In 1933, Paul Couturier, a Catholic schoolmaster priest from Lyon in France, had returned from Amay, having become on oblate of the Monks of Unity. He was deeply inspired by the new direction given to his priestly life by seeing the liturgy as prayer, and not just recitation; their work for unity, opening up a new world of including the Eastern Churches and the Anglicans, came as a complete revelation. The influence of Cardinal Mercier's work and vision had a profound effect on him as did the towering influence, although absent, of Dom Lambert Beauduin. He had previously been moved by the tens of thousands of Eastern Christian refugees who had been sheltered around Lyon after the First World War and the Russian Revolution; it had been his first encounter with Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholics and, like many Church people in the city, he had done what he could to help, feed and befriend them. This vivid memory and the transformation that he had undergone through the encounters associated with Amay, gave him the idea that to heal humanity's injuries, the sin of Christian division had to be overcome through unity made visible and active in the Church by a profound change of heart and direction. He resolved on nothing less than shifting the entire emphasis of the old Church Unity Octave.
Instead of prayer for others to become Roman Catholics, he proposed that all Christians could unite in prayer to grow in holiness and union with Christ and the Father, in the spirit of John 17: 'Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they all be one, that the world may believe it was you who sent me'. As all could thus converge on Christ, they could achieve unity through the richness of prayer and belief expressed in different parts of Christianity, for the moment divided, yet already truly one through Baptism: 'The walls of separation do not rise as far as heaven' (Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev).
At the heart of this process of ever closer union with Christ, was what Couturier called ‘spiritual emulation’. The idea of ‘emulation’ was partly borrowed from leisure activity, in which people could take up new skills, hobbies or knowledge by learning from one another: Couturier saw that different Christian traditions, Reformed and Catholic, Eastern and Western, possessed so many treasures in separation, that in embracing each other’s ways and traditions and making them one’s own could draw different groups of Christians very closely together, expanding their life as they received new gifts without diminishing it as they passed their own riches to someone else. But spiritual emulation was also an idea of Blessed Columba Marmion, the famous abbot of Maredsous, also in Belgium. His was the idea that in ‘pious competition’, the faithful could out-do one another in pursuit of holiness and the discernment of Christ’s will. Profoundly influenced by the letters of St Paul, Abbot Marmion called upon Christians to run the race for the unfading crown of glory. Couturier instinctively saw that Christians in different communions and traditions need not be separate or live as rivals, but unite in spurring each other on in the exhilarating race which Christ has run before.
The reason Couturier saw this exercise as so urgent is twofold. In John 17.21, first Christ prays for the unity of Christians to be like the unity of the Father and the Son. Nothing could be more sacred and indivisible than this union; nothing more ungodly and damaging than to assault its integrity, contrary to nature. Secondly, Christ appeals for a divine unity for the disciples, so that the world will recognise that the Son was sent by his Father. So the purpose of the unity of Christians is the peace and unity of all humanity in Christ. Just as the incarnation, the passion, the resurrection and the ascension were all worked within all human nature through the life of Christ, so the growth of all human nature in holiness towards God is progressed as the visible unity of Christians is realised before its eyes. But for as long as the Church maintains its earthly separations, it impedes the journey of all humanity to God.
This ground-breaking approach encouraged Christians throughout the world to join together in January for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which he had refounded, and every Thursday evening in a common 'Invisible Monastery', where all could be at one in prayer and praise with Jesus, as if beyond the world’s divisions, to ask for unity not to fit in with our plans, negotiations, delays and schedules, but as and when God decides, 'according to his will, according to his means'. This spiritual ecumenism was in due course written in to the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio.
Another of the fruits of Couturier's endeavours was the Groupe des Dombes, which he first gathered together in 1936. This was a regular spiritual and study meeting, bringing together Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic clergy at the Cistercian Abbey of Les Dombes (another instance of Benedictine hospitality towards the work of ecumenism). The group has been extremely influential, publishing regular and penetrating papers, as an informal body contributing to the work of the official agencies of the World Council of Churches and the Catholic Church in Europe. It meets to this day and has for a long time included the voices of women and young lay people. Today the Abbaye des Dombes is in the custody of the Communauté du Chemin Neuf, a new religious community with an ecumenical vocation and membership, founded in Lyon and very much continuing the vision of Couturier.
Couturier made two visits to England, in 1937 and 1938. These took place with the knowledge of the English Catholic hierarchy, but without much encouragement. It was a condition that they were private and did not give the impression of formal conversations or official contacts with the Roman Catholic Church, or with the hierarchy of France. The visits were organised by the Revd Henry Fynes-Clinton, a friend of the late Lord Halifax and leader of the pro-Catholic movement in the Church of England, the 'Anglo-Papalists', most of whom were members of the Catholic League. They were designed to give Couturier a first hand experience of the Church so admired by Mercier, Portal and Beauduin. So he was shown a number of the most active parish churches in the Anglican Catholic tradition, and visited a number of the then vigorous Anglican religious communities in the Benedictine and Vincentian traditions. An important encounter was with the Community of the Resurrection, whose Father Geoffrey Curtis CR became Couturier's biographer, an advocate of Couturier's spiritual ecumenism and a promoter of the renewed Week of Prayer.
But Couturier was aware that he was not seeing the whole of the Church of England and soon realised that a corporate reunion that could not take account of the Evangelicals, the Broad Churchmen and the High Churchmen whose sympathies were not with Rome, would not be feasible and that efforts to achieve it would increase division rather than mend it. But his visits made a deep impression and re-inspired the movement that hoped for unity with the Roman Catholic Church to be less concerned with its role as an interest group within Anglicanism and more aware of its influence for keeping Anglicanism to an ecumenical conception that aspired to the unity of the whole Church.
Couturier won many friends in all churches and indeed other religions for his ecumenism of prayer, spiritual friendship, humanity and humility. In 1940 he encouraged Roger Schutz to found a monastery in the Reformed Church in France, at Taizé, to pray and live its life for unity. It would not be long before a women's retreat movement in the Reformed Church in Switzerland would likewise form itself into a monastic community at Grandchamp, again with the keen interest and encouragement of Couturier. His annual letter announcing the themes of the forthcoming Week of Prayer was sent to tens of thousands of people across the world, who included Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and all kinds of Christians. Indeed in the very last year of his life in 1953 his friend and follower, Maurice Villain, a Jesuit priest, took the Week of Prayer for Unity to be kept for the first among Muslims, because above all (and this was the point of the appeal to people of other faiths) the Week was primarily about sanctification, a change of heart and soul, not merely the mind. To Couturier, Christian unity was about the unity of humanity, of which the 'icon' was the very person of Christ. It is not often realised that Couturier's Week of Prayer pioneered today's concerns in the Catholic Church for dialogue and encounter with people of other religions, especially in their spiritual lives, their cultural milieux and their beliefs and values. Couturier saw unity in Christ as the point at which all this converged and the point from which it all emanated, even ways that could not be understood or finally realised in human terms for the present. Hence, again, his famous prayer for unity 'according to your will, according to your means', that is regardless of our plans and attempts. Each year in praying for the sanctification and unity of Christians - 'that the world might believe' - he also encouraged prayer for the sanctification of Jews, and Muslims and people of other faiths, much in the spirit of the current prayers in the Liturgy of the Passion each Good Friday. All this was in the context of prayer for 'the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ'.
Acclaimed at his funeral by Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon as the ‘Apostle of Christian Unity’, his influence was keenly felt when after World War II his friend Dr Willem Visser t'Hooft convened the first assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948. Thus Couturier’s dearest prayer came to be fulfilled: that Christians begin to learn once more to say the Lord’s Prayer together.
For more on the work and significance of Paul Couturier visit the Paul Couturier website
Another important connection made by Couturier was with Nashdom Abbey (the community is now at Elmore), where Dom Benedict Ley worked hard to establish sustained contacts with Roman Catholics at home and abroad. Thanks to Couturier, Ley was put in touch with Mother Pia of the Cistercians at Grottaferrata just south of Rome, a community (now living in Vitorchiano near Viterbo) which Couturier had asked to devote itself to 'vertical ecumenism', a spiritual living in the cause and hope of unity. One of the young sisters to respond with her life's oblation to this call in 1938 was Maria Gabriella Sagheddu, Blessed Maria Gabriella of Unity. She died only a year later in 1939 but her sanctity in prayer and offering her terminal illness for Christian Unity deeply inspired the Anglican religious communities and has led, especially since the Second Vatican Council, to the foundation of a number of new religious houses and congregations expressly to advance the unity of Christians. To this day, too, the Cistercians of Vitorchiano's work includes their prayer and living for unity.
Another member of the Nashdom community, the distinguished and influential liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix was invited by some French Catholics to visit them in 1936, to meet the Trappists of Les Dombes and Paul Couturier. Thus he was witness to the beginnings of what was to become the famous Groupe des Dombes. The meeting with Couturier and the circle of intellectual and spiritual interest for which he was the catalyst so vividly affected Dix that in 1937 he wrote to Maurice Bévenot, a Jesuit priest whose work he had read and admired, inviting him to come to Nashdom and take part in a series of meetings between Anglican and Roman Catholic theologians to discuss Church unity, taking as their first reference point the newly published book by the rising theological star of the Dominican Order, Yves Congar, Chrétiens Désunis, Divided Christendom: a Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion. Bévenot accepted and in June 1938 the first Catholic-Anglican meeting since the Malines Conversations successfully took place at Nashdom Abbey, with five Jesuits from Heythrop meeting five Anglicans.
Immediately upon his election in 1939, Pope Pius XII called for a conference of Italy, Germany, France, Poland and Britain, in a last minute bid to avert war. His public appeals, his diplomacy behind the scenes and his offer to act as a neutral go-between in building a principled peace - despite the Vatican's weak and perillous position - were to no avail. The month after the invasion of Poland, his first encyclical Summi Pontificatus, based on first hand evidence from the German Cardinals of the deeds of Nazism, condemned totalitarianism and the 'deification' of the state in place of God and Christian ethics. His energetic appeals on behalf of the occupied nations and his condemnations on behalf of the Jews, for whose protection he ordered monasteries and convents to be opened up not only in Rome but wherever possible, demonstrate the five points he set out as principles for peace on the eve of the war: the defence of the small nations; the right to life; disarmament; a new and more effective version of the League of Nations; and observance of the moral principles of justice and love.
It is not always realised nowadays how Pius' personal spiritual authority and unswerving commitment to achieving a principled peace, put into practice by the relief of those in danger, emboldened Christians of all kinds across Europe and set the moral compass points for the conduct of the war of liberation. In England the role of the Anglican Bishop Bell of Chichester as an trans-national, ecumenical ally of the 'Confessing' Lutheran Church in its stand against Nazism, as well as his condemnation of 'area bombing' of German cities and their populations by the Allies, is well known. The mutual strength afforded to different Churches across the divisions of Christianity at the time when, as Winston Churchill said, the survival of Christian civilisation itself was at stake cannot be underestimated.
Inevitably, mutual strength led to meeting and co-operation. On December 21 1940, the Anglican Archbishops, Cosmo Gordon Lang of Canterbury and William Temple of York, joined Cardinal Hinsley, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, and Dr George Armstrong, Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council, in a letter to The Times which set out and supported the foundations for recovering world peace on the basis of Pope Pius' five principles. This had arisen out of a radio address by the Cardinal, called The Sword of the Spirit, and a meeting at Archbishop's House in Westminster on 1 August 1940 suggested by prominent highly educated lay people of the same name. This widened out into an organisation open to Catholics and other Christians alike. Although other churches and the government were keen supporters, the Cardinal was hardly supported by his brother bishops in other Catholic dioceses. The Sword of the Spirit was after all lay-led, ecumenical, intellectual, possibly too progressive for them, and decidedly English in feel.
Nevertheless, a great meeting took place at the Albert Hall on the 10th and 11th May 1942. On the night of the 10th, the blitz had been unleashed and there was considerable bomb damage to London, including Parliament, where the House of Commons had been destroyed. People overcame considerable obstacles to be present for the second day to hear Cardinal Hinsley deliver the closing speech. At the end, it was an extraordinary moment of solidarity. Instinctively, Bishop George Bell asked the Cardinal whether all could say the Lord's Prayer. The Cardinal led the whole assembly in the Our Father.
Hinsley was rebuked by his fellow bishops for praying with heretics. There had been calls for Catholics to be forbidden to belong to The Sword of the Spirit, for the reason that it was impossible for Catholics and non-Catholics to work together as there was no common Christian ground (as an article in the April Clergy Review had stated. Such calls intensified. But Maurice Bévenot, the French Jesuit, was stirred by these very words and retorted that war had brought about the demand for co-operation and that baptism, which leads to the life of supernatural grace, is what provides the 'common Christian ground' - 'in the ontological order as God sees it, there is ... a real common basis between us, over and above our common humanity.' Although this thinking would take decades to be received in the Catholic Church in England more widely, it is at the heart of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council only just over twenty years away - in Lumen Gentium, Guadium et Spes and the Decree on Ecumenism.
Even though the Sword died with the passing of Cardinal Hinsley in 1943, his leadership and the lay ecumenical movement which he facilitated for the purpose of promoting a just peace lived on in people's memories and aspirations. The saying of the Lord's Prayer in such a way and at such a point was a milestone in ecumenical progress: not only would it be a potent and unforgettable symbol, it was a prayer which was to bear rich fruit in the decades to come.
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