By Stephen P. White, The Catholic Thing - Ultimately, the unity of the Church is the unity of Christ Himself. For this reason, division in the Church is always a wound in the Body of Christ. From this comes the urgent imperative for the work of genuine ecumenism, so emphasized at the Second Vatican Council and by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical, Ut unum sint (“That they may be one”), in which he insisted: “To believe in Christ means to desire unity; to desire unity means to desire the Church; to desire the Church means to desire the communion of grace which corresponds to the Father’s plan from all eternity.”