In a more candid moment, Cardinal Augustin Bea, president of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, declared:
“The Roman Catholic Church would be gravely misunderstood if it should be concluded that her present ecumenical adventuresomeness and openness meant that she was prepared to reexamine any of her fixed dogmatic positions. What the church is prepared to do is to take…a more imaginative and contemporary presentation of these fixed positions.”