Buried among the one-paragraph news items was a report that the United Methodist-Catholic Dialogue has moved closer to the issuance of a joint statement “on the local and universal church.” Participants meet twice yearly and expect to have a draft underway in March. The Dialogue was formed in 1966 and so far has issued joint statements on such topics as education, ministry, the Eucharist, and ecumenism—but to what effect?
The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years. The United Methodist-Catholic Dialogue has been operating nearly as long—thirty-eight years—and the result is a desert of words, exercises in studied vagueness and doctrinal trimming. Can anyone think of any joint statement, issued by any ecumenical confabulation in the U.S., that has had any measurable and positive effect on the participating churches? The ultimate goal of ecumenism, as noted repeatedly in papal encyclicals, is corporate reunion. With which mainline Protestant church is the Catholic Church closer to reunion today than in 1966?
Dom Peter Flood, in The Priest in Practice, quoted this advice to preachers who tend to go on too long: “If you find you are not striking oil, stop boring.” Can’t something similar be said about these ecumenical gatherings? Most of them long ago ceased to accomplish anything, other than to keep a few clerics occupied. Thousands of unread pages have been churned out, but who has profited from them? Who even has read them? Is it not time that we took a long sabbatical from these meetings—say, a full generation—so that people not hobbled by the false optimism of the past might have a chance to make a fresh start (assuming even that will do any good)?
I am not challenging the wisdom of certain high-level ecumenical outreaches, such as those made toward the eastern churches by the Vatican. In a few cases, such as with the Assyrian Church of the East, they already have had success. But is there much point in working up joint statements with, say, the Anglicans, who cannot agree among themselves regarding beliefs and practices and who, year after year, trend ever further from Christian basics? If Catholics were unable to effect a rapprochement with the Anglicanism of the 1960s, when nearly all Anglicans opposed ordaining women and homosexuals and when most Anglicans subscribed to the theology exemplified by C.S. Lewis, what likelihood is there that progress can be made today, when Anglicans have jettisoned so much and believe so little?
A period of benign neglect would be good for both sides. It would clear the air of the notion that mainline Protestantism and Catholicism are closer now than when the discussions began. I wish they were, but all the evidence is against it. The irony is that Catholics and “non-liturgical” Protestants, meaning Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, really have become closer, though reunion occurs not at the corporate but at the individual level. Progress with “Bible Christians” has come through lay action, not through committees issuing joint statements.
There is a lesson here, if anyone is willing to listen.