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EDITORIAL Alarms sound over latest blow to ecumenism
Its a safe bet that most
Catholics have never heard of the Consultation on Common Texts, an ecumenical
forum for specialists in the arcane discipline of liturgical translation. Hence
when veteran Presbyterian liturgist Horace Allen says, as reported on Page 7,
that this sort of dialogue is finished, dead, done, it may seem a
minor concern.
Its not.
Any blow to ecumenical progress, whether real or perceived, merits
serious attention. The quest for Christian unity is not, as Pope John Paul made
clear in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, some sort of
appendix that is added to the churchs traditional
activity. Rather, the pope wrote, ecumenism is an organic part of
her life and work, and consequently must pervade all that she is and
does.
Moreover, the Consultation on Common Texts has produced real
breakthroughs -- above all, the Revised Common Lectionary, a collection of
scripture readings modeled on the Catholic Lectionary that is now used by 70
percent of Protestants in the English-speaking world. It means that Catholics
and Protestants are, for the first time since the 16th-century Reformation,
hearing the same scriptures proclaimed on Sunday, a stunning historical
achievement.
The details of these liturgical debates, which NCR has
tracked closely over recent years, can seem obscure to the uninitiated. But as
the success of the Revised Common Lectionary makes clear, liturgical reform
reaches down into the faith experience of hundreds of millions of believers,
both in and out of the Catholic church.
It may be that Allen and other critics of Liturgiam
Authenticam, a May 2001 Vatican document that called for a more traditional
approach to translation, are overreacting. Msgr. James Moroney, the U.S.
bishops chief expert on liturgy, told NCR that the Catholic church
remains unequivocally committed to ecumenical collaboration. If
anything, Moroney said, Liturgiam Authenticam actually boosts ecumenical
work by insisting it be carried out by bishops conferences rather than
other groups acting in their name, such as the International Commission on
English in the Liturgy.
Moroneys is the most benign spin, however, on a Vatican
march to undo liturgical reform that had begun to take hold during the past
three decades. The movement, young by any Catholic church measure, was never
allowed to mature through its mistakes and miscues. Instead, those most deeply
engaged in liturgical reform and translation issues had to spend most of their
time in recent years fending off attacks from curial officials appointed during
this papal regime.
Yet the fact that several longstanding conversation partners of
the Catholic church are alarmed should tell us something. Its not just
Horace Allen. We reported March 15 that Anglican liturgist David Holeton,
another participant in the Consultation on Common Texts, has called
Liturgiam Authenticam a disabling blow to ecumenical
cooperation.
As Lutheran scholar David Yeago wrote in a recent essay on Ut
Unum Sint, it is always the best friends of the Catholic church in the
Protestant world who are most committed to the ecumenical conversation. They
are most likely to be orthodox moderates with a keen sense of the
centrifugal forces threatening their own communions, Yeago wrote,
and a high appreciation of the role an ecumenically renewed papacy could
play in strengthening the pull of the apostolic center in all the
churches.
When such friends of longstanding, people such as Horace Allen and
David Holeton, set off alarm bells, we all would do well to listen.
National Catholic Reporter, May 24,
2002
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