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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Some Aspects of Ecumenism

Some Aspects of Ecumenism

It is an old story; but I think it will bear repeating. It seems that a certain man had newly entered Heaven. And an angel was given the job of seeing him round his new abode.

The man was much impressed by the variety of religious observances which he found among the Blessed. In one paddock a number of people had spread out mats on the ground and were engaged in praying together. ‘Who are those people?’ he asked the angel.

‘Oh, they’re the Muslims,’ said the angel nonchalantly.

They came into another paddock. Here the people were engaged in earnest textual discussion. ‘Who are these?’ the man asked.

‘Oh, they’re the Jews,’ the angel answered.

In the next paddock people were singing hymns most fervently. It turned out that these were Methodists.

And so the man and the angel made the round of a great number of paddocks, and found in each of them gathered together the members of a page 559 Christian denomination or else one branch or another of the non-Christian religions.

Finally they came to a very large paddock in which there were no people visible at all. But in the centre of the paddock stood a gigantic steel globe resembling a bathysphere.

The angel and the man approached it, and the man saw that it had a porthole of thick glass in its side. He peered through the porthole, and there inside the sphere he saw a number of people talking together and reading and praying. ‘Who on earth – I mean, who in Heaven are these?’ he asked the angel.

‘Oh,’ said the angel with a smile. ‘Those are the Catholics. We’ve provided them with this accommodation so that their feelings won’t be hurt. You see, they imagine they’re the only people up here.’

There is, I think, an element of terrible truth in this story; for though most Catholics nowadays would not dare to imagine that only Catholics would enter Heaven, many of us may unconsciously assume that our neighbours whose beliefs are not explicitly Catholic are all a kind of second-rate Christian.

The view generally springs from two kinds of ignorance – ignorance of people and ignorance of Protestant belief and habits of devotion. For the ordinary Catholic layman, this ignorance may show itself in various ways.

In a few, now happily diminishing cases, it may show itself in an arrogance of which he himself is unaware, but which is nevertheless woefully evident to his Protestant neighbours. And this arrogance may even exist within the Church herself.

I have never been able to shift from my mind Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful picture of Peregrine Crouchback (a knight of the Papal Court, if I remember rightly, and a member of an ancient English Catholic family) who found himself permanently unable to regard converts as being quite Catholic.

A justified certainty that the Church possesses the fullness of theological truth may lead a man to the unwarranted assumption that he himself possesses all truth and that he has nothing to learn from others, least of all those who are not explicitly Catholic in their belief.

In such cases the possession of the Faith may bear an extraordinarily close resemblance to the defensive walled-off certainties of the small Protestant sect whose members feel that their temporal misfortunes and misunderstandings are bound to be balanced in the Divine scale by a unique Heavenly reward denied to their non-sectarian neighbours. This is a matter of an emotional climate, and is probably strongest in places where the Church has been persecuted.

In practice the contrasts are generally less absolute. What is more likely to happen is either that the Catholic layman will withdraw from all spiritual converse with his Protestant neighbours, so that they will be surprised when they learn – by accident, after having worked alongside him for five and a-half page 560 years – that he is actually a Christian; or else the ignorance will show itself in a series of ecumenical blunders, not on the public scale of church welfare committees, or theological dialogue among scholars, but in the factory and the office and over the bar counter or the backyard fence.

Having made some of these mistakes myself, I would like to speak to them, as a mild warning to my fellow Catholics.

It is well known to Catholics who have studied the matter that Anglican Orders are almost certainly invalid. We derive this knowledge not from our own insights but from the Church’s magisterium. What is not so clear to all of us – and certainly is far from clear to Anglican believers – is that, if Anglican Orders are invalid, then the bread and wine of the Anglican Communion Service does not become the Body and Blood of Christ when the words of consecration are spoken over it, because the man who is speaking the words is not a priest. Therefore inter-Communion between Catholics and Anglicans is not theologically possible; and even when both denominations share the same church, the bread which is reserved in the Catholic tabernacle is the Host, and the bread which is reserved in the Anglican tabernacle, however much reverenced, remains solely bread.

It is not a matter that can be cured by argument. When all the books have been read and all the words have been spoken, a priest whose ordination is invalid will not be a priest, and the bread that he has sincerely tried to consecrate will not be the Host.

Having been myself a member of the Church of England before I became a Catholic, I am perhaps a little sensitive about the matter. Most Catholics probably do not care two hoots whether Anglican Orders are valid or not; but I originally became an Anglican under the impression, on the authority of my Anglican teachers, that they WERE valid, and that no reasonable doubt had ever been raised to the contrary. As a result, for ten years, nearly every Sunday, I was receiving unconsecrated bread and wine under the sincere delusion that they were in fact the Body and Blood of Christ. The memory is not wholly a comfortable one.

But when I meet Father Smith, a member of the Anglican monastic Order of the Community of the Resurrection – how am I able to talk to him? Should I refuse to call him Father? Should I interminably argue the toss about the validity of Anglican Orders?

I think it would be imprudent, uncourteous and uncharitable to do so. After all, Father Smith has received a certain training, read certain books, and come to certain conclusions. The Holy Spirit has no doubt raised him up, if not by ordination then by some less clearly defined charismatic ministry, to be a pastor within his own denomination. He may do more good in his life than I will ever do. At one time I would have been awkward with Father Smith.

But nowadays I would be inclined to let sleeping Bulls lie, and try to derive what good I can from his deep Christian spirituality and his example page 561 in prayer and almsgiving. The theological differences remain – not just in the books, but on the altars – and in a sense I have the impression that the solution of these differences is God’s business rather than mine, since He alone can give the fullness of the Faith to any soul.

My business is rather to prepare the ground, not thinking in terms of convert-hunting, but rather with an ordinary human appreciation of Father Smith’s learning and wit and other enviable human characteristics. I have to get it clear in my own mind what my job is before I can act ecumenically – and I believe that first and foremost to act ecumenically is to act humanly.

Above all, I have no right in the world to question Father Smith’s sincerity. He believes he is a priest – it is indeed not impossible that he is a priest, though all the historical signs point in the opposite direction – and since he believes he is a priest, I will treat him with the same respect I would give to a priest.

Our relationship may be made a little more delicate by the fact that Father Smith knows that I was once an Anglican like himself, and have become a Catholic – when speaking to him, incidentally, I would invariably use the term ‘Roman Catholic’ to describe myself, since Father Smith believes that he is equally Catholic. But the fact that a relationship is delicate does not make it unworkable; and I will be helped in my converse with him by a ten years’ experience of the strength and particular virtues of Anglican spirituality.

And when I meet Miss Jones, my Presbyterian neighbour, an ardent supporter of Professor Geering, what am I to say to her? Any theological conversation we have will eventually end up at the same brick wall – namely, that I, as a Catholic, accept the Church’s magisterium, and that she, as a Presbyterian, has no magisterium to accept and so must travel on as Professor Geering does, by whatever light the Holy Spirit may shed on her prayers and on her reading of Scripture.

I should point out at this stage that her Bible Class studies in early life have left her with a much closer knowledge of the Holy Scriptures than I am ever likely to possess. It is best, in my own opinion, if I do not dispute with her about the meaning of the Resurrection of Our Lord – who was ever truly convinced by an argument? – but get to know about her phobias and her interest in flowers.

As Pope John remarked more than once, each person is more than and different from the beliefs which they may or may not hold.

And when I meet Mr South, my Quaker friend, why should I waste our time discussing theological matters? The theological content of Quaker belief is distinctly limited – and this has the merciful effect of allowing a great many people who might find it hard to belong to other Christian denominations to join together in a reverence for Christ and in a vast multitude of good works.

I have often thought that if the other Christian denominations had done what the Quakers did after the First World War, and had entered page 562 war-dismembered Germany with food for the hungry and clothes for the naked, then the Nazis would never have come to power – but we lacked the special international spiritual horizon of the Quakers, and so we remained entrenched in our nationalism and lost the opportunity.

No; I will find plenty to talk about with Mr South without digging up the bones of theological contention.

I would be on the whole a little bolder in dealing with my neighbours who are agnostic or atheist. The special points of awkwardness or delicacy that accompany interdenominational relationships are much less likely to crop up.

Where the problem is belief itself, and not the variety of Christian belief to which one should adhere, I can readily enough quote Pope John or St Thomas Aquinas without fear of giving offence.

But in general I can isolate three guiding rules which I have more or less unconsciously formulated for use in all ecumenical conversation and relationship: –

(a) Be positive. Approach the person, not the idea, and with an aim to learn from him or her.
(b) Be positive. Never criticise. If you are dealing with a Lutheran, find opportunity to speak favourably of Martin Luther; if you are dealing with a Quaker, praise George Fox.
(c) Be honest – that is, do not cloak your own belief. But even at the risk of appearing stupid, it may be wise to give theology less prominence than you would in conversation with a person who had the same belief as yourself. There are other things to be honest about than theology. One could, for example, discuss one’s own uncertainties and depressions, rather than risk giving the false impression that once in the Barque of Peter, one had no problems at all.

The aim then in ecumenism would be most of all to be natural. People on the whole are not happy to be instructed by their neighbours; but I have not seen any great version among them to being loved. Without love we will get nowhere; with love we may get further than we ever dreamed. It would be a pity to leave the greatest talent the Lord has given – not only to us, to the human race at large – entirely unused.

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