Generally speaking, trends can be observed during the 1950s that
seek to strengthen a distinctly theological concept of recognition.^279
At the same time, the terminology may vary. The unity statement of
the New Delhi 1961 assembly of the World Council of Churches
speaks of the Christian fellowship in which‘ministry and members
are accepted by all’. Instead of the normal phrase‘recognizing min-
istry’, the verb‘accept’is used. The German translation of New Delhi
employsanerkennenas a translation of‘accept’.^280
After Vatican II, the language of recognition begins to permeate the
statements of the Roman Catholic church. In his address to the
Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul in 1967, Pope Paul VI considers
that charity can help us‘to recognize the sameness of faith underlying
the differences of vocabulary’. He further says that the primates of the
churches should seek a recovery of full communion‘by mutual
recognition of each other and mutual respect for each other as pastors
of that part of theflock of Christ which is entrusted to them’. In his
response, the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I states that church
leaders should devote themselves to‘reuniting what is divided, in the
firm recognition of the common points of the Faith and of canonical
regulations’.^281
While such diplomatic statements should not be analysed too
philosophically, they clearly depart from a merely administrative
understanding of recognition. Instead, recognition is considered a
method of discovering the truth of faith and a way of respecting
others and their convictions. In this manner, the Catholic and
Orthodox statements are closer to the Latin tradition ofagnosco
than to earlier Protestant ecumenical texts. The Second Vatican
Council programme of reconsidering or revising (recognosco) certain
realities may also be present in these statements.
The real elaboration of the concept of ecumenical recognition
starts in 1973 with an important Catholic essay by Heinrich Fries
dealing with the recognition of ministry. Fries gives a fairly extensive
semantic treatment of the German termAnerkennung, explaining
several features that have later—independently of Fries—become
prominent in theological and philosophical literature. Fries empha-
sizes the positive otherness of the other in the act of recognition.
(^279) Cf. Kelly 1996, 82.
(^280) Documentary History, 145. For this, cf. Meyer 1998, 121–2.
(^281) Doing the Truth, 183–5.
176 Recognition and Religion