Ecumenical hope for
the new Millennium

Michael Hurley, SJ

Issue 356, vol.89, Winter 2000

We have learned to speak much less in terms of one “side” capitulating to the other. Protestants and Orthodox are no longer expected to return to Rome - no more than we expect of Northerners and Unionists any return to Dublin. The New Ireland Forum adumbrated more than one model of Irish unity. And, since the Second Vatican Council, the Churches are seen as being not mutually exclusive but as having complementary insights. (Witness the 1999 Joint Catholic/Lutheran Declaration). Unity-in-diversity is the vision for the years ahead.

We have also become more realistic about what is involved in step-by-step progress towards unity. Negatively : violence leads nowhere - whether it be , in the political arena, the “armed struggle”; or, in inter-church terms, that non-cooperation and segregation which is in effect sectarianism or mutual excommunication. Positively: repentance is called for - forgiveness, apology, reparation, reconciliation.

On 12 March 2000 the Pope celebrated a Day Of Pardon. A theological grouping from the Irish Inter-Church meeting has recommended that the Churches in Ireland should come together in a common confession of guilt and a common desire for reconciliation. But there has been no collective move on this from the Irish Catholic bishops, no celebration of the Day Of Pardon in the way in which other Jubilee special “Days” have been marked here. However what happened in Ferns, as between Catholic and Church Of Ireland bishops, is a beacon of hope.

Michael Hurley, SJ is and Ecumenist and author of Christian Unity: An Ecumenical Second Spring?, Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1998