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To: marshmallow
Commenting on this portion of the declaration, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk told the Catholic News Agency that "the ecumenical vocabulary of the Catholic Church uses the phrase 'ecclesial communities' to refer to Protestant churches, that is to label those communities which do not bear all the richness of the apostolic tradition."

Plenty of non-catholic churches bear all the richness of the apostolic tradition. They can be found in the sacred Scriptures as taught by the Apostles. The word "ekklesia" is a Greek word that means a "called out assembly":

Most English translations of the New Testament generally use the word "church" as a translation of the Ancient Greek term "ἐκκλησία" (transliterated as "ecclesia") found in the original Greek texts, which generally meant an "assembly".[1] This term appears in two verses of the Gospel of Matthew, twenty-four verses of the Acts of the Apostles, fifty-eight verses of the Pauline Epistles (including the earliest instances of its use in relation to a Christian body), two verses of the Letter to the Hebrews, one verse of the Epistle of James, three verses of the Third Epistle of John, and nineteen verses of the Book of Revelation. In total, ἐκκλησία appears in the New Testament text 114 times, although not every instance is a technical reference to the church.[2]
In the New Testament, the term ἐκκλησία is used for local communities as well as in a universal sense to mean all believers.[3] Traditionally, only orthodox and catholic believers are considered to be part of the true church, but convictions of what is orthodox or catholic have long varied, as many churches (not only the ones officially using the term "Orthodox" in their names) consider themselves to be orthodox, and many (for example, Eastern Orthodox Church and Anglicans) consider themselves to be catholic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Church

6 posted on 03/03/2016 2:07:24 PM PST by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.)
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To: boatbums

The New Testament never referred to multiple, distinct churches. It spoke of one Church, Christ’s Church.

As far as Wikipedia as your source: I recommend you move it up a notch in your research.


7 posted on 03/03/2016 2:59:06 PM PST by ebb tide (We have a rogue curia in Rome.)
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