IRENE Ni MHAILLE,
Madam, - This year, I didn't attend any services in other churches, during the week of prayer for Church Unity (January 18th-25th). Because this exercise doesn't seem to lead to any kind of meaningful unit, it not only becomes meaningless but verges on the hypocritical. Performance replaces reality. I was very happy, therefore, that Archbishop John Neill asked the question "What sort of unity is envisaged?" (Rite and Reason, January 21st) and that he dealt with this question both at the institutional and at the worldwide level that leads "totally beyond structures".
The problem, as I see it, is that the unity envisaged in our separate denominations is usually a clerical preserve that centres on retaining denominational clerical power. This clerical vision is incapable of opening out to the local needs of laity within its own structures and also to the broader needs of global ecumenism without. Archbishop Neill invites us to look at both local and global ecumenism in tandem and that is the only way forward.
To do this we need to ask ourselves whether we are living out a doctrinal or a relational understanding of Christian faith. I have spent most of my life in Christian education in the Catholic Church. The burning question that has accompanied me and many of my professional colleagues, both Protestant and Catholic, over the past four decades, is the deceptively simple one: "What is Christian faith and how do we develop adult Christian faith in the laity?"
Christian faith defined as assent to intellectual, though often unintelligible, propositions, imposed as certainties, supported the whole institution of Christendom, until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century and the institution of Roman Catholicism, until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The work of missionaires in non-Western countries, showed us how deeply flawed and inadequate that definition of faith was. It also showed us how sad that different Christian denominations went on mission to win adherents to different sets of propositions, none true in the factual sense, but all divisive.
Then came Vatican II for Roman Catholics with an enormously liberating understanding of Christian faith. We moved towards defining faith as trust in God, as Martin Luther had done over four centuries earlier. Trust is, of its very nature, unifying. Trust means total emptying of all our possessions, spiritual and material, that we may find God anew in our present world. It sends us all back again to learn to pray so that through direct communion with God, we are empowered to live by God's Spirit.
This understanding of Christian faith can liberate us, from within our reformed local structures, for the kind of wider ecumenical vision that Archbishop Neill refers to. However, clerical Roman Catholicism, under the present Pope, has reverted to the doctrinal understanding of faith and Catholics are now deeply divided on this issue.
Now is the time to begin to prepare for Church Unity Week, 2004 by answering the question in private and in public: "What sort of unity is envisaged when Christians pray for unity?" - Is mise,
IRENE Ní MHÁILLE, Seapoint Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.