Ecumenism as an excuse

I drove out today to the annual conference of the National Catholic Commission for Ecumenism out in Ciney, south of Namur, as the ROC representative.

 The conference venue was the huge Belgian centre of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, the world-wide RC teaching order. Like so many RC orders in Belgium it has shrunk rapidly, the victim of secularization and contraception (until the 1970s, most vocations came from large families of five or more children). Today it serves as a conference and retreat centre, and a retirement home for the last surviving Belgian brothers. The church, dating from between the wars, is not bad inside, in particular with a good Stations of the Cross.

 The main conference was by an Orthodox professor, very much of the Paris school. Intelligent, well-structured and with some good ideas, especially on modern culture, though oblivious, it seemed to me, of the problems faced by Orthodox hierarchies whose Fussvolk are desperately afraid of being ‘sold out to Rome’ and losing the sense of identity that comes with confessional difference. The responses, by Anglican, Roman Catholic and Protestant representatives, all of university graduate/ postgraduate level, were of equally high standard.

 Such a conference may be an everyday occurrence in Moscow, but here in Belgium, it is a rare and pleasant occurrence.  Indeed, as I remarked to my Anglican compatriot, this is not really about ecumenism at all. What this really is – and why we are here – is one of the few occasions in the year in which the Christian intellectual élite can get together and be intellectual in top gear. Indeed our confessional differences are not so much a problem to be thrashed out as an excuse to get together, and to breathe a bit of fresh air outside our own parish and confessional boundaries. Among ourselves we reached unity a generation ago....