In 1908, Father Paul Wattson SA, founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement (while still an Anglican) and his friend the Reverend Spencer Jones, Anglican vicar of St David's, Moreton-in-the-Marsh, began the Church Unity Octave. Spencer Jones had accepted in 1900 an invitation to address one of a series of meetings organised by the now declining Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, at St Matthew's Church in Westminster. He was encouraged by Lord Halifax to work the thesis into a book, which was published in 1902 as England and the Holy See. It was a lucid exposition of the Anglican pro-Roman Catholic position, asserting the indispensability of the visible unity of Christ's Church and of an ecumenism to which Catholicism as it is was integral - and this included facing the question of the role and authority of the Bishop of Rome if the Church of England was to recover its communion with him.
The book caused a sensation and led to correspondence and friendship between Wattson and Jones. In 1907 they jointly published a work on the Petrine office, The Prince of the Apostles, and later in the year made preparations for their octave to be set between the feasts of the great apostles of the Church in Rome - St Paul's Conversion and St Peter's Chair, marking the establishment of his episcopal ministry. It was to prove the foundation of what would later become the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Their intention was the reunion of Christendom around the See of Peter. The devotion received the approval of Pope Pius X the following year, alongside Leo XIII's Ascensiontide Novena, not long after Fr Wattson and his community became Roman Catholics themselves. But why was reunion with the See of Rome so important to a significant body of Anglicans?
Despite the setbacks of the later part of the 19th century, historically, as well as theologically, they saw the Catholic Church as the most likely means of bringing unity to the world, in an age facing its breaking point with the past. With so much of the surrounding social and cultural world in a swift moving process in search of new directions, they sensed that upheaval in the world was calling for Christ's Church to be united and strong. British Christians of all traditions had been horrified by the persecution and martyrdoms of Catholic lay people, religious and priests under France's Third Republic from 1905 onwards. Their steadfastness in their Catholic faith and their loyalty to the See of Peter made a profound impression. It evoked within ecumenically minded Anglicans a strong sense of solidarity with universal Christendom, and the limitations endured by a Christian faith divided on national and confessional lines. While Christians call for reconciliation and unity in the world in the world in the the name of the love of Christ and the peace and justice of his Gospel, yet are unable or unwilling to realise it visibly in their own life and organisation, the Church that remains divided before the world is a scandal to the proclamation of the gospel before the world. Perhaps this was felt the more urgently as the Christian powers of Europe were about to tear themselves apart in war.
The observance of the Church Unity Octave was extended to the whole Roman Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1916. Pope Benedict devoted his pontificate to persuading the powers of Christian Europe not to tear each other apart in the First World War, and to promoting peace and reconciliation as the antidote to the world's ills. He saw the Octave, and the potential of its emphasis on unity and prayer, as a vital tool in getting this job done. The world leaders who had scoffed at his calls to peace recognised he was right when they came to deal with the war's aftermath at Versailles in 1919, not least as the spectre of atheist communism now loomed over Europe from the East in Russia. The Holy See, most notably in the pontificate of John Paul II, has ever since striven for human unity as the path to peace and justice in the world, promoting Christian prayer for Christian unity as the principal means by which it can become a reality.
Thus began the modern ecumenical movement. Its first steps were those of prayer, shaped by the dialogues and devotions of a previous age, but now grounded in the realities and urgent needs of a very different and fast changing new world.
With a different kind of vision, the Edinburgh Mission Conference in 1910 saw Anglicans and Protestants addressing a very practical concern to prevent various Christian communities from fighting over the 'unchurched' in the African and Asian regions. This brought together 121 different denominations and was accompanied by two exciting new movements, Life and Work and Faith and Order. Of course, while the initiatives are seen in Protestant and Anglican circles, inaccurately, as the start of the modern ecumenical movement, the equation leaves out the Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of the Christian East. Out of this would one day grow the World Council of Churches after the Second World War, and in time Faith and Order became an integral part of it. The Roman Catholic Church never joined the WCC, unlike the Eastern Churches; but has been an active collaborator with it and, indeed a full member of the Faith and Order Commission since the 1960s.
With Rome decided on a policy of 'the ecumenism of return' to the Holy See, rather than corporate reunion, Anglicans and the Orthodox looked to each other more closely, an affinity which had partly grown through Britain's imperial interests in the Middle East in the later nineteenth century, partly through contacts with refugees following the Russian Revolution and partly because of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which had governed many of the Christian Churches of the East, after the First World War and the hopes of Greek Christians to recover territory, including Constantinople, from Turkey and restore a contemporary Byzantium. Religious links with Anglicans were as important as political links with Britain and the Allies. Thus in 1920 the Lambeth Conference of all Anglican Bishops and the Metropolitans of the Ecumenical Patriarchate both issued letters calling for the union of the Christian Churches (the Patriarchate called in a 'koinonia of churches'), in a spirit of prayer and mutual recognition of worship. In 1921 the new Patriarch Meletius, who had earlier visited England to foster ideas of union with Anglicans, sent delegates to the Faith and Order Conference in Geneva; and in 1922 affirmed Anglican orders, spiritual and sacramental life, calling for prayer for union between the Anglican and Orthodox Churches. This drew a formal complaint from the Vatican.
During a visit to the United States in 1919, after he had led and held the Belgian people together during German occupation and the raging in his country of the First World War, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium experienced his imaginative horizons concerning the world and Christianity widen, in sympathy with his generous and deeply spiritual temperament. He visited a number of Protestant theology faculties and addressed the Convention of the Episcopal Church. On his return he wrote to Pope Benedict XV to outline his intentions for healing the wounds of a humanity injured by war through healing the injuries to Christianity caused by its divisions. Pope Benedict had pleaded for peace during the war and, in the midst of it, established the Church Unity Octave throughout the Church as another means to bring humanity together in peace in one Church. Mercier received no response, but concluded, 'Qui tacet consentit - those who say nothing consent.' So he began in earnest his ecumenical ministry. This is his well known 'Testament':
In order to unite with one another, we must love one another;
in order to love one another, we must know one another;
in order to know one another, we must go and meet one another.
A rising concern in the 'Latin' West was the question of Eastern Churches in communion with the See of Rome and how this affected relations with the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches. In previous centuries politics and Western triumphalism had played their part, causing historic Churches to be divided in loyalty and even weakening all the Christian communities in usually Muslim-ruled lands. There was a good deal of bitterness and mutual recrimination and suspicion, some of which continues to this day, despite strenuos efforts at friendship and understanding on all sides. Some of the Eastern Catholic Churches were the groups which had remained in communion with Rome when most of their Church had abandoned this union in favour of Eastern Orthodoxy (the Melchite Greek Catholic Church for instance). Others resulted from existence in a Roman Catholic state (such as the Greek Catholics of the Western Ukraine, whereas the Orthodox of the Easter Ukraine remained in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church - this is a particularly controversial separation). Others arose from attempts to bring Oriental rite Christians, believed to be 'heretics' by the Rome authorities in past centuries, into union with Western Catholicism as a 'corrective' to their error (the relations between the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Churches, also between the Syrian Catholic and Syriac Orthodox illustrate this history, much transformed into friendship in recent years). After the First World War, France and Belgium witnessed the presence of many refugees from the Eastern Churches and this inspired a desire to heal divisions in the name of Christ's peace and charity.
Difficulties for Eastern Catholics under Polish jurisdiction after the First World War, in Belarus and Ukrainian areas, as well as strained relations between Eastern Catholics and Roman Catholics in Belarus and the Ukraine, not to mention the painful division between Ukrainian Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox in communion with the suffering Russian Orthodox Church, inspired the Greek Catholic Metrolitan of Lviv in Ukraine, Cardinal Andreas Szeptycki, to enlist the support of Mercier in raising awareness in the West and in overcoming problems in the East, following sympathetic comments on the problems from Pope Benedict XV at a consistory in 1919. This in turn led to a presentation by Szeptycki in Rome, to which the French and Belgian bishops responded generously. Although Mercier died in 1926, the enduring contacts in Belgium and France proved greatly encouraging in the dark years ahead. In 1925 Pope Pius XI established the Pro Russia Ecclesiae Uniendi Commission (for the Union of Russia with the Church) to have responsibility for relations with Greek Catholics in the former territory of the Russian Empire, to offer assistance to all Christians in Russia and to work for the unity of the Orthodox with the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, this work was confided to a French Jesuit bishop, Michel d'Herbigny who understood his mission as the expansion of Roman Catholicism eastwards, regardless of the Eastern Catholic rites and the Orthodox Churches. Some Eastern rite provision was made, but energy was also devoted to setting up a Russian Catholic structure, using Eastern forms to persuade Russians away from Orthodoxy to union with Rome. Hardly even an 'ecumenism of return', it was a policy of conversion. As such, it was entirely counter-productive and d'Herbigny was removed from office in 1934. Szeptycki worked around the Commission and was able to guard the autonomy of his own Church as well as establish episcopal oversight for the Eastern Catholics of Belarus. He also strongly resisted the Pro Russia policy with regard to Orthodox of the Ukraine and Russia. With the departure of the Soviets and the arrival of the Nazis, Szeptycki continued to tread a perillous path, most notably protecting 150 Jewish people, mostly children. Arguably, his leadership and pastoral instinct, supported by significant friends like Mercier in the West, helped to bring about lasting change in attitudes in Rome to relations with the Christian East, especially the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe.
In a completely different direction, from 1921 to 1926 Cardinal Mercier led the famous Malines Conversations aimed at a rapprochement between Anglicans and Catholics, involving Lord Halifax and the Abbé Fernand Portal. In some ways, the Malines Conversations were a taking stock after the judgement of Leo XIII; but their tentative, unofficial status arguable promoted a meeting of spirit, heart and mind without the pressure of a specific objective other than greater understanding and affinity. It can rightly be said to be an early fruit of the Church Unity Octave of Prayer.
The Conversations have often been criticised as failing to take into account more than one ‘Anglo-Catholic’ viewpoint from among the full range of doctrinal and ecclesiological positions within the Anglican community, as well as for disregarding the relevance to Anglican-Roman Catholic discussions of English Roman Catholicism (although they enjoyed the interested good will of Cardinal Bourne, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time). But this misses several new conditions. The first was the experience of all-consuming war which had brought down the Christian status quo across Europe: to match the secular and political League of Nations, Christians looked for a spiritual and ecclesial union of Churches. The second was the gentle but insistent call of Benedict XV to peace and reconciliation. The third was the experience at first hand of tens of thousands of Eastern Christian refugees in the West. It was beginning to dawn on Christians on all sides that no one church exhausts all that there is to say of Christ and that, increasingly, all relied on each other to bring strength to each other and hope to the world. A fourth new condition was the Liturgical Movement.
This was a movement to restore the celebration of the liturgy to enrich the spirituality and mission of both clergy and lay people. It inspired a rediscovery of the traditions of Eastern Christianity and the treasures of the West as well. Pioneered in the monasteries, Dom Lambert Beauduin became a leading figure. Another great centre was the famous Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany, where Dom Odo Casels and Ildefons Herwegen brilliantly led the liturgical renewal, with its vigorous after-effects for ecclesiology and ecumenism. It was no accident that the Monks of Unity which Beauduin founded at the request of Cardinal Mercier were asked to work and pray for unity between Catholics in the West with all the Christians of the Eastern Churches, resulting in a Benedictine monastery in which were twinned monks of the Roman and the Byzantine rites at Amay-sur-Meuse in Belgium (nowadays at Chevetogne). In 1924, Beauduin convinced Pope Pius XI to write the Letter Equidem Verba to the Abbot General of the Benedictines, asking the Order to work in a special way for unity. This enabled the foundation of Amay in 1925, as well as the Vita et Pax Foundation within the Olivetan congregation of the Order of St Benedict at Schotenhof, also in Belgium, in 1926 under the leadership of Dom Constantine Bosschaerts. Ever since the 1920s Vita et Pax has worked to encourage East-West Christian dialogue and its longstanding support for Christian-Jewish encounter has broadened out into important Interreligious Dialogue and Interreligious Monastic exchange and retreats. In England this work is continued by the communities at Turvey in Bedfordshire and Cockfosters in North London. Again in Belgium, the last of the Beguines in Bruges became the foundress of a new Benedictine Community, the Daughters of the Church, especially given to the service of pastoral and liturgical renewal and to Christian unity.
Beauduin’s links with the Malines Conversations and Cardinal Mercier had brought a characteristic ‘liturgical’, that is to say spiritual, light to bear on the question of reconciling Anglicans and Catholics (Mercier saw the dialogue as standing for Catholic unity with regard to Lutherans and other ‘severed’ Christians as well).
Beauduin, surveying Anglicanism’s liturgical, sacramental and spiritual life, as well as its threefold ministry, envisaged a reunion for Anglicans as a distinctive body within the wider Catholic Church in his provocative and somewhat idealised proposal of 1925, The Anglican Church, United not Absorbed. Sadly this approach led to his exile from Amay, and to the termination of the Conversations after Mercier’s and Portal’s deaths in 1926. Bishop b'Herbigny moved against him and the Monks of Unity, and secured a decision banishing him from the monastery he had founded and restricting the community from further work with Anglicans and Protestants: from now on they were to concentrate on the 'union of Russia with the Church'. This of course was entirely contrary to the Monastery's founding charism. But even without Beauduin's leadership the monastery persevered as it could in continuing with the ethos inspired by Cardinal Mercier from the beginning. It was this persistence as a liturgical centre for the spiritual and pastoral life as a means towards the re-invigoration of the Church, in some ways a precursor to Pope John XXIII's opening of the windows to let some air in for his famous aggiornamento, that drew Yves Congar, the great Dominican theologian, prime architect of Lumen Gentium and possibly the greatest of the Catholic Church's ecumenical theorists and advocates in the twentieth century, together with Paul Couturier, the schoolmaster priest from Lyon and future re-founder of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the 'apostle of unity' and spiritual ecumenism, together by providence for an encounter on retreat, to discover Amay's greatest treasure - the ecumenical vocation of the Catholic Church in the decades to come.
Beauduin was not to return to his Monastery until after it moved to Chevetogne in 1939, but although much had moved on, it had still managed to remain faithful to his ideals and kept his vision alive - not only in the encounter between East and West which remains a delay experience in the life of the community to this day, but also in its work and hope for reconciliaton among the Christians of the West.
Although in 1926 the Malines Conversations were officially discontinued and those who participated were dead, silenced or kept at a distance in the years that followed, there can be no doubt that their international and interchurch character revived the memory of dialogue mostly forgotten since the 17th century and proved to be the foundation stone for the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission following Vatican II in 1965, as well as for so many other dialogues and conversations between Catholics and other Christians. In other words, they encouraged the Catholic Church to rise to its vocation to offer unity, communio, to all Christians. Moreover, the Liturgical Movement had a profound influence in reforming the patterns of worship and spirituality in churches far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic world, not least in the widespread recovery in the Anglican Communion of the ‘Parish Communion’, once more restoring the Eucharist as the central feature of its devotion and mission. Perhaps more than anything, this has been the point at which a sense of affinity (the 'affective ecumenism' to which Pope John Paul II has referred) and spiritual unity – and thus the acute suffering occasioned by the absence of complete communion – between Catholics and other Christians has revealed itself.
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