Reunion in Catholicity

Extract

The unity of Christians, Our Lord implies, is a necessary condition if the world is to accept His mission from His Father; He prays that His followers ‘may be one . . . that the world may believe that thou hast sent me’ (Jn. xvii, 21). The scandal, the futility, of the continuance of Christian divisions whose origins and meaning have been long forgotten is plain for all to see. Yet nobody with any sense of realities can be blind to the immensity of the obstacles which hinder Christian reunion, nor to the theoretic unsoundness and the practical hopelessness of the various well-meaning but man-made solutions that have so far been offered to the problem. Meanwhile, with bewildering rapidity, the alignments for what looks like becoming the final struggle between Christ and secularism for the soul of civilised man are being formed, leaving those who profess the name of Christ hopelessly divided among themselves.

Anglo-Saxondom has much to answer for in originating and continuing the divisions of Christendom, and it alone is responsible for most of the subdivisions of those divisions—the final atomisation of Christendom, the reductio ad absurdum of schism. But to Anglo-Saxondom is due also the origin of many of the efforts of recent years, however pathetically inadequate, to undo the damage. Faith and Order, Life and Work, the Branch Theory and the Bridge-Church Approach, all these are of British or American origin. And to all these, and to most other reunion schemes or dreams, ‘Rome’ has appeared as the great obstructionist.