THE 1996 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity opens on January 18th in the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Foxrock, Dublin.
The occasion will bring together leaders and congregations of all the main Christian churches. They will be addressed by the Rev Brian Griffin, district chairman of the Methodist Church. Looking back, we have advanced considerably since the first hesitant crossings of each others thresholds. And yet . . .
There can be few seasoned ecumenists around who have not been "disheartened, at times, as they measure the gap between the present situation and the desired goal of Christian unity, in life, worship and witness.
The apparent stalemate between theologians, intent on God's future kingdom, and church authorities intent to safeguard the heritages of particular denominational traditions, clearly defies mere human resolution. An annual Week of Prayer hardly matches the need of the present hour. Can we really do no more?
The challenge to the whole Church of Christ, at the present time, is to strengthen its engagement, at grassroots level and across denominational boundaries in sustained prayer for the grace of unity that we seek. No other road leads to the "conversion of heart" which is the basis of all communion.
Our Christian tradition has never lacked prophets or practitioners of this way. One such little known up to the present day beyond her native shores - is the young Sardinian girl, Maria Sagheddu, who dedicated her short, stark life to continual prayer and sacrifice for the healing of Christian divisions. Although her own life was lived in a cloister, the way she opened up is a well trodden path, open to all Christians.
Born in 1914, in Dorgali, a small Sardinian village, Maria entered the Cistercian monastery of Grottaferrata, near Rome, at the age of 21. There she learnt of the activities of Abbe Paul Couturier of Lyons, the noted pioneering ecumenist.
She answered his call for volunteers willing to commit their lives totally to Christ, for the healing of his church. Abbe Couturier, having moved beyond the perspective of a simple return of "all dissident Christians to the See of Peter", was proposing "the unity that Christ wills, in the way that he wills and by the means that he wills", it was a prayer with universal appeal.
By the age of 25, Maria had completed her personal mission. She died unknown, as she had lived, on April 23rd, 1939, and it has taken nearly half a century for her rich legacy to come to light.
Father Pearse Cusack, a Cistercian monk of Mount St Joseph's Abbey, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, to whose painstaking research we owe the recently published biography of Maria, under the title Blessed Gabriella of Unity (her name in religious life), has done us a notable service, in focusing attention on the timeless and uniquely effective contemplative way into Christian unity, at the deepest level, where God is diversity in unity.
The biography is published by Cistercian Press, Roscrea, and available from religious book sellers.