Religion: One Flock, One Shepherd

Vouchsafe, oh Lord, our God, that . . . what Thou hast promised would one day occur, may come to pass in our time, namely, that there be but one flock and one shepherd.

This prayer for a united Christendom was repeated last week by Pope Pius XII. With the same prayer the Council of Trent in 1563 had closed its 18-year deliberations to combat the schism born of Martin Luther's theses nailed to the church door at Wittenberg. The Council failed to bring Protestant heretics back to the fold.

The ideal of "one flock and one shepherd" remained an ideal; the scandalous reality of a divided Christendom remained too. The ideal was reasserted by Pope Pius, in a letter to the Archbishop of Trent on the quadricentennial of the Council.

In terms which present-day Protestantism had all but forgotten, the Pope re-echoed the Council's appeal to non-Catholic Christians. He appealed for the return to the Catholic faith of all who believed "in the principal divinely revealed truths." When Christians outside the Church of Rome observed, he said, that the Church "remains firm in the faith, powerful in its works, enriching all men without distinction of race, creed or color, then they, it may be hoped, will . . . sense a desire, implanted deeply in the heart of every man, for that necessary union with Peter and his successors. . . ."

But Protestants saw no chance of Christian unity on those uncompromising terms.