In this morning's Bolletino from the Holy See, I spied this paragraph in the announcement of the Holy See' forthcoming delegation to the meeting of the World Council of Churches, which raises the question of how we Catholics can "cooperate" with those who deny there are seven sacraments, deny that the Eucharist is more than symbolic, who deny the apostolic succession, etc. But, hell, if one of these people thinks that you might, in the future, support the idea that civil legislation should furnish gay and lesbian couples with some measure of legal stability, or that it is wrong to help poor folk sign up for insurance because they might buy a plan that covers abortion, and then might someday have an abortion....
While the Catholic Church is not a member of the WCC, it cooperates in various ways with it, including participation in its Faith and Order Commission, whose function is to pursue the search for Christian unity through joint research on topics that still divide Christians today, particularly ecclesiology. Among other channels of cooperation, the "Joint Working Group" [JWG], which was established in 1965, represents the main instrument coordinating relations between the Catholic Church and the WCC.
