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When these lines appear in print the third session of Vatican II will be in full swing and some crucial declarations of the Church's mind, which must have a vital bearing on the problems of Christian unity, will be in the making. Not least in importance among these is the revised Schema de Oecumenismo. It will perhaps be useful to examine the attitude of the World Council of Churches to what is happening in the view of representatives well qualified to speak for it.
This attitude may, I think, be summed up by saying that while there is generous recognition of progress there is also considerable doubt among a number of responsible non-Catholic ecumenists whether, in view of its well known presuppositions, the Catholic Church can, as such, engage in ecumenical dialogue on the terms now common to all the member-Churches of the World Council of Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox. This doubt is fairly widespread. It is expressed, for instance, by Dr Lukas Vischer, one of the World Council observers at the Vatican Council. Speaking during the Unity Octave in Zurich in 1964, just after Pope Paul's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he said: The non-Roman Catholic Churches do not question the fact that the Roman Catholic Church must claim to be the one and only Church. But if a permanent conversation is to be established between the divided Churches, then a form of fellowship must be found which does not compel the non-Roman Catholic Churches to accept the Roman Catholic concept of unity and of union.
