The fight against Futurechurch: Ecumenism

By Damian Thompson
Sep 28, 2008

The misguided ecumenism of the English Catholic bishops is causing "meltdown" in the Church, according to a brilliant essay by one of England's up-and-coming Catholic philosophers.

Dr Thomas Pink of Kings College, London, is one of the first lay Catholic academics to attack the policies of the Bishops' Conference, which is still tied to a model of Futurechurch that is in some respects indistinguishable from "liberal Catholic" Anglicanism.

In his essay The toils of ecumenism, Pink accuses the bishops of "a grand process of de-Catholicisation" that has done nothing to bring Anglicanism closer to Rome. On the contrary: English Catholic bishops are busy suppressing the traditional culture of the faith in order to make it more acceptable to their Anglican "brother bishops". the rest