My way of expressing the problem is to say that the understanding of ecumenism is not symmetric between the Catholic Church and other denominations, a comment particularly true of England. The teaching of Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism is that the fulness of the Church's unity exists unfailingly in the Roman Catholic Church, though real and efficacious elements of the life of holiness and grace exist in the other Christian denominations. Other Christian denominations, though, and in particular the Church of England, see themselves as being just as much the Church (expressed in a particular locality) as the Roman Catholic Church, and see the Roman Catholic Church in the same way as they see themselves. The reciprocal outlooks are precisely not reciprocal.
But the joint prayer can so easily send, by accident, a message that the Catholic participants are buying in to the Anglican view of the thing; it can send this message to both Catholics and non-Catholics. Only those with the most perceptive ecclesial sense will avoid being drawn into this. But it raises a huge pastoral problem for the ordinary parishioner who does not have this level of awareness.
I wonder whether it would be better for each denomination to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity with a series of prayer events in their own churches and following their own traditions. Common Scriptural texts might be chosen, and common prayers of intercession ...
This passage from the Decree on Ecumenism is interesting in this regard:
Catholics, in their ecumenical work, must assuredly be concerned for their separated brethren, praying for them, keeping them informed about the Church, making the first approaches toward them. But their primary duty is to make a careful and honest appraisal of whatever needs to be done or renewed in the Catholic household itself, in order that its life may bear witness more clearly and faithfully to the teachings and institutions which have come to it from Christ through the Apostles.
For although the Catholic Church has been endowed with all divinely revealed truth and with all means of grace, yet its members fail to live by them with all the fervor that they should, so that the radiance of the Church's image is less clear in the eyes of our separated brethren and of the world at large, and the growth of God's kingdom is delayed. All Catholics must therefore aim at Christian perfection and, each according to his station, play his part that the Church may daily be more purified and renewed. For the Church must bear in her own body the humility and dying of Jesus, against the day when Christ will present her to Himself in all her glory without spot or wrinkle.
All in the Church must preserve unity in essentials. But let all, according to the gifts they have received enjoy a proper freedom, in their various forms of spiritual life and discipline, in their different liturgical rites, and even in their theological elaborations of revealed truth. In all things let charity prevail. If they are true to this course of action, they will be giving ever better expression to the authentic catholicity and apostolicity of the Church.
The last paragraph does make interesting reading in the context of Pope Benedict's anxiety for the unity of the Church, expressed in the letter that accompanied Summorum Pontificum. It is important, though, to remember that this paragraph is addressed to those in the Roman Catholic Church. It would be quite wrong for the Church of England, for example, to take it as an approbation of their "broad Church" approach, which at its bottom line, contains a certain disregard for what is essential.
2 comments:
An excellent post, which puts into words that which I have been struggling with this week, except far more eloquently...thanks (from a Parishioner who doesn't feel she can ever participate in joint, ecumenical services)
AR x
AutumnRose:
Thank you for the commment, which prompts another thought, personal to me.
My family background is Lancashire Catholic, way back to 1640ish (that's as far as we got before records ran out, destroyed in an anti-Catholic riot at some point), and Catholic all the way. Some of my forebears were prevented from owning land or property(in Lancashire, of course, what happened was someone else held the land in trust for him)and paid fines rather than attend Church of England services.
Certainly times have changed, and the juridical ban on joining with other Christians in prayer would not be appropriate in these days. But that ban - and the history of those who paid fines - did express something of how the Catholic Church viewed itself as "the Church" in relation to what it would now properly term other "ecclesial communities".
The challenge is to try to preserve what the former discipline was properly trying to express, whilst accepting that the discipline itself would not be right today.
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