Talk Within the Club

In Chicago last week, 145 theologians, church historians, priests and ministers gathered for the organizational meeting of the brand-new North American Academy of Ecumenists. For most of the participants, it was like a college reunion. Many had spent the previous week at an interfaith Colloquium on evangelism at Notre Dame. Others were veterans of the series of theological dialogues carried on by the Roman Catholic hierarchy with various U.S. Protestant churches. Still others had attended talks at the World Center for Liturgical Studies in Florida, the Packard Manse retreat house in Massachusetts, the Jesuits' John LaFarge Institute in Manhattan, or countless other U.S. interfaith gathering places.

Since ecumenism has become an accepted part of church life, all too many exponents of church unity have discovered to their horror that they spend most of their time attending interfaith meetings. According to Jesuit Theologian Daniel O'Hanlon of California's Alma College, so many interfaith organizations and dialogues are under way that there "may be a need for an ecumenical movement to bring the ecumenical committees together."

An End in Itself. Although most professional ecumenists are good friends, some feel that they may be seeing too much of the same old faces. The Rev. Colin Williams, who attends about 200 ecumenical meetings a year on behalf of the National Council of Churches, admits that "quite a few of us are getting tired of hashing over the same issues and crossing each other's paths." President James I. McCord of Princeton Theological Seminary shares Williams' view that the ecumenical societies are proliferating too fast, fears that "talking may become an end in itself."

While theologians like to be popular, some worry because every new ecumenical venture invariably seeks out the same familiar names. Methodist Albert Outler of Dallas, who was an observer at the Vatican Council, is the automatic choice of any new Catholic-sponsored organization. Jesuit John Courtney Murray ranks equally high in Protestant esteem. So great is their concern for church unity that these ecumenists are generally reluctant to turn down any serious new offer--and the result is still another amiable interlocking directorate. "It is the thing to do," says one popular Protestant theologian. "If you say no too often, somebody's liable to accuse you of beating your wife or hating kids."

Wider Echelons. The great danger of so much clubbiness, believes Murray, is that interfaith discussions "are in danger of spinning off into the blue" and becoming the private province of an ecumenical clique. He believes that ecumenical discussion, hitherto largely limited to a cadre of top theologians, needs to bring in significantly wider echelons of the church at large. "What we need," he says, "are parish priests, members of the bureaucracy, people who can give practical application to what goes on at these meetings. The discussions tend not to run down but to go round and round, and the way out of the circle is through church organization to the parishioners."

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