Ideas of universality pervaded his thought and inspired his performance pedagogically, academically, and
ecclesiastically. The music of Bruckner, which was ecclesiastical music par excellence, emerged from the composer's personal piety and church commitment; Bruckner essentially translated church-based activity into musical terms.
In Bourgeois's estimation the intentions of proponents of the institutional church were "in part charitable and in part socially and
ecclesiastically conservative" (72).
His "Report on
Ecclesiastically Independent Theological Education," released by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1976, was also a notable contribution.
There are even some theological voices in Orthodoxy which attribute an ecclesiological relevance to the WCC in addition to its
ecclesiastically neutral or merely "serving" function--or precisely for that reason.
Yet by 1700, when the settlement had grown into a fair-sized town of perhaps 14,000 people, the situation had not altered,
ecclesiastically speaking.
Yours in sympathy for the
ecclesiastically ambitious,
"World" was even more pretentious, but
ecclesiastically more modest.
A major transition was underway, from
ecclesiastically delegated and controlled apostolates of caring for Catholics in large Catholic institutions attached to monastic-style convents to more individualized ministries in situations of need regardless of the denominational affiliation or lack thereof, ability to pay, or respectability of the recipients.
Joon-Sik Park's essay on Anabaptist John Howard Yoder is a reminder that even "the least of these,"
ecclesiastically speaking, brings gifts of inestimable value to the larger world church.
Then in 1968, in the wake of turbulent student strikes and civil disobedience in Germany and France, Ratzinger underwent an intellectual conversion that drew him politically and
ecclesiastically to conservative positions.
(63) In fact, in the late middle Byzantine period, at a time when female deacons had presumably devolved to a nonordained monastic order, Balsamon summed up their duties in just this way in a letter to Patriarch Mark III of Alexandria: "they
ecclesiastically manage the gynaeceum." (64)
This unity, however, is not a matter of compromise, nor is it a matter of fait-accompli, or imposition of decisions through methods that are morally and
ecclesiastically unacceptable.