A Fellowship Without the Roman Catholic Church as a Member

The Roman Catholic Church has never joined the World Council of Churches as a member, a position that predates the Council itself: Pope Pius XI's 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos had already rejected the broader interwar ecumenical movement on the ground that unity could only mean churches returning to Rome rather than churches meeting one another as equals, a stance the Vatican did not formally soften until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has sent official observers to Council assemblies and cooperates closely with its Faith and Order Commission, whose membership does include Catholic theologians, but formal membership has never followed.

The Council governs itself through an Assembly, its highest legislative body, meeting roughly every seven to eight years to set overall policy and elect a Central Committee that governs between assemblies. Its member churches remain fully self-governing, and the Council's pronouncements carry the weight of a shared statement rather than a binding decision, a structure deliberately chosen to make cooperation possible among churches with widely differing views on church governance, sacraments and doctrine.