Review in America of a new book (published by Eerdmans) about Cardinal Bea and the origins of the ecumenical movement:

Pope John XXIII’s heralded hope that Vatican II would promote Christian unity faced resistance from these same officials who hoped to control the preparatory process. Then, on May 30, 1960, Pope John announced his intention to establish a new curial entity called the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (S.P.C.U.), and he named a new cardinal, with whom he had scant contact, to head it. Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J., like the pope 79 years old, was a biblical scholar and respected religious, having been Pope Pius XII’s personal confessor and having served the Holy Office as a German consultant, under the formidable Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. Jerome-Michael Vereb’s “Because He Was a German!” tells the engaging story of how Bea and his secretariat came to be the “ecumenical conscience” of the Second Vatican Council.

The book relates the beginnings of ecumenical activities in the 20th century, with special attention to the “German theater.” Why Germany? Several factors conspired to produce an ecumenical kairos in the “country” that was the cradle of the Reformation. First, the collapse of the Reformation principle cuius regio, cuius religio at the end of World War I and then the nightmare of the Third Reich stimulated a new appreciation of the church’s nature and the shared Christian call to holiness. Second, ressourcement in Reformation historiography by Lutheran and Catholic scholars helped to set aside sterile polemics and clear a path for dialogue. Third, prophets of “spiritual ecumenism,” notably Max Metzger and the Una Sancta movement, placed high value on lived experience and promoted exchanges with ecumenically minded Protestants. Vereb cites Cardinal Willebrands, co-founder of the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions and subsequently secretary and then president of the S.P.C.U., who stated that the “single greatest cause for the dynamic of the ecumenical movement” was “the ‘life together’ of Protestant and Catholic clerics in concentration camps.”