Now that I have a doctorate — which sounds impressive, though honestly it isn’t all that much — I’ve set myself a goal: to simplify things that are hard to understand so they’re easy to swallow.
Think of it this way: I’m not going to hand you a cacao fruit. Because that, while technically the origin of chocolate, is not what you want to eat. I’ll do all the processing so you can take a good bite out of the bar.
Today’s topic is ecumenism.
I already know what you’re thinking. “That’s a Catholic thing.” Or maybe: “Isn’t that where everyone ends up believing the same thing?” Or the classic: “My pastor said that’s from the devil.”
Relax. Grab a coffee. Let’s take this one piece at a time, as Jack the Ripper once said.
First, a scene
Picture two believers having coffee. One is Baptist. The other is Catholic. Both read the Bible. Both pray. Both say Jesus is Lord.
Can they pray together before they finish their coffee?
That uncomfortable question is exactly where ecumenism lives.
How did we get here?
To understand the problem, you need to know the history. Not the long, boring version. The coffee version.
In the year 1054, what is known as the Great Schism took place. The Christian church, which until that moment was a single institution — imperfect, complicated, but one — split in two: the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox Church in the East. The official reason was theological. The real reason was also political, cultural, and institutional ego. Like almost every major rupture.
Five hundred years later, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a door in Wittenberg. Important fact that most people don’t know: Luther didn’t want to found a new church. He wanted to reform the one that already existed. What came after completely overtook him.
But there’s another fact almost nobody mentions: the 95 Theses weren’t exactly some great original revelation from Luther. They were ideas already circulating inside the Catholic Church itself — internal debates that theologians and reformers had been having for years. Luther basically took those conversations, put them on a single sheet of paper, and nailed them to a door.
Think of it like an influencer today taking a scientific study that a research team has been developing for five years, making a fifteen-minute video explaining it, and suddenly becoming “the one who discovered” the thing. The experts are still in their lab. The credit goes to whoever had the best viral moment.
Luther had the best viral moment of the sixteenth century.
And here comes the number that’s going to stop your coffee halfway to your mouth: from the movement Luther started, over five hundred years, more than 40,000 distinct Protestant denominations emerged.
Forty thousand.
So the honest question is: is this what Jesus had in mind?
What Jesus said
There are two texts you can’t ignore if you’re a Christian talking about unity.
The first is John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Jesus didn’t say “if you share the same liturgy.” He didn’t say “if you belong to the same denomination.” He said: if you love one another.
The second is John 17:21, where Jesus prays to the Father and asks something specific for his followers: “that all of them may be one.” He doesn’t suggest it. He asks for it. In prayer. The night before he died.
If that doesn’t make you think, your coffee is really good and it’s distracting you.
The family analogy
Imagine a family that had a major falling-out three generations ago. A real fight, with real reasons, with real wounds. But time passed. The grandchildren don’t even remember exactly what happened, but they maintain the distance as if it were part of their identity. “We don’t talk to that branch of the family.” Why? “Because that’s just how it is.”
That describes much of the anti-Catholic Protestant sentiment we inherited in Latin America. Legitimate historical trauma — the Inquisition was real, the religious wars were real — turned into tribal identity, passed down through generations without context, without nuance, without ever asking whether it still applies.
It’s not theology. It’s a dysfunctional family with Bible verses.
The three real problems — and here I’ll give you the point
The Protestant movement has legitimate reasons to distrust certain forms of ecumenism. There are three real distortions worth naming.
Doctrinal relativism is when dialogue between traditions ends up at “all beliefs are equally valid.” That’s not unity — it’s evasion. Truth matters. Not everything is negotiable.
Liturgical syncretism is mixing rites and practices from different traditions without biblical foundation or theological coherence, simply because “it feels right” or “it’s more inclusive.” That’s also a real problem.
Visible unity as an end in itself is when the goal stops being Christ and becomes the ecumenical institution. When signing a joint document matters more than actually believing something true together.
Those three are real problems. But note this carefully: they are problems with the distortions of ecumenism, not with the idea itself. Exactly as medieval corruption wasn’t Christianity — it was Christianity’s deformation.
So what is ecumenism, really?
It’s the honest search for what believers in Christ already share, the sincere dialogue about what divides them, and the willingness to walk together where possible without surrendering truth where it isn’t.
It’s not “we all believe the same thing.” It’s “we all follow the same Lord, and that deserves at least a conversation.”
Or a coffee.
And before you go spreading the word that Dr. Mora has gone ecumenical: I’m not telling you what to believe. I’m telling you what ecumenism is, because there’s an enormous difference between rejecting something you understand and rejecting something because someone told you it was from the devil.
You now have the chocolate bar in your hand. The information has been processed. By your own judgment, with your Bible, with your history, with your coffee still warm — you decide whether ecumenism is right or not.
I just made sure you weren’t eating it as a cacao fruit.
