Why can't we taste and see? Ecumenical progress over the past half century has been profound, but eminent Lutheran church historian and ecumenist Martin E. Marty mourns the continuing scandal of our separation at the Lord's table. Can a new pope help?

For decades, as a historian, reporter, and sometime ecumenist, I have covered scores of meetings of high-level committees debating themes of Christian unity. At these meetings I have often wondered whether the high officials in Protestantism and the Orthodox and Roman Catholic hierarchies keep in mind the hungers of the heart among the hundreds of millions of Christians who do not get to share the Lord's table.

In fact, I've seen enough of what these good and well-meaning people do as they work on concordats and issue declarations that I don't need to wonder much. It seems to me that they show too little imagination, too little readiness to revisit the radical themes of the gospels and the Pauline letters to come up with anything fresh.

So when I reread Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on ecumenism--especially how it treats the "Petrine ministry" and what it means for common participation at the Lord's table--I join so many others in mourning the existence of a gap between biblical expressions and the realities of Christian life in the world today.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not accusing the late Pope John Paul II and the bishops and theologians of bad faith, though I can't help but think that there is sometimes timid faith. Having been at the margins of ecumenical councils and deliberative assemblies for more than a half century, I have found reason to respect pope after pope, council after council, committee after committee for all that they have achieved since 1958. That's when Pope John XXIII took the chair and began embodying a spirit and sending signals that gave hope for better times.

Those better times have arrived. Today Christians across the boundaries of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism are flee to respond and act in every practical expression that I can think of and in all the spiritual commitments as well except the most important one: We do not come to the eucharistic table together.

Catholic authorities generally agree that many of us--I am speaking from the Lutheran dugout right now--recognize Christ as present in all the dimensions that Catholics do. In fact, opinion surveys of Catholics suggest that many of them have a very wan sense of Christ's presence and might profit from shared Communion. Why? Because when you alter the context of something, you have to think through what it is that you believe.

Some may think I am giving too much importance to a single theme. I don't have other complaints, however. Differences within Catholicism, within Lutheranism, and within Anglicanism and other church worlds are often more plaguing than are the differences between these churches.

Today we engage in social action across the boundaries of church bodies. We pray together, preach and hear and converse and study together, rejoice in each other's victories, and cry in each other's defeats. We are developing a global sense and a global reach together. We read each other's poets and sing each other's songs together. We share Baptism and usually are supportively present at marriages that cross communions and unite members.

For all that, the hope that we might be at the altar together was frustrated, deferred, and, pessimists would say, defeated by lines in Ut Unum Sint. It is not that non-Catholics reject "Peter" and "ministry" in the Petrine tradition. Yes, the church must be governed, we agree. More and more of those who had not yet recognized bishops do so each year, though we cannot find episcopacy to be of the essence of the church. We have no trouble with the idea of a first among equals, and why not let that person sit in Rome? Not all of these ideas come easily, but we are trying to use our imaginations.

To Pope John Paul II there was some thing integral about the papal office and the auspices under which the Eucharist "occurs." But must it be so? Cannot there be shared Communion even if we have separate jurisdictions and somewhat differing definitions of what goes on in the context of the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, the Mass?

Being or trying to be liturgically and ecclesiastically responsible and not to be clerical, I am cautious about receiving the bread in Catholic churches if this means that I am privileged--because of my status as an ecumenically involved ordained minister--and the other baptized children of God are not. Yet sometimes I use my imagination and break the rules. Quietly my wife and I and hundreds like us commune at funeral Masses of people we respect.

Sometimes I get called on to do a homily, as I did on Benedictine soil the night our conference was interrupted by word of Humanae Vitae in 1968, and the clergy, angry at the pope--oh, yes, they confessed!--refused to refuse me at the altar.

I also was asked to do the homily the night Pope Paul VI died; I think this came more easily to me than to some of the Catholics present, who had more disagreements with the pope than I.

At a conference on the site of a Nazi concentration camp, invited to the table, an Anglican and I partook, finding no way in the world to counter our near despair in the face of the ovens and graves unless we could share in the resurrection hope that comes with the Bread of Life.

But it is deflating to return from such exceptional occasions to the parishes where we spend most of our hours satisfying hungers and being fed for the journey, only to be denied food.

So while I have hope for the new pope, I am quite sure that I won't get to be at the same table until it is no longer a "foretaste of the feast to come" but will be the fulfilled feast. Apart now, together then: Imagine that!

MARTIN E. MARTY, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the editor of Context, a newsletter on religion and culture published by Claretian Publications in Chicago (for subscriptions, call 800-328-6515).