Quoted By:
The divine gift of the Church’s unity is in need of no restoration, the Church continues in the fullness of its faith and sacramental life. Faced with this doctrine the Protestants created a new theology which was able to satisfy their wish to believe in their continued participation in Christ’s Church. This is the “Branch Theory”, a claim that the thousands of Protestant sects with their different doctrines are all branches growing from the one trunk. This heresy was rejected too by the Roman Catholics until they adopted their new ecclesiology at Vatican II which recognised these other groups as “churches”. In order for a union to exist amongst these many denominations it was necessary to reduce the Christian faith to its lowest common denominator on which the groups could all agree: while Orthodoxy teaches the essential nature of the fullness of revealed truth, ecumenism requires the jettisoning of those doctrines which it identifies as “secondary” and unessential for salvation.