Is there life after ecumenism?

...Is there space, in other words, for the Anglican church order within the Roman order-with its authoritarian, centralizing tendencies...

...Runcie with a reluctant "Yes, there's room...

...But what are the practical implications of such a "consensus of the faith...

...It's disheartening...

...Signals are being sent, ominous ones, by the Kung and Schil-lebeeckx cases, by the pope's refusal to celebrate an indigenous African liturgy, by the Dutch synod and other attempts to strong-arm national and regional conferences of bishops, and by the treatment of the Uniate churches, The "mood in Rome," insiders at both conferences assured me, is "not auspicious...

...William Jerry Boney's proposal to seize the dawning day of the third millennium in the year 2000 with a vast assembly representing all Christians "on the way" to a truly ecumenical council...

...I went, I soon discovered, a "Roman...

...Can there be unity without nullifying absorption, he asks...

...Meanwhile, my impression is that many Protestant leaders await, if not the sacrament of communion, at least some sacramental gesture from Rome and national bishops' conferences-like the "covenanting" mentioned above -to publicly mark, and celebrate, the very real bonding in faith already achieved...

...Nonetheless, ecumenists are a dauntless lot, even incorrigible...

...So yes, if you look to Rome, my colleagues were right to say things are "on hold"-though even there, behind the stonewalling, there's more movement, last-ditch efforts I incline to think, than appears...

...More Walt Disney," quipped one auditor...

...At the New York meeting, the courtly Father Jerome Vereb, O.P., of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, insisted it wasn't so...

...There's confident life after the death of the post-tridentine psyche, so I heard here...

...Short of full juridical union, of course, lies the intermediate device of formal "covenant" between churches, a public acknowledgment of agreement at the roots of faith and a pact to collaborate in social action-a model on the way to intercommunion that thus far (only) local congregations have pioneered...

...But thus far, ironically, what Protestants have for the most part gotten from Rome and the bishops is words, preachment with little embodiment...

...it would come, a matter of time, as regional and national conferences of bishops assume, and assert, more autonomy vis a vis Rome...

...On more familiar ground, however, the ecumenical movement has manifestly reached the mature stage of asking tougher questions from inside the other's world...

...Like St...

...Since then, however, we've discovered we're in a post-modern world which is both more hospitable to faith and more menacing than anything avoided or faced in 1870 or 1966...

...Among other proposals, Jesuits were discussing one by Father Bernard Sesboue of France to radically decentralize church structure by dividing up the western (Roman) patriarchate...

...discover, first-hand, the splendor hidden "from all eternity," both immanent and imminent, in and over our earth, our flesh -the question of "spiritual depth" I referred to at the outset...

...James Cathedral in Brooklyn...

...If Sesbbue's suggestion seemed impractical, as it did to many, especially with Pope John Paul II assertively reigning, the point was not lost-that somehow, someway, the Petrine office needed major revision...

...The present had come down hard;' ecumenists, like the rest of us, are gathering their wits...

...Catholics need Quakers, and so forth...

...And yet, in suffering (not enjoying) intercommunion with an Archbishop Lefebvre or a Hans kung, "base communities," women on the Pill, and (who knows...

...At both conferences, you could see that the locus of discussion had shifted forward, from the classic, historical issues that had once divided us to the unsettling problematic of contemporary faith that has little to do with denominational position...

...graduate student, among the first of a flood of Jesuits to be "released" to study at Protestant divinity schools...

...On hold," replied one, and then the subject, apparently lacking interest, was quickly dropped...

...The purport of Dr...

...They do...

...Apparently, John Paul is not hearing this message...

...John's (Collegeville) Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research...

...On the inter-religious front, Eugene B. Borowitz's Jewish response to contemporary christologies [reviewed Commonweal, Sept...

...Among other consortiums modeling this new situation of a shared, troubled faith is the ecumenically "collegial" Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology sponsored since 1977 by St...

...Golden opportunities for incarnate gesture have been missed...

...So what's the quandary for present-centered, invariably liberal ecumenists...

...OF COURSE Rome is not wrong to think these differences in sacramental practice and church order matter extremely...

...On the contrary, as such, it provides the basis for the multiplicity of confessions...

...Planning for such a thing, Mudge and Boney dream, might refocus and galvanize the sluggish ecumenical movement into action again, and in so doing, create the conditions for a genuinely ecumenical council...

...But consider: the fact that Protestant church leaders are now pressing Rome on the issue of legitimate diversity proclaims loud and clear just how confident they are of substantial common ground with Catholics...

...abused the privilege...

...At nearly every ecumenical convention these days, like the two I have reflected on here and the National Council of Churches' "ecumenical event" in Cleveland, held on November 5-7, there's much talk of Dr...

...Sooner than Protestant diplomatic pressure, this acute internal bind is likely to move the question of diversity forward - and rather rapidly I should think...

...Like many another agreement on fundamentals hammered out over the last decade, this one, too, carried none...

...He now lives, blessed by rich music and conversation, at St...

...In effect, the answer to this question is being worked out-and telegraphed to other Christian "ecclesial bodies"-by current struggles within the church...

...With a Yes, "this too is my body...

...Catholics were not even urged, as many had hoped, to make the Augsburg Confession their own, to use it liturgically...

...Both the floundering and the tougher questions were evident at the New York NAAE meeting in September, and also, in late August, at the international meeting?, outside Montreal, of Jesuit ecumenists representing some thirty-six countries...

...In all honesty, though, I had to admit ecumenism doesn't fire me either, at least not as it once did when I was an eager S.M.U...

...Fresh from meeting Cynthia Wedel, the effervescent president of the World Council of Churches, and so many other hardworking ecumenists in the last two months, I was somewhat peeved by my colleagues' -perhaps typical-indifference...

...THAT CHRISTIAN diversity is the issue of the hour, and that at least some Catholic elites are entirely comfortable with it, was shown by one leading question on the agenda of the Jesuit Montreal conference: what changes in the Roman Catholic church appear desirable to restore Christian unity...

...On the ecumenical front, this ought to mean that Catholic bishops, realizing that the dialogue locally has surpassed the international one, will feel pastorally obligated to act according to the religious climate within their own jurisdictions-without thinking it necessary that the church everywhere need be at the same stage for real leading edges to consolidate themselves...

...Some forms, argued Niebuhr-witness Tolstoy, Ritschl, Aquinas, Luther, Augustine, and F.D...

...Though less conspicuous thin before, the quality of ecumenical dialogue is actually improving...

...What's happened in these fruitful bilateral dialogues demands some great, symbolic calling attention to-and by tradition, we Catholics ought to know how to put on the kind of headline-catching street theater the situation calls for...

...What's happened to the movement...

...Reflecting the "third church" concerns I mentioned earlier on, the idea is to reconceive and adapt for the occasion the ancient Israelite idea of a Jubilee Year (of Leviticus 25) and the "acceptable year of the Lord" (of Lk 4) to take up the central issues of justice and peace...

...As Alfred North Whitehead once saw, the most distinctive thing about Christianity consists in its doctrine of divine immanence: the unseen Hebrew God's face and voice visible and audible in Jesus, and the interiority of Spirit to created materiality in general...

...My favorite example from the New York meeting was William H. Lazareth, the new director of the World Council's Faith and Order Commission, who is now questioning the Orthodox as to whether, given the gender-neutral meaning of anthropos at Nicea and Chalcedon, they're really being "orthodox" in the practice of excluding women from the ministry...

...Sooner or later, then, we'll want to voice, within an encompassing Yes, a dismantling No to this post-modern world...

...At the same time, after my recent conventioneering, I'm here to tell you the movement's far from dead...

...The plank in Rome's eye that prevents it from appreciating the specific, cultivated "virtues" of other Christian ways of incarnating themselves, on the other hand, is its own post-tridentine monstrosity, its over-developed centralization and authoritarianism...

...Maurice for samples-run short of the whole story, stress one trinitarian pole (perhaps appropriate for the time, not for another) at the expense of the other, and thus witness-at best-to but a third of the truth...

...When theologians disagree these days, it's rarely along confessional lines, but along professional, academic ones...

...The answer is no, time does not stand still nor does the world we must include, recognize...

...For what creeds once divided, culture, scholarly method, has united...

...It was also adventure bordering on revelation to assimilate, as many of us then did living with "separated brethren" and sisters, the Protestant principle-that Luther and Calvin were for us "doctors of the church" too-and to find, out of contrast, our Catholic substance freshly illuminated...

...forms of ministry (ah, women...

...It's Rome's cyclopian way of strongly asserting, against "Protestant" spiritualism and me-and-God privatism, against an overly hieratic and politically withdrawn "Orthodoxy," its central principle of incarnation - and with that the essentially social, and yes-if we want to make an earthly difference -the institutional consequence of authentic Christian conversion...

...father DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., assistant editor of Commonweal, did graduate study at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas...

...Is this, all this, my body-or Christ's?, we want to know...

...official Roman Catholic words have begun to sound empty: the ecumenical will is flagging...

...The debate's about that-what we will stomach...

...For instance, last year when a joint Lutheran-Catholic commission had completed its 450th anniversary study of Melanchthon's conciliatory Augsburg Confession, Cardinal Jan Willebrands, president of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity, saluted the creed for presenting "a basis for the common confession of central doctrinal truths...

...communal Catholics"-and, less publicized, with most of the very "protestant" lay Catholic students I once taught in Buffalo, New York-the Vatican has tacitly stretched far to answer Dr...

...No one I spoke to believed him...

...what are the limits of diversity...

...It's that this common culture also puts faith, both its meaning and its truth, in eclipse-and please note, for nearly all churches in roughly the same ways...

...The theology justifying it, implicit in Vatican II and much developed since, is already in place...

...on this basis, Catholics and Lutherans spoke with a common voice...

...As with other themes they might have chosen, the floundering here is collective-a sense of primitive "defilement" or "stain," says an initial Workgroup report {Occasional Papers, Collegeville, Sept., 1981), that afflicts prosperous Westerners regardless of confessional stance...

...Ecumenical zealots" are suspect...

...Nor were survival rights to food and decent work, or the plight of refugees, ever far out of sight at the New York meeting...

...Whether theoretician or activist, the issue is spiritual depth, penetrating to roots...

...Thus one of the first topics considered was the modern problem of evil, a theme indifferent to church membership, a context we're all in like the proverbial boat...

...In Montreal, the "third church" was bodily present and yes, disruptive of doctrinal European-American concerns, in the form of Jesuits from Africa and Southeast Asia-and the Santa Claus presence of Father Cesar Jerez ("As a Latin, socialism would be too dull"), Jesuit provincial of Central America...

...We've had one very parochial council to order things in our ghetto world (Vatican I) and another (Vatican II), as the saying goes, to "perform surgery without anesthetic on a patient who thought he was in the best of health" -which acknowledged ex post facto we were in the modern world...

...Symbolic of this deafness, perhaps, the Gregorian University in Rome, in a distinctive way the pontifical think-tank par excellence, has no Protestant faculty members these days...

...It's a measure of how successful the dialogue has been that at least for Anglicans, and perhaps Lutherans, advancing the question of diversity shows a readiness to consider seriously some flexible form of juridical communion -which might be as hard to swallow for their own congregations as it is for inelastic Rome...

...For as H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture demonstrated, diverse Christian attitudes toward culture, toward those educing means of cultivating one "spirit" or another, testify to substantial differences on how, and whether, the Triune God makes its presence felt, is "in" or "out," lost or found, in material events...

...Equally illustrative of this shift in depth, on a front closer to home, was last March's address by Dr...

...In a way then, to make agreement on sacramental and institutional order the prerequisite for intercommunion strikes me as correct in principle...

...But Rome's nose is already out of joint fresh sniffing similar protestantizing claims among its own faithful, conspicuously in the mounting argument over the people's "right to a priest," to Eucharist, which Pope John Paul II judges to lie at the heart of matters Catholic...

...visit was any index, for much of the populace besides-he is already their spokesman, their pope, the most powerful and visible Christian voice in the world today...

...Each member brings the strengths-and weaknesses-of his or her own tradition to what is recognized as a common theological enterprise...

...To others, like Gray moor Friar William F. Lewis writing in the October issue of Ecumenical Trends, religious diversity is less a "problem" than the inspired means by which, historically, oppressed groups like the Amish, American Indians, poor Hispanics and blacks, have achieved social renewal, made spiritual breathing room for themselves...

...After bilateral dialogue in which virtual Anglican-Catholic unanimity has been reached or eucharist, ministry, and authority in the church, Runcie wanted to know "what range of diversity is compatible with unity, or...

...the central bone of contention being the fourth article, the church-and plural ecclesiologies, plural ways of convening and cultivating a distinctively trinitarian vision and action in the world...

...However one defines the issue, though, the point is that one need scarcely go beyond the boundaries of today's Catholicism to discover a multiplicity of worlds-going down hard or easy...

...The era of euphoric fellowship has done its work, made it possible to put better questions...

...It's important to note where it lies, and where it doesn't...

...Why do so with less than as catholic a chorus as by all signs stands available and willing-without the other Christian voices, like the Texas Methodists who in the sixties taught me so much, who would join us...

...For one thing, theologians of the different traditions are now deep enough inside each other's skin so that there's no offense in the "outsider" questioning the keystones of fraternal kingdoms...

...I came away, I think, more richly catholic...

...The few once there, I was told, "didn't work out...

...Absorbing Methodist theologian Albert Outler's suspenseful eye-witness tales of how the shrewd tactics of Cardinals Lienart, Frings, Dopfner, and Konig outwitted the sly Cardinal Tisserant-and set the Catholic church on an amazing, unpredictable new course-that was adventure...

...15, 1980...

...and church order (ugh, Congregationalism...

...So be it...

...Read-out historically and dialectically, as it must be, this means that no generation of Christians can escape the windy imperative to discern the context-specific promising goods and unpromising evils of its age, and accordingly, make theological choices in embodying Christian witness in limited ways for and against...

...Runcie's question, his claim for "unity not absorption," has not been missed...

...Can our bodies stand the expansion...

...have brought to the table...

...DAVID TOOLAN IN LATE SEPTEMBER, just back from the annual meeting in New York City of the North American Academy of Ecumenists, I asked the two extraordinary diocesan priests with whom I live where they thought the movement toward Christian unity stood...

...The latter is what well-bounded, "disturbed" church people fear...

...What's clear is that Protestants, with the Orthodox just behind them, are queuing up on this one: assuming agreement on the fundamentals of the faith-and though too much a guarded secret among church elites, years of bilateral dialogue have assured this to a remarkable degree-how much diversity in sacramental practice and ministry will the Catholic church tolerate-even encourage...

...My guess is it's what Protestants tend to consider rather secondary formalities in the "hierarchy of truths" Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism professed, and which Rome, following the Scholastic adage that form follows substance, regards as revealing irreconcilable differences -things like different sacramental practice (once a month or year...

...A disarmingly simple idea, "unity by stages" may be one of those notions destined to break logjams at the top...

...For though Rome's current mood is that of the turtle who's "overextended" its head, ecumenical intercommunion is already, within our own shell, a fait accompli...

...And that means ecumenists too...

...When he addresses the UN, when he dresses down a Marcos or the Brazilian generals, when he evokes Lazarus in a Yankee Stadium, he speaks to and for them-and is also, in some as yet undefined way, answerable to them as well as his cradle-constituency...

...The Archbishop was candid enough to admit Rome would properly have tough questions to ask Anglicans, viz., whether their famous "comprehensiveness" did not conceal many an inadmissible self-contradiction...

...What's holding things up...

...All of which has much to do with the more visible source of confusion in the ecumenical agenda: the overriding socio-economic issues, liberation theology, and El Salvador et al...

...But this means, subjectively, that the question for aspirant Christians is: by what path, by what means (of grace), does one...

...The ease with which such a prospect was contemplated, in some form even foreseen as inevitable and healthy for the papacy itself, showed how little Jesuit identity is now wedded to a church order we helped to create...

...If the answer's yes, it's Christ's body, it decidedly does spell a bending out of traditional shape, more catholicity for some, at least a temporary loss of identity for others...

...Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Catholic cathedral of Westminster in London...

...So what's holding things up in Rome...

...No less true, subsequent generations) facing a different set of circumstances will be inspired to undo the consolidations of their ancestors...

...Lewis Mudge and Dr...

...religious pluralism is positive, a sign of the "Spirit who blows where it will...

...Somehow, at least this pope does not seem yet to realize that at least for a large portion of mainstream Protestant elites-and if his U.S...

...And the whole point is that in this tail-chasing historical game, conserving kings would be lost without visionary prophets, and vice-versa-and both would perish of chronic "realism" or utopianism without hieratic time-off to celebrate what already is...

...Rome knows only too well that swallowing that claim would bend it out of shape-which it would...

...After fourteen years of remarkably successful official bilateral dialogue, and a mixed bag of equally stunning exchanges among congregations at the grass roots level, the ecumenical movement flounders-understandably...

...Conservative Lutherans and conservative Catholics, for instance, are likely to resemble each other-and the divisions lie between them and in-house liberals, whose scriptural and historical scholarship increasingly agrees...

...For meditators of the Pauline epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, the protests on all sides ought to sound familiar...

...FIRST the floundering...

...Few thought this likely to occur at Vatican initiative...

...10, 1981] is a sample of what's afoot...

...more deeply rooted than any division.'' The German bishops and Pope John 4>aul II later confirmed the judgment...

...It did not escape Runcie's attention that in light of "the new confidence of the non-European cultures . . . unity in inescapable diversity is now a pressing (issue) for the Roman church.'' Nor did he miss that, as Ernst Kasemann has written, "The New Testament canon does not, as such, constitute the foundation of the unity of the church...

...Instinctively then, Rome mistrusts the reliability of (merely) conceptual agreements reached on the first three articles of the creed...

...the Lutheran World Federation asked this past August 10...

...All that's needed is episcopal "spirit"-and more attention, on the part of Protestants and Orthodox, to national/ regional episcopal conferences rather than Rome...

...Stanley Hauerwas & Robert Wilken, Commonweal, Feb...

...Haven't we Roman Catholics just had two ecumenical councils in the past century or so...

...The problem of pluralism, some theologians call it-that almost Hindu polyphony and fissiparousness of contemporary Catholicism...

...The most obvious answer, from the Catholic standpoint at least, is that the adventure of ecumenism has become an in-house affair...

...hurt the church by being critical"-by being themselves, I thoughts "protesting...

...The lines between confessions developed since the original schisms are increasingly fluid...

...Is there life after this death of the denominational self...

...yin-yang, troublesome diversity is treasure to be conserved...

...Clearly, this new set of post-modern "political" questions had thrown both groups of ecumenists off strike...

...Paul maybe, or Catherine of Siena...

...Just because the time is ripe for such communion, just because the differences indispensably matter, and just because we know that even this ecumenical thrust will be in-house, but dress-rehearsal for the challenge of world religions already so much with (and against) us, let us seize the day...

...It would recognize that institutions like the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic church are intermediate, penultimate forms of the one church in process of formation in every place-and participants would be asked to think on behalf of the people of God in the place where they live...