When Mickey Mattox, assistant professor of theology, introduced Otto Hermann Pesch as this year's Père Marquette lecturer, he described the speaker's visit as a "great privilege" and a "profound honor."

When Pesch reached the podium, he said he was just happy that so many people came, quipping, "I wouldn't be convinced totally that I would attend a presentation at 2 p.m. on a Sunday."

Similar comments peppered Pesch's lecture, entitled "The Ecumenical Potential of Vatican II." The lecture was open to the public and about 100 people attended the event in the Weasler Auditorium Sunday.

Pesch, professor emeritus at the University of Hamburg in Germany, was the 37th presenter of the Père Marquette Lecture. The lecture is an annual event put on by the Department of Theology.

Pesch's speech centered on finding unity within the different Christian religions and how various councils in the Catholic Church have worked toward that goal. He said open dialogue is the only way to find truth within the church, and that Vatican II helped alleviate the church's anxieties about contact with other faiths.

"Unity is not to be made but discovered," Pesch said.

Mamie Smith, a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences, said she decided to attend the lecture because of a class she took about the documents of Vatican II last semester. She said the part of the speech that struck her the most was Pesch's emphasis on the differences between the actual dogma of the church and how people talk about and understand it.

"He talked about how the church itself is there and it doesn't change, but with the differences in culture, time and society you find different ways to express it and different ways to come to an understanding of it," she said.

Pesch highlighted other ways in which religious understanding changes over time as well. He said only those with a "vivid memory of the time before the Council, those who are older than 60," will recognize the successes and steps that have been made toward unification.

The younger generation, he said, thinks more about the "blockades" that still exist between different faiths.

Smith said she thought Pesch reached a sort of middle ground by recognizing that the church itself does not change, but people's way of looking at it does with each new generation.

"I thought that was an interesting kind of compromise," she said. "A lot of people see truth as completely subjective or completely eternal."

One reason Pesch was chosen as this year's speaker was because of his expertise on ecumenical issues, according to John Schmitt, associate professor of theology.

"He is such a distinguished scholar, and there is an ecumenical thrust within the theology department at Marquette," Schmitt said.

Mattox echoed this sentiment in his introduction of Pesch, saying his topic was fitting at "a Catholic university with an ecumenical faculty of theology."

"Ecumenical" refers to the Christian church as a whole. Schmitt said Pesch is a Roman Catholic, but roughly 10 percent of speakers who have given the lecture in the past have been leaders and thinkers in other faiths, including a rabbi.