Professor Christopher Ruddy skriver en lang artikkel om økumenikken i tidsskriftet America, der han presenterer en ny vektlegging, et nytt fokus på dette viktige temaet:
… (Noen kritiserer pave Benedikt) … Others, of whom I am one, argue that the pope sees the primary contemporary ecumenical questions to be not ecclesial but cultural, philosophical, spiritual and, most radically, Christological. Holding that there is an ongoing realignment not only among, but also within Christian communities, he has centered his energies on causes that are transconfessional: a call for Christian communities to witness together to longstanding moral and cultural values in a time of upheaval, particularly in the West; insistence on the liberating and unitive power of truth over that liberalism of religion as subjective taste decried by John Henry Newman upon his creation as a cardinal; and, above all, a renewed ecumenism and evangelism centered on a personal encounter with the risen Christ. One sees this Christocentric commitment in the time he has devoted as pope to completing the two volumes of Jesus of Nazareth, in his celebration of the Year of St. Paul and even in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s shift of activity from the ecclesiological and ethical disputes of the 1970s and 1980s to the Christological debates of the 1990s and the 2000s.
One need only recall Pope Benedict’s insistence, in the introduction to “Deus Caritas Est,” that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” So, too, are ethics and doctrine ecumenically central but not primary. The encounter with the person of Christ is the primary ecumenical reality. It gives direction to still-necessary ethical and doctrinal dialogues. One might speak of the “audacity of Pope” in fostering this recentering on the person of Christ, both within Catholicism and in Christianity as a whole. ,,,