Father Alexei, I know you are the official representative of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese on ecumenical events, so what do you see as the most significant fruits of the Catholic-Protestant interaction at Azusa Now?
“There are two things,” he answered. “First, this is very much in line with Pope Francis’ thinking. In ‘The Joy of the Gospel,’ he writes about our relationship with fellow Christians and he writes these words:
‘We must never forget that we are pilgrims journeying alongside one another. This means that we must have sincere trust in our fellow pilgrims, putting aside all suspicion or mistrust and turn our gaze to what we are seeking.’
“And, that is exactly what we did in the Coliseum on Saturday,” he said.
“The other significance is the forgivingness factor: at the end of the week for Christian unity, Pope Francis asked for forgiveness for the ‘un-Gospel-like behavior on the part of Catholics against Christians of other churches.’
“The mutual exchange of forgiveness between Catholic and Evangelical-Christians on Saturday wondrously reflected this forgiveness.”
Source: Jennifer Wing Atencio - "Christians pack Coliseum for revival: Catholics join thousands of believers to mark 110th anniversary of Pentecostal Azuza revival", Angelus News, 13 April 2016
https://angelusnews.com/news/christians-pack-coliseum-for-revival-catholics-join-thousands-of-believers-to-mark-110th-anniversary-of-pentecostal-azuza-revival
Ethnicity in the New Testament
In the Book of Acts we read that with the coming of the Holy Spirit, diverse expressions of languages were being spoken. And in Revelation we see a glimpse of eternity with men and women from every tongue, tribe, and nation making up the choir of eternal praise (Rev. 7:9). That the writers of Scripture took notice of ethnicity, and saw diversity as good, makes it impossible for the Christian to hold to thoughts of racial superiority, or separation of the races.
Source: Abbot Tryphon - "The Evil of Racism", posted on his FB page on 3 June 2020
Tithing ... Time
But could Presbyterians tithe their Sundays to the Church of Ireland, i.e. go to the Church with the Anglicans rather than with their fellow-Presbyterians some five times a year? Could a member of the Church of Ireland reciprocate this ecumenical gesture or do likewise with the Methodists, worshipping with them on the occasional Sunday and also transferring the tithe of their support for the Church Missionary Society to the Methodist Missionary Society? Could Roman Catholics transfer a tithe of their support for Trócaire to Christian Aid? And sometimes buy and read the Church of Ireland Gazette instead of the Irish Catholic or Catholic Herald? Could Roman Catholic ordinands tithe their theological studies to another Church? In other words, could they study and live with Anglican, Orthodox or Presbyterian ordinands for a part of their course?
Source: Fr Michael Hurley - Christian Unity: An Ecumenical Second Spring? (Dublin: Veritas), p. 83-84, as quoted by Gladys Ganiel in her blog post "Fr Michael Hurley on Ecumenical Tithing", 5 November 2011, http://www.gladysganiel.com/irish-catholic-church/fr-michael-hurley-on-ecumenical-tithing/
Young People - Build Bridges of Friendship
The Pope hopes that these days that bring you together in Riga will help you not to be afraid of your limits but to grow in trust in Jesus, the Christ and Lord, who believes and hopes in you. May you, in the simplicity to which Brother Roger bore witness, build bridges of friendship and make visible the love with which God loves us.
From the depths of his heart, the Holy Father gives you his blessing, to you young people participating in this meeting, to the Brothers of Taizé, and to all the people who welcome you in Riga and the surrounding region.
Source: Pope Francis - As quoted in "Pope sends message to Taizé youth gathering" by Vatican Radio, 27 Dec 2016, http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2016/12/27/pope_sends_message_to_taize_youth_gathering/1281913
Didn't Commit, Did Confess
In Jer. 14:20 Jeremiah shows that he, as an individual, is responsible to confess ancestral and national sin, since he is a member of his people, for whom he is praying: Jeremiah 14:20, "We acknowledge our wickedness and the iniquity of our fathers.” No, he didn't commit the sins his people did. He didn't rebel against the Lord, worship false gods, and oppress the poor. But he did take part in confessing those sins on behalf of Jerusalem and Judah.
Source: Dr. Gary S. Greig - The Biblical Foundations of Identificational Repentance as One Prayer Pattern Useful to Advance God's Kingdom and Evangelism, April 2001
1-way & 2-way streets
Abbot Gregory Polan of Conception Abbey framed the duty to forgive with his Catholic faith, pointing to the words of the “Our Father” prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
The prayer challenged Polan in 2002 when a gunman killed two of the abbey’s monks and seriously wounded two others. Some of his religious brothers forgave easier than others.
The benefits always go beyond the individual.
“We forgive ourselves and then turn to others we have hurt,” Polan said. “Forgiveness is a one-way street, and reconciliation is a two-way street.”
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/local-columnists/article11877386.html#storylink=cpy
Source: Abbot Gregory Polan - Abbot Gregory Polan of Conception Abbey, as quoted by Mark Morris in "Forgiveness is Harder in Practice than in Theory," Mark Morris, The Kansas City Star, 1 March 2015, http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/local-columnists/article11877386.html
Identificational Repentance in Germany
Another example of mainline denominational corporate confession comes from the German Lutheran Church. At the end of World War II, in October 1945, the newly formed United Evangelical Lutheran Church, under the influence of one of its leaders, the prominent anti-Nazi theologian and pastor, Rev. Dr. Martin Niemöller, who had resisted the Nazis alongside the famous Christian martyr, Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, issued the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt (Stuttgarter Schulderklärung). In the Stuttgart Confession, the German Lutheran church identified with and confessed the corporate guilt of the German people for the widespread suffering perpetrated by the former Nazi government with words like the following:
With great pain we say: Through us unending suffering has been brought upon many nations and countries. . . . Now a new beginning should be made in our churches.
Apparently the Lutheran denominational leadership felt such identificational repentance was in keeping with their theological understanding of Christian confession. This kind of corporate confession of national guilt has been articulated and discussed over the past decades by German theologians like Dr. Martin Honecker and Dr. Gerhard Besier, as well as by German New Testament scholars like Dr. Bertold Klappert of the University of Göttingen.
Source: Stuttgart Confession of Guilt - As quoted by Dr. Gary S. Greig, The Biblical Foundations of Identificational Repentance as One Prayer Pattern Useful to Advance God's Kingdom and Evangelism, April 2001
Advocating for a Slave
Philemon, if you consider me a partner in Christ, I ask you to welcome Onesimus back home as you would welcome me. If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it all to me. I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand. I will pay you back everything that Onesimus owes you—not to mention that you owe me your very life.
Source: Paul - Philemon 17-19 (IEB)
Humbly Looking Into Our Sordid Past
I am convinced that the deep collective wounds of Canada, the US, Guatemala, and indeed all of the Americas, cannot be healed without humbly looking into our sordid past, and seeking sincere and life-transfiguring reconciliation with the African-American community, and with the Native Peoples of our continents.
Source: Nate Bacon - Ministry newsletter on 1 Sept 2017
Go See Them For Yourself
I’ve visited the Bruderhof in the Hudson River Valley, and found warm hospitality. If you live in the NYC area, I strongly advise you to go up the Hudson and see them for yourself; they welcome visitors. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, my religious beliefs are rather different from their Anabaptist creed, but nobody tried to proselytize me. They were just generous and open-hearted.
Source: Rod Dreher - "With the Bruderhof", Daily Dreher eNewsletter, 11 Dec 2020
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/with-the-bruderhof
ECT
"Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium" (ECT) is the title of a programmatic statement composed by eight Protestants (leader, Charles Colson) and seven Roman Catholics (leader, Richard John Neuhaus) and endorsed by 12 more Protestants and 13 more Roman Catholics. It appeared in the journal "First Things" in May of this year and, shortened, in the Spring edition of "Touchstone."
Source: J.I. Packer - Christianity Today, "Why I Signed It. Part 1.", 12 Dec 1994, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1994/december12/4te34a.html?start=4
Rita & her sister
Rita’s younger sisters lived in the area. Rita took a long-shot chance and reached out to her for a visit. Her sister took a long-shot chance and said yes. That began a difficult and honest adult process of mutual repentance, forgiveness, and understanding. At that time, little did we know that seven or eight years later we would be moving to Texas, literally twenty minutes from where her sister lived! Thirty years of alienation, erased! A sister and a friend recovered, plus geographic proximity!
Source: Dr. Stephen R. Crosby - "Confessions of a Christian Idiot", Reprinted from Christianity Without the Religion Magazine - February 2019
https://stevecrosby.org/christian-unity/confessions-of-a-christian-idiot
Mass Lynching of Italian-Americans
The largest mass lynching in US history killed 11 Italians in New Orleans in 1891. And now an Italian-American group says [New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell] is set to offer a first-ever apology to Italian-Americans for the city's role in the lawless murders.
…
Mike Santo, who serves as special counsel for the commission, said he'd become aware of the lynching a few years ago, realizing how the 1891 lynching was a "longstanding wound" for the Italian-American community.
He said the commission got in touch with the mayor, who was amenable to the proposal, and his group has been coordinating for weeks with a liaison in the mayor's office to get the proclamation written.
He praised Cantrell, calling her the "right woman at the right time" to step up and acknowledge a darker aspect of her city's history.
"It takes a lot of nerve to do that," Santo said. "People want to see that, especially today."
He said he personally felt the pending proclamation was "refreshing." On behalf of Italian-Americans more broadly, he said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
Source: Ryan Prior - "128 years later, New Orleans is apologizing for lynching 11 Italians", CNN, 1 April 2019
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/01/us/new-orleans-mayor-apologizes-italian-americans-trnd/index.html
A Catholic & A Jew (and the Catholic is ... Tolkien)
This dwarf-elf alliance may well be a paradigm of a Jewish-Christian friendship. Interestingly, as Saks and others have noted, Tolkien’s correspondence during World War II reveals that he himself fell into an unplanned interfaith friendship. Too old to serve in the war, he was asked at Oxford to serve on air-raid duty, keeping watch in order to alert denizens of the university town if there was a bombing and they needed to seek shelter. While on duty, he was paired with one of the most esteemed Jewish historians and Zionists then in Britain. Tolkien wrote:
I was in the small C33 room: very cold and damp. But an incident occurred which moved me and made the occasion memorable. My companion in misfortune was Cecil Roth (the learned Jew historian). I found him charming, full of gentleness (in every sense); and we sat up till after 12 talking. He lent me his watch as there were no going clocks in the place: —and nonetheless himself came and called me at 10 to 7: so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world. Actually I was awake, and just (as one does) discovering a number of reasons (other than tiredness and having no chance to shave or even wash), such as the desirability of getting home in good time to open up and un-black and all that, why I should not go. But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his somber glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. I was down at St Aloysius at 7.15 just in time to go to Confession before Mass.
Source: Meir Soloveichik - The Secret Jews of The Hobbit, Commentary Magazine, 11 August 2016, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-secret-jews-of-the-hobbit/
Benedictine @ Fuller
“I’m so grateful that an evangelical seminary [Fuller] received a Catholic Benedictine brother,” he says. “The way I was loved and cared for and inspired and encouraged and challenged—my goodness! I wouldn’t replace it with anything else.”
Source: Michael Wright - https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/a-voice-from-narnia/
Peter Kreeft
Then one summer, on the beach at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I read St. John of the Cross. I did not understand much of it, but I knew, with undeniable certainty, that here was reality, something as massive and positive as a mountain range. I felt as if I had just come out of a small, comfortable cave, in which I had lived all my life, and found that there was an unsuspected world outside of incredible dimensions. Above all, the dimensions were those of holiness, goodness, purity of heart, obedience to the first and greatest commandment, willing God's will, the one absolute I had discovered, at the age of eight. I was very far from saintly, but that did not prevent me from fascinated admiration from afar; the valley dweller appreciates the height of the mountain more than the dweller on the foothills. I read other Catholic saints and mystics, and discovered the same reality there, however different the style (even St. Thérèse "The Little Flower"!) I felt sure it was the same reality I had learned to love from my parents and teachers, only a far deeper version of it. It did not seem alien and other. It was not another religion but the adult version of my own.
Source: Peter Kreeft - Hauled aboard the Ark, http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/hauled-aboard.htm
Are we regressing emotionally?
Early in our childhood development we are often unable to self identify with more than one pole.
I experienced this with my own son when he was three. I would look him in the eye and say, “I love you so much buddy,” and he would respond, “I ONLY love momma. I don’t love you. I just love momma.” After putting my heart back together, I would gently respond, “You can love us both,” and he would respond, “I can only love momma.” This went on for nine months, but eventually a couple neurons somewhere in his cute little head fused together to permit him to say I love you to both of us.
Carl Jung explains that this phenomenon can continue through adulthood, causing us to relate primarily in either/or categories.
I’m convinced our adult civilization is regressing emotionally.
We slide back to childhood when we particularly dislike something about a people group (progressives or conservatives) and deem it necessary to find ways to accumulate a burning mound of facts about why we should hate “them.” Polarization is not a result of intellectual enlightenment or informed thinking; it is a result of emotional regression.
To sign up for Jesus and join his movement is to take on the mature work of integrating differing poles rather than regressing into either/or categories.
Source: Dan White - "When Clinton and Bush go to church … together", V3 Church Planting Movement, Jan 2017, http://thev3movement.org/2017/01/when-clinton-and-bush-go-to-church/
From Ann Cogdell
The process of praying prayers of identificational repentance is both humbling and necessarily cleansing—looking at the sin of another or a grievous event of history, I felt that my eyes needed to be purified so that I could look with care rather than point the finger; but looking carefully, I realize that there are similar tendencies in me and I begin to feel compassion instead. It was a new thought for me to realize that I’m standing alongside the ones or the situation I’m praying for. I found it difficult to feel free to weep in the public setting of lament, though I often weep in private over things that grieve me. So, I was challenged because one of the things that draws me to Jesus is that He is deepIy free—well, I want to be more like Jesus.
Source: Ann Cogdell - Report to Christ Church Anglican in Waco, 4 Sept. 2016 (written draft)
The Substance of My Ministry
I saw clearly how forgiveness was the substance of my ministry. Without it, my ministry would die.
Source: David du Plessis - From "A Man Called Mr. Pentecost", as told to Bob Slosser, Ch. 18, p. 170
New Mexico Prays!
Vince Torres, Executive Pastor at the Blaze Christian Fellowship, explains it this way, "What happened Sunday was nothing short of historic. Watching Catholics and Protestants come together in worship and prayer to our God was so powerful and unlike anything I have ever witnessed at our state capitol. The gathering served as proof that the gospel message of Jesus Christ has the power to transcend denominations and even politics. It was such an honor to be part of it. To God be all the glory."
Source: Vince Torres - Vince Torres, Executive Pastor at the Blaze Christian Fellowship, quoted by Brian Alarid in "Christians Make History With Worship Event at New Mexico State Capitol", Charisma News, 7 March 2017, http://www.charismanews.com/opinion/63470-is-this-historic-worship-gathering-part-of-james-goll-s-prophesied-west-coast-rumble