Cardinal Johannes 'Jan' Willebrands: Cardinal Johannes "Jan" Willebrands, who has died aged 96, was a founding member of the Vatican's Secretariat for Christian Unity, set up during the papacy of John XXIII in 1960. Nine years later he became its president.
He presided over the secretariat for 20 creative years, going into compulsory retirement in 1989 at the age of 80. His retirement marked the end of an era, for in that year, 11 years after the election of Karol Wotyla as John Paul II, the secretariat was transmuted into a council.
Despite official denials, this represented a downgrading of ecumenical work and its subordination to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Until 1989, the secretariat had had greater continuity in personnel and purpose than any other department of the Roman Curia. If Pope John XXIII had not invented it, it is difficult to see how the second Vatican Council could have had an ecumenical dimension at all. The secretariat got accepted the principle of "observers" from other churches and shepherded them through the four sessions of the council.
No secrets - or at least not many - were withheld from them and they were much less passive than their title suggests. They indirectly influenced all the conciliar texts. For example, the crucial phrase about "an order or hierarchy of Catholic truths according to their link with basic Christian doctrine" derived from the Swiss theologian Lukas Fischer, representing the World Council of Churches.
It was Willebrands who went to Moscow in 1963 to persuade the Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan, Josef Slipyi, just released from a Soviet labour camp, to go into permanent Roman exile. Ukrainian Catholics suspected Willebrands of collusion with the Russian Orthodox Church.
In 1964, Willebrands was made a bishop. His visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Constantinople (Istanbul) was more successful. There he negotiated the mutual lifting of the excommunications that had formalised the split between East and West since 1054 which was announced at the end of 1965.
On a visit to Cambridge in Britain in 1970, he launched the idea of a "uniate" solution for the Anglican Communion. That meant that if unity was restored, the Anglican Communion would retain its rites and traditions, its choral evensong and its married clergy. At that date, the ordination of women was only a tiny cloud on the distant horizon.
In 1975, Pope Paul VI asked Willebrands to shoulder a heavy burden: while remaining president of the secretariat in Rome, he also became Archbishop of Utrecht and was given the well-nigh impossible task of reining in his Dutch fellow-countrymen who - so ran the legend - itched for all things novel.
He was not a great success. By the time he returned to Rome in 1983 as full-time president of the secretariat, he found that the balance of power had shifted. The new head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Bavarian Cardinal Ratzinger, intended, apparently with papal approval, to subordinate the secretariat to his own department. This was a bitter blow for Willebrands. It meant that he lost much credibility in the eyes of his ecumenical partners and the trust he had built up over the years was dissipated.
The goodwill built up with the Orthodox churches, and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular, was dissipated, as the Ukrainian Catholic Church emerged from the underground.
Willebrands was the eldest of seven children of a market paymaster, born in Bovenkerspel, the Netherlands. He was ordained in 1934; he studied at the Warmond Seminary near Leyden and Rome's Angelicum University. After parish work in the Netherlands, he became a philosophy lecturer and later the rector of Warmond.
His ecumenical vocation began during the German occupation of the Netherlands, when the Dutch bishops issued a courageous declaration against the persecution of the Jews. It was developed from 1950 when, while rector of Warmond Seminary, the Vatican had just permitted, under very strict conditions, conversation with other Christians known as "mixed bathing".
In 1952 he founded the Catholic Conference for Ecumenical Questions, which broke through the ice blocks that separated Christians.
He remained faithful to Vatican II to the end, through the pontificate of John Paul II and into the present era, and was its last authoritative exponent within the Roman Curia.
Nine years ago Willebrands settled in a convent in the Netherlands, where he was looked after by Franciscan nuns.
Johannes Maria Willebrands, born September 4th, 1909; died August 1st, 2006