More help is being offered to churches that want to do something about climate change.

The Montreal-based Canadian Centre for Ecumenism has launched the Green Church program to advise churches on ways to reduce their carbon footprint and lower heating bills. Joined with Toronto-based Greening Sacred Spaces, Green Church will offer certification to churches that achieve a high level of environmental awareness and act on it starting in April 2011.
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If you pray for something for 100 years you might find the prayer refines itself in the light of new realities, and then perhaps the prayer itself deepens your understanding and broadens your horizon. For 100 years Christians have been formally setting aside seven or eight days in January to pray with Christ for unity. “It’s really about being on our knees together and praying for the unity that is willed by God, in the way God wants, when God wants,” [Marianist] Father Luis Melo told The Catholic Register.

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After 100 years of acknowledging Jesus’ last will and testament in prayer, the theme for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is “Pray Without Ceasing.” “We’ve come to a new level of maturity in terms of ecumenical activity,” said Atonement Friar Father Damian MacPherson, ecumenical and interfaith affairs officer for the archdiocese of Toronto. “Perhaps that’s why it’s becoming more difficult.”

Glib talk of an easy and obvious unity among Christians may have been common in the first decade or more after the Second Vatican Council, but as churches make substantial progress — the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the Lutheran World Federation and the 1965 rescinding of the excommunications of 1054 between Orthodox and Catholic Churches — ecumenists begin to see how long the road to unity might be. “We cannot be looking for giant steps. It’s painfully slow, painfully slow,” said MacPherson. “Patience is the hallmark of the good ecumenist.”
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Church unity hasn’t happened yet, but Catholics and Anglicans have a new list of concrete suggestions for ways to bring the two churches closer. A joint commission of Catholic and Anglican bishops has produced a 42-page report which aims “to bridge the gap between the elements of faith we hold in common and the tangible expression of that shared belief in our ecclesial lives.” The result of work by theologians and bishops in North America, Europe and Australia, Growing Together in Unity and Mission summarizes the agreements reached in 40 years of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, setting out common belief in the Trinity, the church as communion in mission, Scripture, Baptism, Eucharist, ministry, authority in the church, discipleship and holiness, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. It also sets out in eight boxed sections areas of disagreement. The disagreements take up 15 of the 126 numbered paragraphs in the document.
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When Pope Benedict XVI was elected to replace the inimitable Pope John Paul II, he promised to carry on his beloved successor’s work, particularly that related to ecumenism. As is often the case, the press of events can overtake the best laid plans and so ecumenism has often appeared to play second fiddle to other issues.

Yet it remains deeply and ineradicably imbedded in the church’s teaching, thanks to the Second Vatican Council and the post-council popes.

As we celebrate the 2007 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (Jan. 21-28), we would do well to recall some initiatives of the last year that did not produce the kind of documents we usually associate with ecumenical dialogue, but represent progress in a way that cannot be summed up in precise theological language.
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The outgoing president of the North American Academy of Liturgy and a leading Catholic liturgist has told The Catholic Register the most recent translation of the Roman Missal is “a step backwards” for ecumenical relations.

“It’s going to feel like the ecumenical movement has taken a hit,” Fr. Paul Turner, pastor of St. Munchin Church in Missouri and author of a half-dozen books on Catholic liturgy, said following an opening liturgy for the North American Academy of Liturgy annual meeting in Toronto Jan. 4.

New, more literal, translations from Latin of liturgical texts scheduled to hit parishes in two years are a departure from the Second Vatican Council’s movement toward common texts with Anglican, Lutheran and other churches, Turner said. Those common texts were a specific goal of council fathers in the 1960s, and non-Catholic scholars were consulted by Catholic liturgists and translators in the past.

“That same effort is not being made today,” he said.
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By Michael Swan, The Catholic Register Canada has gained a new ecumenical web site, and the start of a centralized, on-line archive of Canadian and international ecumenical dialogue. Want to know what Catholics and Lutherans have really said about their shared understanding of justification, or what the Catholic bishops of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland
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I remember, as an MA student, reading one of Margaret O’Gara’s essays in Grail on petrine ministry and what she called “the ecumenical gift exchange.” Drawing a comparison to the exchange of gifts in a large family at Christmas, O’Gara says that “in ecumenical dialogue, each Christian communion brings one or many gifts to the dialogue table, and each receives riches from their dialogue partners as well. But in the ecumenical gift exchange, the gift-giving enriches all of the partners, since we do not lose our gifts by sharing them with others.” Throughout my own research and the past four years of ecumenical ministry I have kept this concept close at hand.

O’Gara’s new book The Ecumenical Gift Exchange collects her own essays exploring issues of contemporary ecumenical dialogue, particularly: petrine ministry; infallibility; authority and dissent; feminism, and of utmost importance: the process of reception itself. How does one church receive the gifts of another? What level of agreement is necessary? When does the dialogue move from talking to acting? How does dialogue lead to repentance and then to reception?

She points out, “In a sense, the entire ecumenical movement rests on the recognition of the need for repentance, a willingness to ask whether we have a beam in our own eye before we concern ourselves with the mote in the eye of the other.”
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“Many people today think the ecumenical movement is losing momentum; but, in fact, many marvelous things are taking place,” says Father Irenée Beaubien, SJ, director of the Canadian Centre for Ecumenism here. He cited the example of the fruitful dialogue which has been going on for the past seven years between representatives of the Catholic and United Churches.
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