Still today, the Spirit poured forth on Pentecost binds the Church to create paths and to invent ways to make the otherness a cause of communion, not of conflict or hostility. Thus the Church, i.e. every Christian community, will be able to be the sign of the universal kingdom which will come and to which the whole mankind is called through, not in spite of, the differences going through it. All this sharpens the sensitiveness and care that Christians should have for ecumenism and the dialogue with the other religions. The awareness of the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, of the never-ending Jesus’ Jewishness, of Israel as being the people of the never revoked alliance, and at the same time the awareness of the universal destination of the Christian salvation and of the multiplicity of the peoples and cultures in which the gospel is called to throw its seeds, should be part of every mature Christian’s equipment together with the awareness that ecumenism is a constitutive element of the faith of every baptized Christian, who is called, as a Jesus’ follower, to pray and work to remove the scandalous divisions among Christians.

Translated from: 

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}: Le feste cristiane,
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 103-105.