Dozens of Catholics and Protestants gathered at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., on March 18 to have discussions and find common ground on challenges facing Christianity today. The third Ecumenical Forum was intended to embody “the very prayer of Christ: that they may all be one.”
The event is led annually by the Napa Institute, a nonprofit that works to promote the re-evangelization of the United States and the defense of Catholicism in the public square.
The gathering “was conceived as a serious dialogue centered on Jesus Christ, sacred Scripture, and the pursuit of Christian unity rooted in truth,” Timothy Busch, Napa Institute founder, said in a statement.
With the approach of historically significant milestones including the beginning of Christ’s public ministry and his crucifixion and resurrection, “the call to Christian unity grows louder,” he said. “Not unity at the expense of truth, but unity grounded in Jesus Christ.”
Challenges facing Christianity today
The “major challenge” for Christians in the U.S. today “is for us to live what we claim we believe,” Monsignor Roger Landry, who served as an emcee of the event, told EWTN News.
“First and foremost, we’ve got to get our own house in order and strengthen each other in order to be able to live our faith,” he said. “Jesus gives us a high vocation to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and leaven that lifts everybody up.”
“But he warns us not to let our salt lose its flavor, not to hide our light, and not to let our leaven basically become that of the Pharisees and the Herodians rather than the leaven of the saints. So that’s our first biggest challenge.”
There are also “major issues coming down the road for which we need to bring the light of our Catholic faith to the darkness that portends in some of these issues,” Landry said. He detailed issues regarding the understanding of who the human person is.
“Some of the questions are going to be new, but the answers Jesus has already given, at least in seed, and we need to develop those answers credibly in order to do what Christians are supposed to do in every culture, which is to be the soul of that culture,” he said.
Common ground
In order to combat the issues, we need to “recognize the importance of prayer,” Landry said. “That we pray not just on our own, but we pray for each other and eventually find occasions to pray with each other.”
At the “Ecumenical Forum, we began by praying … the Nicene Creed,” he said. The group then had Protestant worship and a Catholic Mass to have ample opportunities to pray together.
The Mass was the first Catholic Mass ever offered inside the Museum of the Bible. The celebrant was Bishop Steven Lopes, head of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, established by Pope Benedict XVI in Anglicanorum Coetibus.
Both the homily and Protestant worship referenced and reflected on “the perichoretic love of the Godhead,” which Lopes described as “a love into which you and I have been not only invited, but our participation has been made possible by what Christ accomplishes for us.”
“In his death, in his resurrection, in his return to glory, but not returning … just by himself, but in his humanity,” he said.
The denominations’ dedications to prayer was not the only shared practice and value the forum highlighted. Through discussion, the overall themes of strong consensus were on pro-life matters, human dignity, and matters of embracing how God made us.
We have “had some issues that united us here in the United States,” Landry explained. “The Catholic and evangelical collaboration on the pro-life fight that culminated … with Dobbs a few years ago in the overturning, finally, of Roe v. Wade. That was a great time in which Catholics and Protestants got to know each other and what they really valued.”
“We’ve likewise seen it in the defense of marriage. We’re seeing it with the defense of who the human person is, that God does make us male and female, and if people sadly begin to think that they’re trapped in some other identity, we need to give them real help rather than pretend as if the emperor is fully dressed.”
“The ecumenical work began at a theological level, but now it’s become very practical. One of the things that’s happening at this Napa Institute Ecumenical Forum is we’re focusing very much on how our practical collection collaboration can bring what we share in our faith much more effectively into the public square, because that public square is losing its orientation and is desperate for that type of guidance,” he said.
Ecumenism as ‘an exchange of gifts’
“Christ prayed that we might be one as he and the Father are one, and that oneness is, at its root, love,” Nathan Smith, director of ecumenism for Glenmary Home Missioners, told EWTN News.
Smith’s ministry “seeks to enhance understanding, reduce alienation, and foster reconciliation between Catholics, evangelicals, and Pentecostals,” he said. “And the way that we lead with that is following John Paul II,” who said “ecumenism isn’t simply an exchange of ideas but exchange of gifts.”
Smith said Christians can foster a connection among one another by leading “with our experience of Jesus Christ,” he said. Doing this “invites different types of Christians to the ecumenical table, but it also frames the way in which we engage the questions of structure as you engage it with somebody who’s a co-traveler in faith, somebody who’s carrying this proclamation of the Gospel within their lives.”
When we “begin to engage our ecumenical questions from a place of friendship, from a place of recognizing that that person is a carrier of gift — we hold them differently. I think we can hold on to the conversation of Christian divisions, which can be difficult in a new kind of way.”
“We have to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit’s doing, because at the same time that some dialogues are having trouble finding their footing, we have new types of Christians engaging in the question of Christian unity … And that’s going to change the way we engage ecumenism. But hopefully towards a way of unity as representative of the Trinity,” he said.