Christians are closer, but theological obstacles to unity seem to be multiplying, writes Martin Browne OSB
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is over for another year. I have more than a passing interest in this annual observance. Ecumenical prayer and cooperation have long been an important part of my own spiritual journey.
Added to this, I’m currently a member of the international group that helps produce the resources for the Week of Prayer on behalf of the Vatican and the World Council of Churches. I spent a memorable week in Latvia last year helping to prepare the prayers and reflections for this year. But despite all this, I’m afraid that I can’t claim that the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2016 has been the most inspiring spiritual experience of my life.
There was no ecumenical service in our local area, so I didn’t even manage to experience the words which I helped to edit in Riga 18 months ago being brought to life in a worshiping community.
One could be tempted to surmise that ecumenism isn’t important. But, at a time when Christianity is becoming more and more marginal in Western societies, our division is a hindrance to Christian mission and is confirmation for those who already believe it that Gospel, Christianity and Church are petty and irrelevant relics of a bygone age.
What is wrong with those of us who think of ourselves as committed Christians that this doesn’t keep us awake at night? Surely we should be working and praying night and day, with all our energy, to overcome the divisions in the Body of Christ!
Apathy
More dispiriting for me than the general apathy about ecumenism is the way some Catholics seem to want to turn back the clock to a time Catholics saw themselves as perfect and simply called on all other ecclesial bodies to ‘return’ to the fold. To mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity this year, one group dedicated to promoting Irish Catholic heritage posted a prayer on its Facebook page, calling on Our Lady to “look with pitiful eyes upon poor heretics and schismatics”, whom it further, charmingly, described as having minds that are “miserably enfolded in the darkness of ignorance and sin”.
Another group, a religious community, in its online posts chose to refer to the Week of Prayer by a title not used by the Catholic Church since the 1930s – the Chair of Unity Octave. This mannered and tendentious archaism harks back to a time not when Christians prayed together for unity, but when Catholics prayed, in Olympian detachment, that everyone else would ‘return’ to the Roman fold, and ‘submit’ to the Pope.
But that isn’t the way that the Catholic Church talks about other Christian communities anymore. The Second Vatican Council’s declaration on Ecumenism spoke not about ‘return’ but about the ‘restoration of unity’, and they’re not the same thing. Rather than claiming that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church, it taught that all the baptised are “in some, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church”.
More significantly, it all but repudiated the idea of the need for ‘separated brethren’ to ‘return’, saying that “one cannot charge with the sin of separation those who at present are born into these communities and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ”. Blessed Paul VI, referring to the Anglican Communion, longed for the day when Rome would be able “to embrace her ever beloved Sister in the one authentic communion of the family of Christ”.
Vatican
This changed attitude is why the Vatican was able to announce on the last day of this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that the Pope would travel to Sweden next October, to mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.
This changed attitude is why later that same day, Pope Francis, just as St John Paul II did before him in 2000, crossed the threshold of the Holy Door at St Paul’s Basilica, flanked by an Orthodox Metropolitan and an Anglican Archbishop. At the end of the liturgy, they blessed the congregation together – as one.
But the day Paul VI was dreaming of seems farther away than ever now, despite decades of growth in love and understanding between Christian churches and communions.
We have grown closer in many ways, but the theological obstacles to unity seem to be multiplying. We could easily settle for the warm neighbourly relationships that have been achieved and give up on the ultimate goal of full visible communion.
We could be tempted to see the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity as an irrelevant exercise. But we shouldn’t. It is a reminder that unity, no matter how rocky or potholed the road may seem, really is God’s will for his Church. And it is a reminder too that it is only in praying for Christian Unity that we have any hope of reaching it, for it is God alone who can grant it.
*Martin Browne OSB is a monk of Glenstal Abbey.