Abstract
This study of the ecumenical attitudes of Roman Catholic Religion Teachers is based on a mailed questionnaire sent to 965 administrators and consultants during March and April, 1982, and returned by almost half of them. The results are highly ecumenical: The respondents show strong pro-ecumenical attitudes and they endorse key propositions which underlie the practice of ecumenism. These findings are corroborated by a content analysis of some leading Roman Catholic religious education texts, which present non-Catholic Christianity in a way which shows their authentic religious spirit. I interpret the discordance between these data and many scholarly studies of ecumenism (which do not report a great amount of grass roots ecumenical activity) by reference to the social-psychological roots of the ecumenicity of the professional religious educator. I suggest that ecumenism allows Roman Catholicism to be a Catholic denomination.
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