Ecumenical Anti-Jihad?
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I’m at the Madrid airport with just a few minutes before boarding begins, but I wanted to say something about Ross’ last column and Noah Millman’s response to it. My impression is that Ross wanted to discuss Pope Benedict’s outreach to conservative Christians, whether they are tradtionalist Catholic or Anglican, and he would usually settle for seeing these moves in terms of Western culture wars, but perhaps he wanted to be a bit provocative and make more out of the outreach than it requires. Just as the Pope’s Regensburg address was frequently misconstrued as principally anti-Islamic rather than a meditation on the Christian understanding of reason, Ross seems to be making forthright Catholic proselytism into something other than what it is to make it seem relevant to non-Catholic readers. I would take the same event and see it as another step in the progression of pan-conservative ecumenism in which political-cum-cultural issues carry more weight than theological ones. Of course, Pope Benedict is engaging in this consistent with his obligations as pontiff, so it is not quite that watered down, but it is these political/cultural issues that are the fault lines that have created the opportunity to lure conservative Anglicans away from the Communion.
Whether or not Anglican conservatives in the “global south” and throughout the world crave Pope Benedict’s type of leadership (and it wouldn’t surprise me if some did), we should bear in mind how swiftly the Vatican backtracked in the wake of the Regensburg address. Stressing that it was an exercise in philosophical reflection, the Vatican actively distanced itself from the claims of both protesters and admirers that the address represented a great intellectual blow in a clash of civilizations. It’s also worth considering that any ecumenical anti-jihad of this kind has the same problems as the “ecumenical jihad” to which it bears some resemblance: it is fundamentally negative in its foundations and attempts to give a religious character to what is primarily a political project. Were there to be a “united Anglican-Catholic front” against Islam, my guess is that it would be as damaging and destructive to the integrity of these confessions as Byzantine unionism was to the integrity of Orthodoxy in the 13th and 15th centuries. One need not prefer the turban to the mitre to see that attempting to end schisms even partly for anti-Islamic purposes does nothing to heal Christian divisions and instead tends to deepen and embitter both parties.
Filed under: Christianity, Islam, politics, religion
People have a tendency to interpret Pope Benedict’s statements on contemporary events as initial reflections rather than an application based upon a long body of work. I confess to not having studied Benedict’s corpus extensively, but I know that he has explicated on Christian Unity many times and that issues of doctrine should be worked out under unity rather than outside it. Even understood under the rubric of Vatican policy, this still shouldn’t be surprising. The Vatican has publicly and directly said that the Anglicans are moving further away from being able to unite with the Catholic Church. I think it was a statement 2 or 3 years ago that was especially blunt. As for Islam, the Vatican hasn’t been a shrinking violet. Saudi Arabia in particular has been party to condemnation over its suppression of the rights of Christians within its borders.
While I appreciate Douthat’s desire to understand and bring forth in policy discussions the Catholic Church’s policies, I really wish he would take the time to understand them by the American conservative catholic lens. The Vatican has its own policy prerogatives, and they are not subordinated to US thought.
Thanks, Mr Larison, for this post. I think it’s high time there was a more thorough discussion of this new ‘conservative’ ecumenism that has arisen in recent decades. The sources are twofold: the erosion of traditional theology by the original ecumenical movement, which teaches that doctrine is of secondary importance to visible unity; and the internal secularization that afflicted all parties to the ecumenical movement simultaneously, shortly after the original ecumenical movement established itself securely through the creation of the World Council of Churches. This secularization created a split within the ecumenist churches between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’. Neither party, of course, maintained traditional doctrine, since both shared the assumptions of ecumenist theology, which had been adopted at an official level by all these churches. The ‘conservative/liberal’ distinction is restricted to moral and political issues. Thus, the ‘progressive’ ecumenists came to dominate the WCC, especially under the influence of Eastern Orthodox members under communist control. The ‘conservative’ ecumenists, with the Vatican in the vanguard, arose as a counterbalance: the aim is obviously to unite all ‘conservative’ Christians under the Pope, who historically has always been willing to subordinate doctrinal differences to sacramental union (viz all the Uniate churches in Eastern Orthodox territories).
Of course, the conservative/liberal distinction is not watertight: Patriarch Bartholomew shares the characteristics of both camps, for example, in his moral conservatism on the one hand, against his environmentalism on the other. But largely this is a useful distinction that students of the ecumenical movement should bear in mind more than they have been doing hitherto.