Margaret O'Gara

Seeing in A New Light: From Remembering to Reforming in Ecumenical Dialogue

Ecumenism is a means of reforming the Church, and such reform is made possible in part when history is seen in a new way. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification speaks of seeing once-divisive questions and condemnations “in a new light.”1 By shining this new light into the darkness of past disputes about justification, Catholics and Lutherans were able to see these past disputes more clearly and to overcome the divisions they caused. Here, remembering became a means of reform.