The week of prayer for Christian unity can be, for many, one of the most depressing weeks of the year; so much aspiration deflated by so little achieved.
Yet the Christian journey and the life of the Church are made up of such paradoxes, some of which verge on outright contradiction.
How is it that a personal encounter with the living God can be one of the most dynamic and transforming experiences in a lifetime, but some religious events, which are intended to contain and articulate it, can be so dull and ineffective?
The annual evening ecumenical services for the local councils of churches hosted in rotation during the week of prayer for unity remain the most difficult social and religious encounters in my memory; they represent religion at its least appealing.
Of all the hard sayings of Jesus in the Gospel, few are more ambitious than his prayer in John 17 that “they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Truth and unity ought to be symbiotic in the life of the Church. But, in practice, one person’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the faith in their search for Truth can be the cause of immediate threat to unity. In the fractured fallen-ness of our conflicted humanity, truth and unity often find themselves in opposition to one another, as a stand-off between idiosyncrasy and pride.
It ought to be different in the Church. And to some extent it is. From the very first Council of Jerusalem, where the ground-breaking change of allowing gentiles to be Christian was presented, truth and unity were placed in tension with each other. The more profound the development of doctrine, the harder it is to achieve consensus and preserve the unity of the Church. The Church has always been faced with choices on her journey, between a deeper apprehension of truth on the one side, and seductive misapprehensions on the other.
Every heresy that broke the surface, every development that carried the Church deeper into the mystery of the Godhead, was a test of, threat to, or opportunity for unity.
If it had not been for the promise by Jesus that the Holy Spirit would lead the Church into Truth, and his prayer that his disciples and his Church be kept in truth, the prospect of holding the two aspects of truth – that is doctrinal integrity alongside the existential authenticity of living in close relationship with the Holy Trinity – would be too demanding even to contemplate.
But these are the two essential dimensions of Christian unity – agreement over ecclesial and theological propositional truth, and the experience of the love of God as we participate in the life and dynamics of the Holy Trinity.
Loving each other with the penetrating mutual love of the Trinity (perichoresis) is one aspect of Christian unity that any Christian can aspire to, experience and practice. But it is incomplete, and marred if it is not boundaried by an equivalent consent to propositional truth. This constitutes an ecumenical expression of the same kind of symbiotic interaction as we know cognitively from the left brain-right brain interaction that Dr Ian McGilchrist has been writing about to such powerful effect in The Master and the Emissary, and the Matter of Things.
The problem with the need for consent to propositional truth to achieve ecclesial unity is that it makes the ecumenical aspirations of Catholics and Protestants so different as to be almost unworkable. It produces an ecumenical hiatus of the same kind we discover in the old Irish joke. In answer to the stranger’s question to the local, “How do I get to Dublin”, the answer comes, “I wouldn’t start from here sir”.
The Protestant is constrained by centuries of misunderstanding and mis-presentation about the beliefs of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This makes propositional progress immensely problematic often leaving only existential unity a possibility. And this quickly gets reduced to something stretching from sharing between two poles with mutual affection for Jesus at one end, to just being polite at the other.
The Protestant is often constrained from making any progress propositionally given the incoherence across the churches of the Reformation. One of the aspects of the fall-out from the Reformation is the development of thousands of different denominations each with their own propositional preferences; sometimes as antithetic to each other as they all are to Rome.
The Catholic sees the ecumenical task differently and oppositionally. The only way to overcome the complete barrier to propositional unity is to suspend the reformation presuppositions that feed the historical, cultural and philosophical rejection and mis-presentations of the Catholic Church, and instead allow for a hypothesis that the Holy Spirit may indeed have led the Church through Scripture, creed, experience and tradition formulated in the Magisterium. If and when this hypothesis firms up under testing, as it consistently and repeatedly, perhaps miraculously, does so often, the accomplishment of the unity that Jesus prayed for is achieved. However polite the Catholic expression of ecumenism may appear in ecumenical diplomacy, only a return to the see of Peter offers itself as a solution to the ecumenical propositional impasse.
And this, of course, was the experience and witness of St John Henry Newman and countless other ex-Anglican and ex-Protestant converts who have made their dramatic pilgrimages home to Rome over the years as theological and spiritual prodigals who have “come to their senses” and healed the brokenness of the body of Christ in their own returns.
No wonder the week of prayer for Christian unity is so uncomfortable an experience. It involves a challenge that no degree of existential affectionate mutuality in Christ can melt or overcome on its own, but instead it requires a re-ordering of institutional schism through a reconfiguration of priorities held in the human heart. It is through the enlightenment of the heart that truth is properly perceived.
But, the implication of the words “Physician, heal thyself” cannot be avoided within the Catholic Church itself. The unity Christ prayed for amongst his disciples applies within the Church as well as across the ecclesial communities. The current lack of it is part of the present crisis.
Timing is so often key, and it may be significant that Cardinal Pell died just as the week of prayer for Christian unity approached. He had some prophetic and profound critiques of the contemporary Church that hindered Church unity.
In the recent memo, penned anonymously by ‘Demos’, but which has now been attributed to the late Cardinal Pell, the late Cardinal urgently addressed the dogmatic turmoil and confusion, and urged an end to the ambiguities that have marked and marred the recent years.
He commented that “Roma locuta. causa finita est” (Rome has spoken; the cause is finished) “has become: ‘Roma loquitur. confusio augetur’” (Rome has spoken; confusion grows).
He offered a stern rebuke in his assessment that Christ was no longer at the centre of the Church, warning that “the Christo-centric legacy of St. John Paul II in faith and morals is under systemic attack”. The late Cardinal also stressed that it was a centrality of the Pope’s office that he exercise “a fundamental role for unity and doctrine”.
“The new Pope must understand that the secret of Christian and Catholic vitality comes from fidelity to the teachings of Christ and Catholic practices…It does not come from adapting to the world or from money,” wrote the late Cardinal.
He had often reiterated privately his expectation and hope that the next pope would restore doctrinal clarity.
Many or some of the other ecclesial bodies may in fact be quite successful at fostering a life in the Holy Trinity which can be shared in the joy of mutual recognition across the denominational boundaries. But if the Catholic Church fails to be true to the charism given to it by the Holy Spirit to foster, protect and articulate the profound depths of the truth of the Faith, she fails the Lord, herself and other separated Christians. One of her most demanding and critical roles is to help draw the separated fragments of the body of Christ, together allowing a journey home into that final expression of unity that only she can offer.
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