Fr Prof Ioan Sauca has been appointed acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches from 1st April.
Sauca, who currently serves as deputy general secretary for the WCC program on ecumenical formation and the Bossey Ecumenical Institute, will temporarily replace Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit who leaves the WCC on 31st March to take up the post of Presiding Bishop of the Bishop’s Conference in the Church of Norway.
Fr Prof Dr Ioan Sauca, World Council of Churches deputy general secretary and director of the Ecumenical Institute. PICTURE:: Albin Hillert/WCC
Sauca will hold the post until June when the WCC executive committee meets. The committee had been due to meet over the week of 18th to 24th March but the meeting was postponed after concerns about the spread of coronavirus.
Dr Agnes Abuom, WCC moderator, asked for support and prayers from the WCC global fellowship as the shift of leadership occurs.
“Father Sauca is a senior colleague, well- qualified for this, and we will support and pray for him in these new responsibilities,” she said.
Sauca, who is from the Orthodox Church in Romania, has been professor of missiology and ecumenical theology at Bossey since 1998 and its director since 2001. He has served as a WCC deputy general secretary since 2014, having first joined the WCC in 1994.
He previously taught mission and ecumenism at the faculty of theology in Sibiu, Romania, and later served his patriarchate as head of the then-newly established Department of Press and Communication with additional responsibility for the Department for External and Ecumenical Church Relations and of religious education in public schools.
Tveit will be installed as the Presiding Bishop of the Bishop’s Conference in the Church of Norway in Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, on 26th April.
