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Father Tom Michel, ecumenical secretary of the FABC Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, pressed the point while addressing 35 bishops, priests, Religious and lay persons at a seminar held July 18-20 in Uiwang, 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) south of Seoul. In Asia, the American-born Jesuit pointed out, only Taiwan's Catholic Church has full membership in a local NCC.

The FABC and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity jointly organized the seminar on The Search for Christian Unity: Where We Stand Today.

"Perhaps because of the slowness of the Catholic Church in Asia to enter the ecumenical association, Pope John Paul II (was) urged to promote Christian unity in his 1999 post-synodal apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia (Church in Asia)," Father Michel reminded the participants in his address on July 20.

Father Michel, who bases his work in Rome, noted that the Catholic Church is a full NCC member in 70 of the 100 currently known NCCs – 25 in Europe, 14 in Africa, 12 in the Caribbean, and 12 in Oceania and the Pacific. The others, he said, are in Asia, Latin America and North America.

An NCC, a voluntary union of Christian churches within a defined geographic area, facilitates sharing and common reflection and action on matters of Christian unity, faith, ethics and service.

According to Father Michel, "a turning point" for the participation of the Catholic Church came with "Unitatis redintegratio," the Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism (1964), which laid the theological foundations for Catholic involvement in such councils.

However, he added, "the first explicit treatment by the Holy See of Roman Catholic participation in national and regional councils of churches came in 1975, in a document issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, ‘Ecumenical Collaboration at the Regional, National and Local Levels.'"

This document views the councils as one of many instruments churches could use to pursue unity, he observed, but it stresses that joining a council is a serious undertaking, and Catholic bishops who decide to join an NCC should not settle for superficial participation but fully involve their local church.

To clarify, he cited the document and said that when the Catholic Church joins a council, the undertaking must be accompanied by "constant ecumenical education of Catholics concerning the implications of such participation."

Father Michel also introduced the "Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism," issued by the Pontifical Council in 1993. The directory has "definitive" guidelines for Christian ecumenism, he said.

Quoting the directory, he said, "Since Councils of Churches and Christian Councils are among the more important forms of ecumenical cooperation, the growing contacts the Catholic Church has with NCCs in many parts of the world are to be welcomed."

"I think the focus of Asia's (Catholic) Church has always been on other religions more than anywhere else in the world," Father Michel, a scholar of Islam, told UCA News on July 20. "But it thinks ecumenical relations go on by themselves and it tends to ignore the ecumenical dimension here in Asia."

Another reason for Asia's Catholic Church taking a not-so-active part in NCCs, he said, is that local clergy feel inadequate to deal with complicated theological or doctrinal controversies because they think it was something they inherited from foreign missioners.

"I'd like to ask Asia's bishops to invite other NCC churches to reflect and pray with them on whether they think it is a good idea for the Catholic Church to become a member of the NCC," Father Michel added.

Auxiliary Bishop Hyginus Kim Hee-joong of Kwangju told UCA News on July 20 that the Catholic Church in Korea does not belong to the NCC in Korea, but it has cooperated and worked with the council on a practical level in many ways.

Bishop Kim, president of the Korean Catholic bishops' Committee for Promoting Christian Unity and Interreligious Dialogue, said becoming a member of the NCC in Korea is not easy. Korea's Catholic bishops apparently need time to ascertain if the local Catholic Church will join it, the bishop concluded.