The Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions. A Representative Summa of Pre-conciliar European Catholic Ecumenism?

During the pontificate of Pius XII, the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions (CCEQ)constituted the sole instru­ ment for international coordination of Catholic ecumenism in various countries and for dialogue, albeit on an informal level, with the World Council of Churches. Presided over by the future Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, the Catholic Conference also constituted a kind of preview and preparation for the work of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, into which many of the members of the Catholic Conference converged during the preparatory phase of the Second Vatican Council. In this contribution, an attempt will be made to investigate one of the most problematic issues concerning the CCEQ, that is, to determine whether it constituted a representative and collegial ‘summa’ of pre-conciliar European Catholic ecumenism or if it was not rather dominated by a few preponderant figures. The dialectical dynamics present within the Catholic Conference will therefore be illustrated and the profiles of the different sensibilities that animated it will be traced. These sensitivities can essentially be reduced to those of two large groups that also corresponded to two different geographical contexts, the German-Dutch and the French-speaking. Their divergence was evident from the very beginning of the CCEQ’s collegial experience.