Pope Leo XIV on Monday, October 19, appointed French Jesuit Michel Fédou, professor emeritus of the Faculty of Theology at the Facultés Loyola Paris, specialist in Origen and Christology and winner of the 2022 Ratzinger Prize, as a member of the International Theological Commission. He is one of the 24 new members announced that day in the Holy See Press Office bulletin, appointed according to the Commission’s statutes on the proposal of the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández. Fédou is a member of the Groupe des Dombes, the ecumenical forum of French-speaking Catholic and Protestant theologians that in November 2023 published a document stating that the Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation form “one single Church, although in imperfect communion.” Fédou presented that book in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique in April 2024.
The document is titled «De toutes les nations…». Pour la catholicité des Églises and was published by the publisher Cerf in its Patrimoines collection. The group signs it collectively, under the co-presidency of Protestant theologian Elisabeth Parmentier, dean of the Faculty of Theology in Geneva, and Catholic priest Joseph Famerée, former dean of the Faculty in Louvain. According to the World Council of Churches, Famerée summarized its thesis when presenting it: the Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation “form one single Church, although in imperfect communion,” because differences that have not been entirely overcome persist and ecumenical conversion must continue toward full communion.
The formula gives the title to one of the book’s sections, “Une seule Église, bien qu’en communion imparfaite.” According to the commentary published by the diocese of Paris, signed by priest Jérôme Bascoul, number 534 proposes applying to the Protestant Churches what the Catholic Church affirms of the Orthodox Churches, and attributes the imperfection of that communion to disagreement over the primacy. The text invokes number 13 of Lumen gentium and the declaration Dominus Iesus to maintain that the Church of Christ is also present in communities that are not in full communion with Rome. At the same time, it holds that the different conception of the episcopal ministry prevents the common exercise of episkopé and that, for Catholics, baptism recognized by both sides does not give access to the Eucharist.
The Church’s doctrine precisely distinguishes between these two cases. The declaration Dominus Iesus, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on August 6, 2000 and ratified by John Paul II, teaches in its number 17 that Churches that preserve apostolic succession and validly consecrated Eucharist, such as the Orthodox, are “true particular Churches,” whereas ecclesial communities that “have not preserved the valid Episcopate” and the genuine and integral substance of the eucharistic mystery “are not Churches in the proper sense.” It recognizes that those baptized in them “are in a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Church.”
Seven years later, on June 29, 2007, the same Congregation, then presided over by Cardinal William Levada, published with the approval of Benedict XVI the Responses to some questions regarding certain aspects of the doctrine on the Church. The fourth explains that the separated Eastern Churches deserve the title of “particular or local Churches” and of “sister Churches” because of their true sacraments and apostolic succession. The fifth responds that the communities born of the sixteenth-century Reformation, lacking apostolic succession in the sacrament of Order and not having preserved the integral substance of the eucharistic mystery, “cannot be called ‘Churches’ in the proper sense.”
The idea of imperfect communion comes from the Second Vatican Council, which in the decree Unitatis redintegratio (number 3) applies it to all the baptized separated from the Catholic Church. What the Groupe des Dombes document adds is the affirmation that Catholics and Protestants form “one single Church,” and it does so by transferring to the communities of the Reformation the status that the Magisterium reserves for the Orthodox Churches.
Fédou has been publicly involved in disseminating the document. On January 11, 2024, he moderated at the Centre Sèvres in Paris, seat of the Facultés Loyola, the book’s presentation evening, in which the diocese of Paris presented him as co-holder of the Chair of Ecumenical Theology and “member of the Groupe des Dombes.” Among the speakers was Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan, dean of the Theologicum of the Catholic Institute of Paris, who has also now been appointed a member of the International Theological Commission.
Three months later, the Nouvelle Revue Théologique published his article “La catholicité des Églises. Un nouveau livre du Groupe des Dombes” (volume 146, number 3, pages 434 to 449). According to the summary, the book recognizes the differences that still separate Catholic ecclesiology from that of the Churches of the Reformation, but, starting from the achievements of the ecumenical movement, considers it possible to affirm that there exists “one single Church, although in imperfect communion,” a formula that would gather together both what already unites the Churches and the remaining obstacles, and proposes paths of conversion toward greater communion. In January 2026, Fédou again intervened, this time at the Catholic Institute of Paris, in the presentation of the group’s next book, dedicated to prayer for unity.
The Groupe des Dombes was founded in 1937 by priest Paul Couturier, promoter of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and takes its name from the Trappist abbey of Notre-Dame des Dombes, where it began to meet. It is a private group of theologians, not an official dialogue commission, and its documents do not commit the Catholic Church or the Protestant Churches.
Fédou’s other line of work is the theology of religions. His book Les religions selon la foi chrétienne (1996) received in 1997 a review by José Miguel Odero in Scripta Theologica, the journal of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarra, which judged it “not profound, but balanced” and animated by a “will to fidelity to the Church.” According to Odero, Fédou distances himself, “not without a certain perplexity,” from Karl Rahner’s thesis on the presence of the supernatural in non-Christian religions, although he shows himself “excessively timid” regarding mission and conversion.
In September 2023, in the inaugural lecture of the course at the Faculty Notre-Dame published by the Collège des Bernardins, Fédou reviewed the debate on religions of recent decades. Of the Belgian Jesuit Jacques Dupuis he wrote that “one cannot deny him the merit of having wanted” to respect religious diversity and at the same time maintain Christ as the sole Mediator, and that his work “certainly lent itself to discussions or criticisms on this or that point.” He did not mention the notification with which the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, then presided over by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, warned in 2001 of ambiguities and difficulties in important doctrinal points of his book on religious pluralism and clarified which theses are contrary to the faith.
In the same lecture he presented the pluralism of philosopher John Hick as radical, questioning “essential affirmations of the Christian tradition”; he recalled that Dominus Iesus affirms that Jesus is the “sole Mediator between God and men,” and cited Benedict XVI’s warning against relativism in religious matters. His conclusion was that “the question is no longer, above all, taking a position on the status of other religions,” but attending to relations between Christians and believers of other traditions: fraternity, common work for peace, justice and the environment, and humble witness to the faith, without abandoning doctrinal reflection.
In April 2026 the Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques published his article “Du monde méditerranéen à la Chine. Claude Geffré et les religions de l’Orient,” dedicated to the French Dominican Claude Geffré, one of the principal theologians of religious pluralism. According to the summary, Fédou maintains that dialogue with the religions of India and the Far East must not ignore irreducible differences, that it can produce mutual enrichment and transform those who participate in it, and that “we are barely at the beginning of a fruitful encounter.” The text sets out Geffré’s ideas and their consequences for an interreligious theology.
Fédou was born in Lyon in 1952. He obtained the agrégation in classical letters in 1974, entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in 1976 and was ordained a priest in 1984. He obtained his doctorate in Theology in 1988 with a thesis on Christianity and pagan religions in Origen’s Contra Celsum. He has taught at the Centre Sèvres since 1987, was dean of its Faculty of Theology between 1996 and 2002 and president of the center between 2003 and 2009. He is the author of the trilogy La voie du Christ, a history of Christology published between 2006 and 2016, and of Les Pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne (2013). In 2022 he received the Ratzinger Prize, which he shared with jurist Joseph Weiler and which Francis awarded him on December 1 of that year.
The Commission he joins has, according to article 1 of its statutes, the task of studying “doctrinal questions of special importance” to assist the Magisterium and, in particular, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and article 3 asks its members to distinguish themselves by their “learning, prudence and fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church.” Fédou is not the only ecumenist in the new composition: Argentine Dominican Jorge Scampini, who has been part of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, has also been appointed.
This medium has not found any sanction or investigation by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding Fédou’s writings, nor his signature on the note of the Académie catholique de France on the report of abuses in the French Church (2021) nor on the Promesses d’Église initiative. Nor has it been able to consult the full text of his article in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique, so it is not clear whether he introduces reservations to the formula of the Groupe des Dombes that the summary does not record.
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