“The Pope is right” was my opening line last week. He should have encouraged the bishops of that church to restore the Latin mass, which continues the formative sounds of the Latin church. Memory is audio, and silence is amnesia.

“That church” I said, not “the Church.” Reinforcing the encyclical Dominus Jesus, Benedict XVI has repeated the denial of the word “church” to all the other churches. But subtraction is sectarian, and this medieval move of pulling up the drawbridges around the Roman Church is a cancellation of ecumenicity. The priority and purity of the church is preserved—keeping us “separated brethren” out of “the Church”--at the cost of confining Roman Catholics to a provinciality parading as universality.

This Pope has a generous heart as well as a brilliant and well-informed mind. His greatness contrasts with the small-mindedness and short-sightedness of this sad word-war proclamation.

Yes, subtraction is sectarian. But addition is ecumenical: we Christians should rejoice as more “churches” appear in this time of wide expansion of the Christian movement. For Chrisianity always has been more movement than institution, more strawberry plant than oak tree. The pyramidal model—from the Roman Empire, Pope replacing Emperor—is only one of the socio-models inhabited by world Christianity.

But no matter the form of the church, the fundamental content of the faith is constant, invariable. It's original wording in the Greek of the New Testament is "Kyrios Iesous" and in the Latin of the encyclical, "Dominus Jesus." Two words in Greek and Latin, and these three words in English:
'JESUS IS LORD."