All ecumenism is local
Marciniak, Ed
he describes the incident, and from the hint of a question mark still hovering above it. Childless myself, I give him the verbal support he wants, hoping that I, too, would have had the courage of...
...Grassroots ecumenism contends every day with practical adjustments to the theologically impossible...
...A.A...
...Couples in interfaith marriages don't like to see their marriage treated like problems," writes Father George Kilcourse of Louisville's Bellarmine College and author of EcumenicalMarriage (National Association of Ecumenical Officers...
...My purpose is to highlight the importance of other ecumenical encounters, like the eight recounted above...
...But there's another side to it: Something we see briefly between the shots of the gleaming spire and the control-room computers racheting to count-down: the rocket's placenta, the gantry of steel girders and hoses puffing spurts of angry steam, an edifice in itself, a giant Beaubourg yet, finally, no more than a means to an end, so much discardable scaffolding tethered to earth...
...a pref- erential option for the poor...
...members, spirituality unites, religion divides...
...is the 'story of how, under God's grace, an unsuspected strength has arisen out of a great weakness.' Any of us who take time to reflect upon our cog- temporary age can appreciate these words when we see that A.A.'s ongoing story is not only transforming the lives of alco- holics but also society...
...Most social programs, whether shelters or soup kitchens for the homeless in our cities...or assistance and referral services for troubled farmers in rural America, are ecumenical (inter-Christian) or interreligious (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu...
...For example, a Catholic, the office secretary for many years in the rectory of my parish church, now performs the same duties for the local Presbyterian church, three blocks away...
...to the mul- tiplication of sacramental, interchurch marriages...
...Lewis's insight that all friend- ships are ultimately gifts from God...
...50: Commonweal Millions of U.S...
...In the meantime, other ecumenical approaches beg for re-examination...
...While theologians struggle at length with the ecumenical riddle of a shared Eucharist, they pay scant attention to a pastoral min- istry for interchurch families that would deepen their communion with Christ...
...Their experiences, for me, recall the reply a Jesuit cardinal, Augustin Bea, gave a Protestant observ- er at Vatican II about a proposed solution to a delicate ecumenical dilemma: "That is theologically impossible but practically nec- essary...
...For it is a grassroots spirituality, easing religious division with a spiritual vision...
...opposition to abortion on demand...
...Recent studies indicate that of new marriages involving Catholics in the U.S., 40 percent are mixed...
...is an organization, Sellner points out, that is "nonde- nominational and outside of ecclesial structures" and "recognizes the importance of such [loving people] in its own process of spiritual growth or 'spiritual awakening'....Bill Wilson, the co- founder of A.A., once said that A.A...
...As they multiply, they go beyond official ecumenism to broaden the ecumenical movement's base and accelerate its progress...
...9 Congratulating a Catholic colleague who had been named president of the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, the largest YMCA in the world...
...The late Thaddeus D. Horgan, S.A., reported on the changing attitude toward official ecumenical give-and-take in 1988 when he was associate director of the National Council of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs...
...They also pray together at retreats, on Martin Luther King Day, and in ecumenical prayer services such as the one held in 1987 in South Carolina where Pope John Paul II preached...
...It is the conviction, amazingly successful in practice, that separated Christians should do everything together except what conscience demands that they do apart...
...It is the contemporary challenge to the faith of all Christians who recognize that the values found in the marketplace, public square, or television studio are often more influential in shaping their lives than their allegiance to a church...
...But both are not the sum total of ecu- menism...
...Many of them have overcome theological hurdles that were once thought to be insurmountable...
...Altos and tenors in church choirs are often ecumenically diverse, as are the organists...
...What is so mind-boggling is that A.A.'s ecumenical spirituality has seldom, if ever, been acknowledged or appreciated by full- time ecumenists...
...Martin E. Marty, the pride and joy of most American Lutherans...
...What keeps twenty-first century ecumenists busy and on track...
...and to sustained cooperation, across denominational lines, on issues such as liberation theology...
...Consider these scattered examples from the United States alone...
...members help alcoholics find a friend when they need one the most...
...members who wish to are invited to pray the Lord's Prayer togeth- er at the close of a meeting, the experience becomes ecumenically genuine and abiding...
...9 Viewing the television presentation of Archbishop John May of St...
...ALL ECUMENISM IS LOCAL (Continued from page 44) .9 Commemorating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth at a Lutheran-Catholic service in Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral where the homilist was none other than Dr...
...reliance on friendship reminds one of C.S...
...How to cope with relatives who have strong convictions about these matters and who exert pressure to have their way...
...When an A.A...
...The most obvious one is the prolife movement which, despite the high visibility of Catholic bishops, is truly an ecumenical enterprise...
...Their responses to this challenge soften denominational loyalties...
...I know by now, having done my research, that Christadelphians are exclusive, would confine our Lord's promise of salvation to members of their own cult...
...In some Southern and Western states, the rates may rise to 80 percent...
...I describe it as grassroots ecumenism because it flourishes in families and neighborhoods and because it consciously embraces religious diversity as it caters to simple human hopes...
...Horgan, a sturdy supporter of institution- alized ecumenism, wrote: "Throughout the United States ecu- menism is taken for granted...
...But which ones...
...Ttle rate for interchurch marriages for Episcopalians is as high as 50 percent in some urban areas...
...groups meet each week...
...Louis greeting twenty-five hundred Lutherans assem- bled in the Catholic cathedral to celebrate the formation of Re Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and opening with these words: "mi casa, su casa...
...social justice...
...They used to be called mixed marriages and frowned upon severely...
...But explanations for the failures of some interchurch marriages are not clear...
...Since then, these prerequisites have been updated dramatically...
...Seldom are guideposts available to two faithful Christians trying to make their ecumenical marriage a happy one...
...From a pastoral perspective, interchurch matches are regularly viewed as "problem" marriages, which some of them are...
...The problem is that these steps seem to be going in circles...
...The excruciating ecumenical questions in two-church families are not theological disputes but highly personal choices: In which church to worship on Sunday...
...When Paul and Jeanne Simon reflected on their marriage in a book, Protestant-Catholic Marriages Can Succeed (Association Press), they exclaimed that such "a marriage, sanc- tified by God, is no place for churches to carry out their petty WarS...
...Christians pray together more frequently and not just on Thanksgiving Day, which is slowly becoming the nation's first ecumenical holy day of nonobligation...
...Mixed Blessings The groundswell in grassroots ecumenism in the United States can be traced to still another source...
...Not many years ago Martin E. Marty served as president of the American Catholic Historical Association...
...As the tide of enthusiasm ebbs for top-level negotiations between ambassadors representing different churches, a new realism surfaces with regard to the efficacy and speed of bilateral commissions and canonical dialogues...
...Fifty years ago, for example, the conditions for approving an interchurch wedding for a Catholic were regarded as sacrosanct...
...Official Ecumenism When these examples of personal ecu- menism are ignored and attention centered only on authorized dialogue, ambiguity begins to cloud assessments of the con- temporary status of ecumenism...
...The A.A...
...The set of demands made of each partner by his or her church institution vexes many an ecumenical marriage...
...These experiences seldom appear in religious publications, make newspaper headlines, catch the attention of television news- casters, or show up as footnotes in theological journals...
...Across the nation, in hundreds of Catholic schools serving innercity neighborhoods, the student populations are predominantly black and not Catholic...
...Discouragement sets in for the participants in official consultations...
...Grassroots Ecumenism A third level of ecumenism emerges from the headaches and heartbreaks of daily living...
...member appeals to "my higher power whom I choose to call God" or when A.A...
...The staff and students of many educational institutions have become ecumenically diverse...
...Recent and historic exchanges will, it now seems, continue to stumble along as they have with the Orthodox since Constantinople in 1054, with Protestants since Augsburg in 1517, and with the Polish National Catholic Church since Scranton in 1900...
...What often becomes divisive in such a marriage is man-made and hence can be unmade...
...Here, despite the blinders of theologians, ecumenism is pervasive and deeply root- ed...
...More than a million alcoholics meet regularly in A.A...
...How well is this potential for grassroots ecumenism grasped and built upon...
...I soon dis- covered that the new kids had been dropped off by parents on their way to Mass at the local Catholic church...
...Which religious education for children...
...Since that time, thousands of models of insti- tutional ecumenism have come into being, many solidly estab- lished...
...Civil celebrations have an ecu- menical and/or interreligious flavor...
...In the darkness we stare forward in search of the infinitely distant point...
...The ecumenical priority nowadays goes to establishing new ways for local religious institutions to respect one another's traditions and become involved with them--the second level of ecumenism...
...These institutionalized developments bring joy and new promise to the beleaguered ecumenists who serve on official interchurch commissions...
...The infectious optimism of the 1960s, fed by Vatican II, succumbs to the disquieting pessimism of the 1990s...
...But still the ice says yes, and calls me to its comely hues and hard realities...
...In the Peoria diocese, where more than fifteen thousand persons have made a Cursillo during the past decade, 25 percent of the Cursillistas were Christians other than Catholics...
...The august-sounding Second Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission will probably see its worthy handiwork sink into ecclesiastical quagmire...
...If recent history is a sound guide, the Anglican and Catholic theologians will send their victorious findings on to church authorities and settle back to twiddle their thumbs for a good long while, perhaps forever...
...Such marriages do, indeed, advance the ecumenical movement...
...Increasingly, religious publishing houses have become ecumenical in their marketing and their choice of authors...
...And their number increases annually as hostility to such marital unions wanes...
...groups...
...Will they be ab- sorbed into the ecumenical movement by those who have been appointed to shepherd it...
...I want the snow to fall enough to make a foothold, to cover the necessary sense of mortality which makes me more alert then I would like to be...
...Religion is by definition otherworldly...
...I think of retaliating and trying out on him a slightly lurid piece of street-corner evangelism--a poor thing but my own...
...Some of the mandatory guidelines emanating from one church or anoth- er are still important...
...In Immanuel Lutheran church there stands a statue of Pope John XXIII, whose attitude, sensitivity, and compassion, not so much his theology, turned him into this century's most influential docent of ecumenism...
...They pray and meditate together, form lifelong friendships, attend retreats, and provide mutual support as they struggle to stay sober...
...I refer to movements like Alcoholics Anonymous...
...Which organizations to join...
...Would he accept that picture as a symbol, not perhaps of Christ's church, but of so much that in any one life represents religious formation----our inspirations, our misroutings, our men- tors, our controversies, our prejudices, as seen from that unimag- inable location, "space...
...For a homegrown family, spirituality, simultaneously ecumenical and Christian, is being fostered in countless mixed marriages that are rarely recognized as signs of Christian unity...
...Perhaps even as we aspire we should admit the basis in pure chance (of being born at this time or in that place) of the support systems whose only--and ultimately discardable--func- tion is to launch...
...Professor Edward Sellner of the College of St...
...The problem is not their marriage, but the division between the churches in which they've been baptized...
...Each of us," according to an A1-Anon handbook, "must find our way to heaven and the A1-Anon teachings reinforce our faith in the way we choose to worship, whatever it may be...
...In his son's sci-fi film the emphasis will have been, rightly, on the gleaming spaceship, the weightless trajectory, the cathedral- high rocket that achieved this defiance of gravity...
...These experiences and similar ones enjoyed by friends and neighbors point to an ecumenism radically different from official interchurch commissions and the like...
...to the receding importance of denominational boundaries even as the demand for confessional identity surges...
...impact is centrifugal...
...Protestants and Catholics once clung possessively to their own Bibles and were urgently discouraged or forbidden to read the others...
...At the Harvard and Chicago divinMary Rudbeck Stanko Transition The ice is a frozen tomb of memories where, at a glance, I can see my ancestors smiling reflectively and affectionately up at my shoes, watching me as I whistle and hold onto the air for balance...
...Home-Grown Ecumenism The most popular examptes of grassroots ecumenism are interchurch marriages...
...That conviction takes the form of institutional ecumenism that occurs in religious organizations that have opened their doors and hearts---or mem- bership-to women and men from other persuasions...
...Furthermore, the American Bible Society, whose historical ethos has largely been Evangelical Protestant, appointed a Catholic Texan as general secretary...
...A.A...
...During the twentieth century, the single most important devel- opment in North American spirituality has been that generated by Alcoholics Anonymous...
...and A1-Anon (the association for families of alcoholics) have become known for ~heir suggested program of recovery, more and more other self-help groups are adapting the [A.A.'s] Twelve Steps to their specific audience and needs...
...Childless myself, I give him the verbal support he wants, hoping that I, too, would have had the courage of my convictions...
...Christians now thrive in families where the marriage is ecumenical...
...9 Listening to a friend from Baltimore, who once supervised the Sunday nursery at Messiah Lutheran Church, explain her encounter with ecumenism: "One year I noticed more and more strange preschoolers in the nursery...
...I remember that, the first time I sat in this chair, my own declaration of reli- gious allegiance was received in silence, and am left to wonder if the images it produces are of Inquisition torture chambers and Smithfield burnings--scenes from those slide-shows I watched in the fifties as a member of a Protestant youth group...
...By no means are these lonely examples of institutional ecu- menism...
...48: Commonweal Earlier, in 1985, even more discouraging words came from Kenneth Briggs, former religion writer for the New York Times: "A few days ago I read about another one of those headlined 'steps' toward Christian unity...
...To name only a few, these focused on the location of the wedding, the absolute necessity of a Catholic priest as witness, limitations on partic- ipation in the worship services of one's spouse, sworn statements that children would be raised as Catholics, and others...
...For A.A...
...Finally, at Loyola University nearby, classes are held on the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, holy days of obligation, while Jewish students are excused from classes on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur...
...At the present time, a dozen or more English editions are read and studied jointly by Christians without regard to denomination...
...Not well...
...Ecumenical conversations, face-to-face exchanges at the high- est level, deserve everyone's "amen," and the achievements of institutional ecumenism are not only welcome but are, as noted above, also contagious...
...The ecumenical potential in interchurch marriages has not been explored...
...Today, called interchurch, interfaith, or ecumenical marriages, they are not only tolerated but commonplace as well...
...He recalled that only two decades earlier he and other Catholics had been warned from the pulpit not to join the YMCA...
...How often do a bride and bridegroom realize that each confers the sacrament of matrimony upon the other, despite doctrinal differences or emphases...
...How widely understood is it that a marriage between a Catholic and another Christian is, in the Catholic tradition, a sacrament...
...They feel a certain impatience with the seeming slowness with which various church authorities are dealing with the results of nearly twenty years of fruitful and successful interchurch dialogue...
...Through practical cooperation at the local institutional level and through joint witness on behalf of the poor and powerless, authentic ecumenism advances...
...Nationwide, hundreds of buildings once used as Catholic parochial schools now house private schools, many of them under other religious auspices...
...insists that its program is spiritual, not religious...
...I'd rather drag my heels on solid ground, lazily gripping the soil which joins me with the march of seasons, not eternities...
...Marriages are more likely to succeed when husband and wife share the same religious tradition and take it seriously...
...In the Chicago area alone, for example, more than three thousand A.A...
...Good Friday is a day off for all...
...I fall to it and embrace even the beginning when I was born before the fish came, before warmth made my body strong enough to crawl ashore and wait for the cold and lasting winter...
...25January1991:49 ity schools, for example, Roman Catholics comprise the largest single group in the student body...
...Where should the baptism be held...
...In my neighborhood in Chicago, institutional ecumenism is no longer a surprise...
...With each impressive ecumenical document, the goal seems ever more elusive...
...Experiences like these are less cerebral, highly personal, less clerical, and spreading rapidly...
...Many of the common causes that unite Christians without regard to denomination are not passing fashions but sustained undertakings...
...The concern 25 January 1991:51...
...We have come a long way in the United States since 1910, the year when a worldwide Week of Prayer for Christian Unity had its beginnings...
...A grassroots ecumenism inspires women and men whenever justice or compassion demands that they accommodate their separate Christian traditions...
...Institutional Ecumenism What then sustains the ecumenical movement today and buoys its hopes for improved interchurch relations...
...and feminism...
...Yet all this seems irrelevant when the matter at hand is children and TV or Michael's pleased discovery that I have sufficient knowledge of the Bible to be a relatively informed outlet for his gags...
...He wrote that "the ecumenical move- ment has become noticeably quieter...
...This is evidenced by some leading theologians, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, who have publicly commented that ecumenism has come to a standstill...
...In the Cincinnati archdiocese, 46 percent of new marriages are between Catholics and other Christians...
...Church rules have been a troubling source of marital friction...
...Catholics teach in Lutheran elementary schools, while Evangelicals, Lutherans, or Episcopalians, returning the favor, often preside in Catholic classrooms...
...Catherine once noted: "As A.A...
...There is far more to ecumenism than official summits or interchurch exchanges at the local level...
...Who were they...
...In the 1920s the Catholic church's canon law enjoined the clergy to "deter the faithful from mixed marriage to the best of their power...
...peace and pacifism...
...They proceed without any ecumenical compass and with only an occasional gesture of support or understanding from their respective pastors...
...The A.A...
...Most Catholic books and pamphlets that discuss ecumenical marriages, for example, supply guidelines for the wedding...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 2
