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On March 3 Pope John Paul announced, as expected, the retirement of Cardinal Edward I. Cassidy, the 76-year-old Australian who has directed the council since 1989, and named 68-year-old Kasper as his successor.

Kasper has served as the pontifical council's secretary for the past two years. In January Bishop Kasper was named as one of the new members of the College of Cardinals. This was widely interpreted as a sign that he was about to succeed Cardinal Cassidy as the Vatican's chief ecumenical officer. Cardinal Kasper's appointment has been warmly welcomed by leading Protestant officials.

Cardinal Kasper has had wide experience as a theologian, coming into contact with some of the most gifted theologians of his generation. From 1961 to 1964, Walter Kasper was assistant to Hans Küng at the University of Tubingen, and from 1970 to 1989 he was professor of dogmatic theology. He has written many books on theology, and in 1989 he was appointed Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart.

In 1979, he was chosen by the Vatican as one of a dozen Catholic theologians to sit on the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission, which has been described as "the most comprehensive theological forum in Christendom."

In 1994 Cardinal Cassidy appointed Kasper as co-chairman of the Lutheran-Catholic Commission on Unity.

A Canadian priest, 56-year-old Marc Ouellet, has been appointed by the Pope to succeed Cardinal Kasper as secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. At the same time, Pope John Paul has announced that Father Ouellet is to be made a bishop.

On January 22, the day after the Pope announced the names of the new cardinals, including Kasper, a Catholic magazine in Austria, Die Furche, published an interview with Kasper in which he expressed doubts about the presentation and interpretation last year of a controversial Vatican document, Dominus Iesus, which annoyed many Protestant churches.

Dominus Iesus, published on September 5 and signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated that the churches which grew out of the Reformation of the 16th century were not "churches in the proper sense."

"That affirmation offended other people," Walter Kasper told Die Furche, "and if my friends are offended, then so am I. It's an unfortunate affirmation—clumsy and ambiguous." He added that the section of Dominus Iesus on the Protestant churches was written in "abstract, doctrinaire language, which in some ways excludes [others]. The tone is not appropriate."

Another negative aspect of Dominus Iesus signaled by Kasper was its failure to mention the fruits of ecumenical dialogue undertaken since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). He pointed out that Pope John Paul had specifically referred to this dialogue in his encyclical on ecumenism, Ut unum sint, published in 1995.

Referring to the claim that Protestant churches were not "churches in the proper sense," Kasper said out that Cardinal Ratzinger had correctly explained that "churches which grew out of the Reformation have a different idea of church from us [Catholics]. There is no dispute about that. These churches do not wish to be churches like the Catholic Church. They do not retain the apostolic succession for the episcopate or the ministry of Peter, which for us are essential. So in fact Dominus Iesus does not signify any change in the Vatican's ecumenical policy."

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March (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45