Some Problems of Ecumenism

An angel was showing the newly separated soul of John Smith around Heaven. In one paddock there were a great multitude of people kneeling on prayer-mats. ‘Who are those people?’ asked John Smith.

‘Oh, they are Muslims,’ said the angel.

They passed on through a great many more paddocks; and in each some religious group, either non-Christian or belonging to one or other of the Christian denominations, was engaged in conversation and prayer. Finally they reached a broad paddock in the centre of which stood a gigantic polished steel globe like an outsize bathysphere. Indeed John Smith thought it was precisely that when he approached it and saw a small porthole of thick glass in the side of it. But when he peered through he saw the usual sight – a number of people engaged in prayer and conversation. ‘Who are these people?’ he asked the angel. ‘Why do they live in this peculiar steel globe?’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple really,’ said the angel. ‘You see, all these people are Catholic; and they’re under the firm impression that they’re the only people up here . . .’.

This hoary anecdote may serve to illustrate one of the preconciliar tendencies of Catholic thought. Prodded on by the Council Fathers, we are now engaged in the demolition of this illusory steel globe. And it cannot be accomplished simply by our taking a new view of our Protestant neighbours; it must involve a new view of ourselves and the truths that we hold. The first is primarily a matter of charity; but the second involves a discriminating humility, page 679 and I for one find this the hardest virtue to obtain and practise. I would like therefore to lay before my fellow-Catholics one or two relevant points of difficulty.

(a)	I pay a visit to an old and saintly Anglican friend to whom I am indebted for innumerable acts of kindness and forbearance. After tea and cakes and a discussion of the problems of various acquaintances, we part company; and at the door she says to me – ‘Remember, James, I too am a Catholic.’ I make no demur to this statement, but go on my way wondering. I would of course like her to enjoy the full benefits of the sacramental gifts offered by the Catholic Church. Since she is unmarried, she is united to the Church by one Sacrament only – the Sacrament of Baptism, conferred when she received valid Baptism from an Anglican clergyman seventy years ago. She is, however, under the impression that the weekly service which she attends is identical with the Mass, and that when she receives Communion in the Church of England, she is receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood. Since I too was once an Anglican, and believed the same, I have no reason to doubt her absolute sincerity. Yet it troubles me when I think of her kneeling to receive a Sacrament which is not in fact a Sacrament from a priest who is not in fact a priest. History has landed her in this position; and I can’t reverse history. On the surface her claim to be a Catholic is unfounded; yet at a deeper level, her lifelong habit of prayer and delicate awareness of the needs of others, combined with a valid Baptism, make me feel it would be more wrong for me to dispute the claim than to accept it. The problem is basically that I am in contact with a spirituality more refined and more integral than my own. My business is to learn from her, not to instruct her. So I leave her doctrinal ‘errors’ to the Holy Spirit, with whom she is better acquainted than I am.
(b)	Yet the difference between Catholic and Protestant life is never just a matter of doctrinal divergence. It is also experiential. If I expect and receive the intervention of the Blessed Virgin in the crises of my domestic life, while my Protestant friend does not – if I regularly make Confession to, and receive absolution from a Catholic priest, which my Protestant friend cannot do – if I am joined to those who die in Christ by an explicit rather than an implicit bond, and can make them spiritual gifts to shorten their purgation – then my life, since I am a Catholic, is experientially a different life from that of my Protestant friend whose chief formal access to God is confined to a study of the Scriptures with a mind clearly or dimly illuminated by the Holy Spirit. I cannot pretend that the difference does not exist. The phrase ‘separated brethren’ has for me an existential reality: the separation exists for me, is felt by me, just as it exists for and is felt by my Protestant friend. I have to endure it as a penance for my own faults and the faults of our ancestors, who may (in the words of Chesterton) either have ‘had no right to their right reason’, or ‘had good reason to be wrong.’ To ignore the difference would page 680 be self-delusion. Whether one should in a given instance explicitly state the difference is another matter.
(c)	It would be unwise for me to try to eradicate or ignore the Protestant spirituality which brought me to the gates of the Catholic Church; for it was a real part of my experience, of my journey towards God; and because of this experience, the maturity of a convert is different from the maturity of a Catholic who has been received into the Church before the age of reason. When I talk to an agnostic, that part of me which was once agnostic can operate as a bridge of sympathy and communication – when I talk to a Presbyterian, that part of me which was influenced by Presbyterian spirituality is again a means to establish common ground between us – nothing that was in itself true or good, however imperfect, should ever be disowned and abandoned. Thus one can take a positive view of Protestant spirituality by taking a positive view of one’s own past experience. If I am correct in assuming this, the convert may often have a special role to play in ecumenical dialogue. John Henry Newman was able to speak to the condition of many Anglicans because he had the courage to regard his own Anglican experience in a positive way, after he became a Catholic, and bring to the Church the fruits that he had gathered before he was formally received. Those converts of his generation who simply rejected their pre-Catholic spirituality as an integral part of heresy became not mediators but bigots.
(d)	I think it could be dangerous to enter an ecumenical dialogue and cooperation with an open or hidden intention to convert. It is necessary for me to be quite honest with myself on this issue. When I politely send a Jehovah’s Witness pamphleteer away from my doorstep, I am not only motivated by a desire to reject erroneous doctrine; I am also resisting an invasion of my domestic and spiritual privacy; and I must fully respect this second reaction in my non-Catholic friends and acquaintances. A non-Catholic relative said to me recently, ‘It is arrogant for anyone to suppose that they can offer anyone else the whole truth.’ Superficially, I, as a Catholic, am safeguarded against any such arrogance: it is not my truth but the truth of the Church which I have to offer. Nevertheless, the truth I offer, passing through the lens of my personality, is bound to be partisan and distorted. And I am dealing with people, not with calculating machines. The genuine spirituality they have built up over a lifetime may be unable to accommodate the truth in the form that I offer it. It might be better if I tried to find out what their deepest human problems were, and tried to ease these a little; at least then they would remember that one Catholic had been a human being. Eventually conversion is not the work of any human being but the gift of faith made in the secret depths of a particular soul by the action of the Holy Spirit. Who am I to suppose I can hurry the work of God? I can of course pray that God’s Will should be done. page 681
(e)	When I try to work out what talents are most necessary for ecumenical action, I find my mind turning to Karl Rahner’s definition of the diaspora of Christians. This scattering, this loss of the false security of triumphalism, is part of the process of the time. I recall a picture I saw once of a mural in an American church, in which a priest and congregation are depicted, all dressed in overalls, celebrating Mass in a prison camp. What made the event Catholic was simply that he was a priest and they were believers. A Protestant, sharing the diaspora, would, I think, understand the meaning of that mural. If I retreat into a burrow well lined with holy pictures and occupy myself with an all-but-infinite series of compulsive devotions, I do not think I will be capable of dialogue with my non-Catholics, let alone my agnostic or atheist brothers and sisters. I have to travel with little or no luggage, and then those who have themselves had to abandon their luggage and face realities to which there seemed to be no explicit or dogmatic answers, may recognise me as a fellow-traveller – a term much abused by the politicians! The Samaritan was emphatically a fellow-traveller, not so different from the man he helped; just as much vulnerable to the possible assaults of robbers. In the Gospel story, and in the lives of the saints, the crucial encounter with God is again and again seen as an unpredictable exchange between people who happen to be going on the same road. To my mind, a Catholic is one who, considering the Creation and the Incarnation, sees God in everything – in a stone, in a piece of bread, in another person – yet in charity the Catholic must share fully the vision of the person who stands alongside and sees no God at all. The first vision is by faith; the second by identification. I suggest that to withhold oneself from the forms of anguish that identification may bring with it, is to withhold oneself from a necessary participation in the Passion. We are truly ecumenical only when we are in this manner crucified.

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