The Right Rev. John P. Chalmers, moderator of the Church of Scotland, accompanied by a group of representatives of the same Church, were received in audience this morning by the Holy Father who, in his greeting, expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to meet and share with them a common commitment to the service of the Gospel and the cause for Christian unity.

“Scotland’s rich cultural and historical traditions have been shaped by outstanding saintly witnesses to Christ from various confessions”, he observed. “The present state of ecumenical relations in Scotland clearly shows that what we, as Christians, hold in common is greater than all that divides us. On this basis the Lord is calling us to seek ever more effective ways to overcome old prejudices and to find new forms of understanding and cooperation”.
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The Rev. Daniel Montoya, longtime professor at Seminario Evangelico Teologia (Evangelical Theological Seminary, or SET) here, calls his core class “Practical Theological Ecumenism.”

“In Cuba, Christians are a tiny minority, so they try to get together to know each other,” Montoya explains. “They are not so keen on institutional or ‘macro’ ecumenism, but on local or “base” ecumenism.”

In Cuba, as most everyplace else in the world, ecumenism at the national or interdenominational level is in crisis. “These institutional groups forget location,” Montoya says. “They forget the base.”

For example, he says, “people are neighbours, their children attend the same schools, they ride the same buses, they walk in the same streets ― they are friends. On the ground they don’t see any differences, just on Sundays when they go to different churches.”

Practical ecumenism for Montoya, then, means teaching seminary students how to involve people locally “so they have better understanding and don’t have prejudice.” His classes focus on ecumenical cooperation in local communities, not on the dogmatic or doctrinal differences between churches.

Practical ecumenism must also be theological “because all of our hope ― what it means to be the church ― is based on faith and confidence in God.”
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“I want to transfer to the Presbyterian Church because in this denomination children matter.” I don’t remember the name of the speaker. It has been 20 years or so. But his words left their imprint.

We were proceeding through routine approvals of minister transfers in a stated presbytery meeting. Interest picked up when this longtime military chaplain, a Baptist, shared how his journey of faith had led him to the Reformed theological camp. “In my former tradition, we dedicated infants and educated children in the hope that they someday would profess faith in Jesus Christ. Upon their profession, they would get baptized and thereby be welcomed into the body of Christ. In the Reformed tradition you all baptize them into the body and educate them into personal faith. I think that’s the right sequence.”

As a fairly recent convert to Presbyterianism at the time, I found his words reassuring, especially so, since the one theological sticking point for me had been the practice of infant baptism. Exercising my office under the Presbyterian Church’s constitution, I had learned well how to present to parents the covenantal concept of baptism, rooted as it is in the practice of infant circumcision dating to the eighth day of Isaac’s life. But I still harbored some doubts about such a practice. This chaplain helped convert me into a passionate advocate of our denomination’s sacramental theology.
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An effort to make an existing Protestant-Roman Catholic committee the top ecumenical body for Ireland has been stymied by a vote of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI).

The plan, which had been approved by the three other major denominations in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland – the Anglicans, the Methodists and the Roman Catholics – went down by a 224-144 vote during the Belfast General Assembly in June. Its opponents say it was defeated by the fact that an institutional identification with the Roman Catholic Church would imply approval of its doctrine.

And that is, in a word, apostasy.

If this all sounds like theological separatism, it is. But this is Northern Ireland, where politics and religion stay unintelligibly and painfully entangled – no matter how much distance Catholics and Protestants put between themselves, and no matter how many centuries go by.

The political stalemate isn’t so dissimilar.

Ulster’s major unionist (and largely Protestant) party is refusing to form a four-party administration to govern Northern Ireland – including Sinn Fein, the radical republican party – because the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) has refused to disarm, and because of apparent breaches of the outlawed group’s 1997 cease-fire.
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by Robert O’Connor, Chicago Tribune Last December, Rev. David Armstrong, minister of the First Limavady Presbyterian Church, performed what in most parts of the world would have been a little noted act of courtesy: He exchanged Christmas greetings with a neighbor, the pastor of the local Roman Catholic church. Last week he left town. He
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