This is especially true at a time when many among the Sunni...

This is especially true at a time when many among the Sunni and Shi'ite 'ulama' are seeking in every way possible to avoid confrontation with each other in order to safeguard the unity of Islam in a secularized world which threatens Islam from both the outside and the inside. The attitude of this group of ulama is of course in a sense reminiscent of the ecumenism among religions, and also within a given religion, that is so often discussed today in the West.

Most often, however, people search in these ecumenical movements for a common denominator which, in certain instances, sacrifices divinely ordained qualitative differences for the sake of a purely human and often quantitative egalitarianism. In such cases the so-called "ecumenical" forces in question are no more than a concealed form of the secularism and humanism which gripped the West at the time of the Renaissance and which in their own turn caused religious divisions within Christianity.

This type of ecumenism, whose hidden motive is much more worldly than religious, goes hand in hand with the kind of charity that is willing to forego the love of God for the love of the neighbor and in fact insists upon the love of the neighbor in spite of a total lack of the love for God and the Transcendent. The mentality which advocates this kind of "charity" affords one more example of the loss of the transcendent dimension and the reduction of all things to the purely worldly.

It is yet another manifestation of the secular character of modernism which in this case has penetrated into the supreme Christian virtue of charity and, to the extent that it has been successful, has deprived this virtue of any spiritual significance.

From the point of view of this type of ecumenical mentality, to speak approvingly of the differences between religions, or of the different orthodox schools within a single religion, is tantamount to betraying man and his hope for salvation and peace.

A secular and humanistic ecumenism of this kind fails to see that real peace or salvation lies in Unity through this divinely ordained diversity and not in its rejection, and that the diversity of religions and also of the orthodox schools within each religion are signs of the Divine compassion, which seeks to convey the message of heaven to men possessing different spiritual and psychological qualities.