In 1810, the Bishop of Durham, Shute Barrington, in the extraordinary Charge to the Clergy wrote of his hopes for 'catholic union' between Roman Catholics and 'the Catholics of the Church of England'. Of course, he meant for Roman Catholics to adapt to an Anglican perspective, but his motivation was deeper: a search in a spirit of truth and charity to overcome prejudice, roused passions, bias and anything contrary to the Gospel. It is not surprising that he was in favour of lifting the civil disabilities Catholics had faced for centuries, although he felt political power should be denied them as long as the Pope maintained opposition to the legitimacy of the British state. This idea of 'Catholic' in a broad sense to describe the Anglican polity in relation to the rest of Christianity echoes the thinking of John Jewel and Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud. But it also looks forward to the inspiration behind Archbishop Michael Ramsey's and Pope Paul VI's Common Declaration in 1966. In some ways it is also the precursor of Cardinal Walter Kasper's great idea, as President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, of 'Receptive Ecumenism'> Thus the Catholic Church not only learns from other Christian traditions, but moves to overcome the disunity whereby it has not been able to enjoy the gifts and workings God has provided for them, and to receive them into her life and make them her own.
In 1821, the Rector of St Bride's Church in Liverpool, the Revd James Haldane Stewart, published Hints for the General Union of Christians for the Outpouring of the Spirit, calling for the first Monday of each New Year to be set aside for prayer for unity. The proposal combined for the first time the Scottish-American movement for a 'Concert of Prayer' at a regular, given time with the Wesleyan Evangelical expectation that people from all Christians could rise above the confession to which they belonged and unite in common faith and prayer.
At the time, no one thought that this included Catholics, but 150 years later, looking back, this was seen as a vital part of the foundations of what was to become the Week of Prayer and the whole edifice of spiritual ecumenism. It was, after all, only a few years ahead of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the general relaxation of attitudes to Catholics, not least in the light of the persecution of Catholic clergy, religious and lay people under the French Revolution, the growing assault of secular liberalism on Christianity in France and elsewhere in Europe, and the greater familiarity of British people with the many Catholic refugees in their midst. It was becoming clearer to some in Britain that Christianity not only had a Protestant dimension, it had a legacy from the past, in which Christendom had been united and strong in company with Rome, and that there was a contemporary Catholic dimension which, increasingly, it made no sense to ignore.
Nevertheless, this initiative occasioned the first time that Christians of different denominations were brought together to pray together in public. It was thus a visible sign of unity.
In 1824, James Warren Doyle, Catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in Ireland, observed that on most matters - the Canon of Scripture, the faith, justification, the mass, the sacraments - there were actually few essential differences between Catholics and Protestants, the present diversity arising from historic forms of terminology. He called for both sids to shake off the old prejudices and ill will, and to overcome ignorance and misunderstanding. Pride and scoring points ought to be foreign to a discussion of such subjects, he insisted, and only a love of Christian humility, charity and truth could be of benefit. Paul Couturier was to speak in almost exactly the same terms over a hundred years later, when he launched the renewed Week of Prayer for Christian Unity at the Cathedral of Lyon in 1933.
Germany since the Reformation had lived with being a collection of states, some Catholic, some Protestant, within the loose structure of the Holy Roman Empire and then its successors after 1805. The realities of living with religious pluralism meant there was a much stronger tradition of dialogue and disputation on religious ideas between Catholic and Protestant university theology faculties than in Britain, significantly distanced from European studies through its isolation by the English Channel and preoccupied with global imperial concerns. In 1825, a young lecturer in the Catholic theology faculty of the University of Tübingen, Father Johann Adam Möhler, in the course of dialogue with Protestant counterparts, produced his book, Unity in the Church, which many see as the foundation of modern Catholic ecclesiology. Möhler saw the gap in Protestant movements in favour of unity: that they failed to take account of the visible reality of the Church and its structure as the expression and instrument of the Gospel and faith they proclaim. Unity is not therefore just a matter of spiritual kinship and prayer, or even agreement on doctrine; by the same token, neither is it a single monolithic institution, imposing unanimity from above, demanding assent from below. Möhler identified the reality of life and faith in the Catholic Church as communio:
Möhler's idea of the Church as communion, rooted in the letters of Paul and the writings of the early Church Fathers, thus took account not only of the pattern of institutional relationships that effect the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ, but also of the vital importance of constructing authentic unity out of the prayer and spirituality, the faith and belief, the membership and active participation of the individual Christian. He acknowledged that this differed from person to person, diocese to diocese, region to region, church to church, yet it was still possible for it to be held together in a genuine communion, in complete unity, but not necessarily uniformity. This character of communio was a gift that only the faith of the Catholic Church could offer.
Möhler was thus the first to put forward the idea of unity in diversity, not to sanction the existence of separate groups of Christians (however closely they might be associated in prayer and common faith), but to explain how only communio in the one visible Body of Christ can hold together and sanctify the belief and life of so many individual Christians in the Church. He saw Catholic unity as a threefold process, or network:
This thinking had a profound impact on the future Cardinal Wiseman, who introduced it to John Henry Newman. And although its direct application to relations with Christians in other traditions and churches was yet to be realised, it also had a great effect in Rome as an account for the life of the Church in modern times. Thanks to the expert advice of Father Yves Congar OP as a theologian accredited to the Second Vatican Council, Möhler's conception of the Church as communio profoundly influenced the Second Vatican Council, especially in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, and the Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio.
In more recent times, Pope John Paul II, surveying all the gifts in the different groups and traditions by which the Church as a whole is enriched, described communio as the special gift that uniquely the Catholic Church can offer, as Peter strengthens his brothers and sisters with the very structure and organisation that embody the Gospel it proclaims. He has also, in his search for new models by which the office of Pope can be of service to other Christians, proposed a prior ‘affective collegiality’ of friendship, common witness to faith, and pastoral and evangelistic service to the world, leading steadily to the 'effective collegiality’ of reconciliation, complete communio and visible unity.