Notable Dates in the Ecumenical Movement
1844: Beginning of the interdenominational movement that later produced the Young Men’s and the Young Women’s Christian Associations.
1846: First international conference of the interdenominational Evangelical Alliance, held in London, England.
1908: Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America formed. In 1950 it became the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
1910: First World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland, “where the modern ecumenical movement really began.”—Encyclopædia Britannica.
1919: Pope Benedict XV rejected an invitation for the Catholic Church to participate with the Protestant Episcopal Church in a meeting on faith and order (interchurch differences in doctrine and ministry).
1921: International Missionary Council formed.
1925: First international conference of the Universal Christian Council on Life and Work (for studying a common church policy on economic, political, and social issues), held in Stockholm, Sweden.
1927: First world conference of the interchurch “Faith and Order” movement, held in Lausanne, Switzerland.
1928: Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mortalium animos, forbidding Catholics to give any support to the ecumenical movement.
1937: The “Life and Work” conference held in Oxford, England, and the “Faith and Order” conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland, agreed to form a provisional committee for setting up a world council of churches. This project was postponed because of the outbreak of World War II.
1948: The WCC (World Council of Churches) was formed at a constituting assembly held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Its membership included almost 150 Protestant and some Eastern Orthodox churches. The WCC has since regularly held general assemblies (1954: Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A.; 1961: New Delhi, India; 1968: Uppsala, Sweden; 1975: Nairobi, Kenya; 1983: Vancouver, Canada).
1960: Pope John XXIII set up at the Vatican the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. This “was the first official recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of the existence of the ecumenical movement.”—Encyclopædia Britannica.
1961: The International Missionary Council united with the WCC. The Vatican began sending official Catholic observers to WCC general assemblies.
1964: Pope Paul VI promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s “Decree on Ecumenism,” which defined the limits of Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement.
1965: The pope and the Orthodox patriarch mutually nullified the excommunications that their predecessors had pronounced against each other in 1054.
1968: SODEPAX (Joint Committee on Society, Development, and Peace) was set up by the Vatican and the WCC.
1969: Pope Paul VI paid a visit to the world headquarters of the WCC, in Geneva, Switzerland. He emphasized, however, that he was the successor of the apostle Peter and that any talk of the Catholic Church’s joining the WCC was premature.
1980: SODEPAX was dissolved.
1986: Pope John Paul II organized an ecumenical “World Day of Prayer for Peace” in Assisi, Italy, where spiritual leaders representing major religions of the world assembled to pray for peace according to their separate rites.