Ecumenism, what’s it good for?

Like Fr Hunwicke, I attended last Wednesday’s Oxford meeting of the Council of the Ecumenical Society of the BVM, following a lunch in Christ Church College – formerly Cardinal College, but that’s another story.

My lunch-time companions and I were not preoccupied with analysis of Pope Benedict, but in exchanging our various experiences as laity and clergy of funerals – a much more amusing topic for the lunch table than it may sound.

Fr Hunwicke is right that the membership of ESBVM seems in the main to be aging, and the numbers of those joining is, as I understood it, at best just about matching those going to their reward. Obtaining material for publication is difficult and branch attendance, activity and organisation is variable - a high-point in which is the renaissance of the once-dynamic Oxford Branch by Fr Hunwicke and Jill Pinnock (my mother, in case the surname was making you wonder). (Fr Hunwicke’s promised post or two on why he thinks Pope Benedict is the foremost ecumenical thinker of the twentieth century should be worth looking out for.)

As with all activities undertaken alongside a main occupation, keeping such things going can be hard work – I run the Society’s web site and it is rarely as up to date or as technically polished as I would like it to be. Although it’s not all doom and gloom – the various conferences and International Congresses seem to continue to be successful – I suspect that as Fr Hunwicke indicates, ESBVM is suffering from the fact that ecumenism as an activity per se is in trouble.

Why should this be the case? Why wouldn’t every sane Christian seeing the gulfs presently fixed between the Church (-es, discuss) and various ecclesial communities want to honour the Lord’s High Priestly Prayer, particularly John 17:21. For me at least these are entirely rhetorical questions. For many Christians they are not – not a bit of it.

I wrote some time ago for the Forward in Faith magazine New Directions on another ecumenical meeting that I had attended that seemed not to bode entirely well for ecumenism. At the heart of that article was my hypothesis that there are two modes of ecumenism. One looks to the reconciliation of all Christians under the authority the Holy See - the other just likes to get together from time to time and be pally, in what might be called the ‘Christians together but going nowhere’ model.

I now fear that it is worse than that. One group - in which I would number myself - continues to believe that all Christians must work to be reconciled under the authority of the Holy Father, and all other denominational projects (such as the ordination of women) need to be subjected to that and put aside. Another group is content to meet once a month and ‘celebrate our diversity’. A third group that I had previously - and shortsightedly - not described, simply doesn't care; they will marry, receive Holy Communion, and attend a particular church not according to denominational discipline, but, often as not, because they like the minister.

Is this latter phenomenon an ecumenism of the Sensus Fidelium or just post-modern sloppiness? My view - quelle surprise, you might respond - is that it is the second.

Historically, Catholics were not allowed even to pray the Our Father with non-Catholics. As Fr Hunwicke points out, there is still amongst the Orthodox a view that implies that all non-Orthodox are unbaptised heathen. Fr Hunwicke states that ‘there is no possibility of ecumenism in such a theology’. (Read his post to do his point due justice.)

I am not so sure. Having spent a chunk of the 20th Century - admittedly not very long in the timescales of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches - pursuing unsuccessfully the convergence / regrouping of traditions model, perhaps it is time for those who claim to be committed to the ‘one flock with one shepherd’ model of ecumenism to put their money where their mouths are and admit that for the Church to be one as He and the Father are one that the world may believe, Christian unity needs to be a lot more urgent and a lot more actively pursued - and a lot more clearly delineated.

John Paul II spoke of the need for the Church to breathe with both lungs - east and west; Orthodox and Catholic. There is a legitimate complementarity between the Church of the East and the Church of the West.

But the rest of us in the west - I can't speak for the east - simply need to get one with being reconciled to the Apostolic See and forget about denominational futures. The lesson perhaps that ESBVM and other similar organisations may need to learn is that denominational choice can’t productively be left to individual conscience alone.

Ecumenism = Conversion / Reconciliation. Discuss.