13th of September at the Mariapolis Centre in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. There are 35 bishops from 17 countries participating, from Australia to Hong Kong, from India to Brazil. They include bishops from the Syrian-Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, the Methodist, Lutheran-Evangelical churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. On Sunday 12th of September, the bishops will attend the Angelus with the Pope at Castelgandolfo. A visit from Cardinal Walter Kasper, president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, is foreseen, in which he will give a review of the present situation of ecumenism.

The witness of Christians. “Sermons have no value today. Faced with the inflation of the spoken word, which the media has so accustomed us to, what is needed now is witnessing; this is the most promising prospective for evangelization”. These were words spoken by Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, Archbishop Emeritus of Prague, as he presented the Ecumenical Meeting of Bishops to some journalists. The focus of this year’s meeting will be to reflect on: “The will of God in the life of Christians”.

“This topic,” Cardinal Vlk went on to explain “is not uniquely religious, because in a secularized world in which you feel the absence of God, the human person tends to close himself in his own will, making it difficult, then, to accept or to confront it with the will of an other”. According to Vlk, “the answer to the crises that Europe is passing, would be to show by our witness that God is near to every person in history”. But this is a witness – the Cardinal immediately added – that necessarily requires “the unity of the churches, because it is only if we are united that our witness will be efficacious”. This is the great novelty and message that you derive from important meetings like these.

With regard to the state of ecumenism today and the crisis in dialogue, the cardinal reiterated: “What unites us is much more than what divides us. In a sense, there are many things that allow us already now to live as if we were a united church. The experience of these 29 years of uninterrupted meetings between bishops of different churches,” the cardinal concluded“confirms our confidence that “unity is possible”. Bishop Christian Krause, from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany was of the same opinion, while noting that there is an “institutional crisis taking place in Europe at all levels”. He did not share the recent idea of an “ecumenical winter”, often heard of in ecumenical circles, because there are many initiatives that are testifying to the contrary. He offered two examples: the experience of Kirchentag in Monaco, Germany; and “Together for Europe”, which is an ongoing joint initiative between 160 European Christian movements. When the Anglican Bishop Robin Smith from the diocese of St Alban’s in England took the floor, he stated that he has been participating in these meetings, sponsored by the Focolare Movement, for twenty years. “You don’t come to these meetings to debate about our differences, but to live a concrete experience of unity, taking for ourselves the prayer of Jesus to the Father, ‘that all be one’. This is an experience that allows us to experience the presence of the Risen Lord among us.”

The Pact of Unity. The bishop’s meetings include a “pact of unity”. Bishop Armando Bortolaso, one time Apostolic Vicar of Aleppo in Syria, now living in Lebanon, explained it in these words: “We declare that we are prepared to give our lives each for the other, to love the other’s diocese as we love our own. Then we put our signature to it and exchange the sign of peace”. It’s always a powerful and moving moment that gives – as the Catholic bishop says – “the temperature of this ecumenism of life and of the heart. These are meetings between brothers more than between friends, because each is ready to give his life for the other”.