George Weigel on Bad Ecumenism

Weigel shows how some people like Cd. Kurt Koch are really tied down by the human perspective on what's good for the Church and for true peace in the world. The fall of communism left a mess, but I seem to remember someone saying we shouldn't be afraid of messiness and making messes.

Yet what seems so clear to others is, somehow, not self-evident in the halls of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In a recent interview with Vatican Radio, the pontifical council’s president, Cardinal Kurt Koch, said that “the changes in 1989 (that is, the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe) were not advantageous for ecumenical relations” because “the Eastern Catholic churches banned by Stalin re-emerged” from underground—and that made life difficult for Roman ecumenists, given Russian Orthodox phobias about “Uniate churches” like the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with Rome.

What is going on here? No local Church in modern times suffered more for its fidelity to Rome than the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine—the world’s largest underground religious community between 1946 and 1989. Was Cardinal Koch suggesting that it would have been better for “ecumenical relations” if the communist crack-up in 1989 hadn’t occurred and if the Soviet Union had remained intact? It’s bad enough to be subjected to ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s laments about the Soviet crack-up being the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century; it’s even worse when the Catholic Church’s top ecumenical officer expresses what seem, at first blush, to be ominously parallel sentiments.

Bad ecumenism: is that phrase redundant? I'm one of those people that see the whole project of ecumenism in practice as being a big, ivory tower academic ritual. I'm much more interested in personal, hand-to-hand apologetics, even though it gets pugilistic at times. I prefer ecumenism to a supposed search for common ground which, in my experience, is usually a chance for theology grad students who can't write and don't want to commit to the priesthood or religious life to finally use those hours spent in classes and late-night bull sessions spent on the mostly irrelevant subject called comparative religion.

Conversion is about embracing the Truth which sets you free, not about mouthing other peoples' failed rhetoric in grandiose seminar settings and getting a rise out of "coming together". That's best left to the motivational speakers. What Weigel demonstrates in his article is how the fear of offending a group of people leads deep thinkers to lament the effects of fighting and overthrowing what, in the case of the Soviet regime, was truly and completely evil, and was persecuting all Christians viewed as threats (i.e., Catholics).