ECUMENICAL PANEL — Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright, c-chair of the Methodist-Roman Catholic international dialogue, speaks duringan ecumenical gathering held March 25 in Saskatoon. Also pictured are, from left: Dr. Catherine Clifford, a member of the Canadian Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue commission; Nicholas Jesson, ecumenical officer for the Saskatoon diocese; and Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. (Yaworski photo)

Ecumenical leaders speak at St. Andrew's College

By Kiply Lukan Yaworski

SASKATOON — Leaders in the ecumenical movement at international and national levels participated in an informal dialogue March 25 at St. Andrew’s College, the theological college of the United Church of Canada at the University of Saskatchewan.

The gathering included a number of guests who were in Saskatoon for Bishop Donald Bolen’s ordination that evening, although Bolen himself was unable to attend.

The panel included Dr. Geoffrey Wainwright of Duke University, co-chair of the Methodist-Roman Catholic international dialogue; Roman Catholic Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Bishop Dennis Drainville of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec, who is co-chair of the national Anglican-Roman Catholic (A-RC) dialogue; and Dr. Catherine Clifford, professor of theology at St. Paul University in Ottawa and also a member of the Canadian A-RC dialogue commission.

St. Andrew’s principal Lorne Calvert welcomed those gathered for the session, noting that St. Andrew’s is one of only a few theological colleges in North America to have a chair of Church History and Ecumenics, Rev. Sandra Beardsall, who moderated the discussion.

Nicholas Jesson, ecumenical officer for the Roman Catholic diocese, also welcomed guests and students to the conversation.

Wainwright reflected on the history of the ecumenical dialogue since the ground-breaking World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 which brought together mainline Protestant denominations to discuss mission and unity. “For 50 years the ecumenical ministry was largely between the churches of the Reformation, directly or indirectly, and some of the Orthodox churches. The Roman Catholic Church was not part of it,” Wainwright noted. When the World Council of Churches (WCC) had its inauguration in 1948, Catholics were not part of that organization, either.

“What happened in the second half of the 20th century was a shift of the topography of the ecumenical movement, because once the Roman Catholic Church had decided to enter the ecumenical scene, things were bound to change,” Wainwright said, noting that Catholics made up roughly half the Christians in the world. Since Vatican II and its emphasis on Christian unity, the Roman Catholic Church has entered into 15 bilateral dialogues with other world churches.

“The World Methodist Council was one of the first to respond to the invitation from the Holy See to join a bilateral dialogue,” said Wainwright, describing how some 70 Methodist churches from around the world agreed in 1966 to enter into a dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. Participants in the Methodist-Roman Catholic dialogue gather annually for a week-long meeting and produce a report every five years.

The first few years were inevitably a “get to know you” phase, which later moved into more serious theological conversation. Participants “came very quickly to an awareness that, in a sense, the main theological issue to be faced was that of ecclesiology: what is the church, what is it for, and where, concretely is it to be found,” said Wainwright.

The discussion moved into “what the Methodists and the Catholics might be able to hold together about the church” and basic questions of revelation, faith and ecclesiology. Reports on apostolic tradition, Scripture as the word of life, and teaching authority came out of the ongoing dialogue. “Finally, we came very directly to ecclesiology,” he said. “It’s time to look each other in the eye and ask what we see in our partner that is truly of Christ and the Gospel and therefore of the church.”

This was the subject of a 2006 report entitled The Grace Given You in Christ. “We pointed to places where we had grown together and still had further to go, and finally we came to the issues where we are still diverging,” Wainwright described. One of the ways in which the dialogue has been characterized is in a phrase borrowed from John Paul II: “not only an exchange of ideas, but also an exchange of gifts.”

Describing the hymns of Charles Wesley as one of the treasured gifts that Methodism brings to the world, Wainwright identified the universal ministry of unity as a gift offered by the Roman Catholic tradition. “It seems to me increasingly clear in ecumenical circles, that the claim and offer that the Holy See makes for universal ministry is one that the rest of us have to examine very carefully,” he concluded.

Farrell described the 50th anniversary of the calling of the Second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII as a landmark in the promotion of Christian unity. However, he traced his own commitment to ecumenism to an incident as an eight-year-old in Ireland when a classmate died. He invited a Protestant friend into the Catholic church on the eve of the funeral, and was reprimanded for it the next day.

“That was the world in which we lived, that was the kind of separation we had,” Farrell said. “That is why I am convinced and persuaded by what Pope John Paul II wrote that the greatest result of the ecumenical movement so far has been brotherhood rediscovered.”

He described the 15 ecumenical dialogues undertaken by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. “I don’t think we’ve made our journey on a single path, but we can look and see how many different rivers we have followed. Maybe they are not all going at the same time or in the same direction, but we are convinced that it is the work of the Spirit and we have to continue,” Farrell said.

The Anglican bishop of Quebec described the practical co-operation among churches that has formed much of his ecumenical experience. “There is an ecumenical spirit that can only come if we are working at the same time at a very practical level,” Drainville said, adding that this kind of practical unity in action is vital to engaging a secular society.

“The old way of individual churches doing their own thing just doesn’t cut it anymore. We need to be working together and supporting each other. Increasingly, that is what is happening: for instance, our capacity to deal with social issues, to provide social advocacy for those who are marginalized, is strongest when we work together,” Drainville said.

Clifford acknowledged the vast extent of the work undertaken and achieved through theological dialogues, but expressed an anxiety that this work will be lost or forgotten.

“This work has to be received, it has to take flesh, it has to change the way our churches live together,” she maintained. “Even if other Christians don’t use the exact language that we use, even if their liturgical life has different emphases, we can say, yes, it is the same faith being celebrated here.”

She stressed to those entering ministry that they will never preside at a baptism, marriage or funeral made up of a homogeneous group, and that an understanding of ecumenical issues and a heart for Christian unity will ensure that those in ministry can “serve the needs of the whole family.” She also stressed the importance of praying with each other and for each other.