[ENI] "There is an urgent need for us to move away from the shore and out into the deep, to have the courage to question our status quo," Cardinal Edward Cassidy, recently retired president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said during an ecumenical worship service at the World Methodist Conference in England. "What we have in common is so much more than what divides us," he said.

Cassidy said that one of the most important achievements of the ecumenical movement has been the recognition that through baptism members of various Christian denominations have become "brothers and sisters in Christ." He said that churches need to "give the quest for unity a much higher place in our list of priorities."

Churches today are facing an increasingly secularized and pagan world, the cardinal warned. "Perhaps for the first time in the history of evangelization we are confronted on a wide scale with a multitude of persons who do not feel any need of salvation. Even among those who believe in God and look forward to life after death many have lost the sense of sin," he said.