A Lecture by Rev. Fr. George H. Tavard AA

Delivered to the Commission on Christian Unity of the Massachusetts Council of Churches

Plenary Session on Ecumenical Hospitality

Tuesday May 2, 2006

Metropolis of Boston, Brookline MA

A Theological Exploration of Ecumenical Hospitality

                        At the institutional level the years 1910 (Missionary Conference of Edinburgh), 1948(foundation of the WCC), and 1965 (the closing of Vatican Council II and the start of bilateral dialogues involving the Catholic Church) were of major importance in the development of official relationships between Churches in spite of their continuing, though narrowing separations. In terms of theology, the major development was a renewed emphasis on an ecclesiology of Communion in the last decades of the 20th century. I will reflect briefly on Koinonia-ecclesiology, and from there pass on to Hospitality as an ecumenical paradigm.

Koinonia-ecclesiology

                        When dialogue is carried out by believers who, even in the mutual estrangement of their Churches, are united in Christ by faith and baptism, it promotes feelings of communion. It is particularly significant that the years before and after the start of the twenty-first millennium saw the explosion of an ecclesiology of Communion. In the Catholic Church this took the form of a realization that the fundamental ecclesial model of Vatican Council II was not, as early commentators had stated, an ecclesiology of the People of God. It was an ecclesiology of Communion. “What God wants,”  Wille- brands wrote, “is the unity of communion.[[1]]” Communio-ecclesiology had already been for a long time a theme of Anglican reflections on the Church[[2]], because it is deeply embedded in the Book of Common Prayer. It was so basic to the joint statements of ARCIC-I that the introduction to the Final Report, composed in 1981, provides a summary description of koinonia in an ecumenical perspective: Koinonia “signifies a relation between persons resulting from their participation in one and the same reality” (n.5). Further, “Koinonia with one another is entailed by our koinonia with God in Christ. This is the mystery of the Church.”  The primacy is “a visible link and focus” of  koinonia. The Eucharist is its “effectual  sign.” The ministry, as episcope, “exists only to serve” it. It needs visible expression as the “sacrament of God’s saving work” (n.7). It is “grounded in the word of God preached, believed and obeyed” (n.8).

                        The late Jean-Marie Tillard explored these notions Communion at length in several volumes published respectively in 1987, 1992, and 1995[[3]]. His understanding of the conciliar ecclesiology of communion happily converged with the orientation of the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC, which, in 1982, after a long processus and many debates, made “solidarity in the Body of Christ” (BEM, n.21) central to its report, Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry, and to the Lima liturgy. Following this, the theme of  the Fifth Conference on Faith and Order, meeting in Santiago de Compostella in August 1993, was no other than “On the Way to Fuller Koinonia[[4]]”.

                        Since ARCIC-I concluded its pioneering work, the ecclesiology of communion has been the object of several ecumenical dialogues, as between Catholics and Pentecostals (Perspectives on Koinonia, 1989), Catholics and Anglicans (ARCIC-II: Church as Communion, 1990), Disciples and Roman Catholics (1992), Anglicans and the World Methodist Council (1996), Catholics and the World Methodist Council (2001), Catholics and Lutherans in the USA (The Church as koinonia of salvation. Its Structures and Ministries, 2005). It is also featured in the report of Catholics and Methodists that will be presented at the meeting of the World Methodist Council in Seoul in July of this year 2006.

                        An ecclesiology of communion unites the local and the universal, the local Church being no other than the universal Church in one particular area. It unites structure and sacrament, the central sacrament of the Gospel being the communion of the faithful with the body and blood of Christ. Ecclesial structures exist in order to organize sacramental communion and give it social visibility. In addition, communio-ecclesiology opens a large window on the world. As ARCIC-II declared,

            To explore the meaning of communion is not only to speak of the Church but also to address the                world at the heart of its deepest need, for human beings long for true community in freedom,  justice and peace and for the respect of human dignity (Church as Communion, n.3).

                         The experience of communion within one’s Church calls for communion across all Churches, and all the more so as communion in baptism remains fundamental in the entire Christian landscape. As is manifest in the mystagogical sermons of the Fathers of the Church, baptism implies a radical orientation to communion. Paradoxically, this logic has been disturbed by history, so that what is implied in baptism is not always experienced in practice. The knot that ecumenical dialogues must learn to undo is precisely this: How can the Churches together reopen the way to one Communion for all their members?

                                    Koinonia was a Greek, more specifically Platonic, concept before it entered Christian thought. In Plato’s Dialogues, however, the idea became dangerous when it was made into a political principle regulating the organization of the human city[[5]]. In Plato’s Republic, koinonia is so basic that it must be enforced by authority. In a similar line Dostoievsky imagined the Grand Inquisitor as a fanatic enforcer of Communion. By contrast, the City of God was described by St. Augustine as a mixed body of saints and sinners. In this mixed body a confession of sins is preliminary to the liturgy. Sins, even of a few, affect the whole; and the whole needs conversion. As Unitatis redintegratio declared, “In regard to sins against unity the testimony of St. John applies: If we say that we have not sinned we make him a liar and his word is not in us (I  Jo.1,10)”. Therefore, as the text also says, “There is no true ecumenism without interior conversion (UR. 7). Vatican Council II indeed affirmed that “all Catholics must tend to Christian perfection” (UR. 4), a statement  which happily concurs with John Wesley’s basic idea that Christians must seek to reach perfection. This is well formulated in these verses of Charles Wesley:           

                                                Partner of Thy perfect nature

                                                     Let me be now in Thee

                                                A new sinless creature[[6]].

                        None of the faithful in whatever church, however, can presume to have reached perfection. Communion in a church of sinners must be constantly qualified by confession. And it should eventually be enriched by conversion. Let me again quote Cardinal Willebrands:

             Ecumenism certainly needs theology; but because unity can only be given by God, ecumenism above all needs prayer... Without the mingling of prayer and theological research Christians can never entirely be in the presence of God... Ecumenism will make no progress unless divided Christians have re-created between them ties of ‘the heart’.  The Church God wants is not just harmony and agreement in the matter of doctrine and dogmas. It is the communion of what Thomas Aquinas called ‘living faith’, which is exactly that mingling of intelligence and heart of which I have been speaking[[7]].

Now the dimension of Communion that includes mind and heart, intellect and love, is well expressed in the notion and the practice of hospitality.

Hospitality

                        The ecumenical dimension of hospitality was first noted, it would seem, in the Anglican context. In his book, To Meet and to Greet. Faith with Faith (London: Epworth Press, 1992), Kenneth Cragg saw the Christian mission as turning around two poles, that he called “embassy” (announcing the Gospel to others) and “hospitality” (receiving the other so as better to live the Gospel). The Lambeth Conference of 1998 echoed this insight when it incorporated hospitality in its missionary perspective: “This reminds us at once of the dimension of ‘hospitality.’ Christian faith is a matter of invitation, not force or threat”[[8]].

                        Hospitality, however, is not missionary in essence. An example of pure hospitality was given when John XXIII invited Orthodox and Protestant Churches to send observers to the II Vatican Council[[9]]. The observers were housed, fed, and generally taken care of by the Secretariat for the Promotion of the Unity of Christians. They in turn contributed to the council by their presence and by their participation in meetings and discussions organized by the Secretariat about the conciliar topics. This example inspired similar invitations that the World Council and many churches have, since that time, sent and accepted. The practice, however, needs a  theology if it is to be fully fruitful.

                   Hospitality is a profoundly religious attitude, which the main religions of the world cultivate. It is grounded in the believers’ sense of the universal presence of God, or, where there is no doctrine of a personal God, in the all-pervading presence of the Divine. This presence is sensed and expressed differently in different cultures. The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of a universal presence of the Self, which everyone ultimately is, as a father teaches his son: “That which is the subtile essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, Svedaketu, art it.[[10]]” Hinduism is well aware of the ensuing dilemma, when a warrior seems bound to kill others. This is the very topic of the Bhagavad Gita, where the dilemma is lifted, though not solved, when Krishna, the divine charioteer, tells Arjuna that, since both death and life are impermanent, the inner imperishable reality “is not slain when the body is slain.[[11]]” Therefore no wise person mourns for the dead, and Arjuna should do his do his duty as a warrior.

                        In the context of the Semitic cultures hospitality is profoundly rooted in the conditions of life in the desert. It is based, more profoundly, on the ties between each creature and God the Creator. As is written in the Koran, “To God belong the East and the West; withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God; God is All-embracing, All-knowing”([[12]]). In Genesis 18, Abraham receives the visit of three mysterious strangers. He welcomes them. The text designates them as Elohe Yahweh and Elohim in Hebrew, as o Theos and Kyrios in the Septuagint, as Dominus in the Latin Vulgate. That is, the author identifies them with God, even though the divine identity of the visitors is not perceived by Abraham, and still less by Sarah. Indeed, the book of Leviticus illustrates a latent conflict between an outgoing concern for all humans, and a fear of legal impurities that can be contracted from others. Even there, however, the hospitality that is enjoined on the People extends beyond ethnicity: the alien (advena) who dwells in the Land should be treated like a native (indigena), and loved quasi vosmetipsos, “as though he were yourselves” (Lev. 19,34).

                        In the later history of Israel the totality of gift and response, grace and surrender to Adonai, is manifest in the People’s fidelity to haaretz, the God-given land, which functions for Israel as a  model and summary of the universe as God intends it to be. In Genesis 32 Jacob discovers that the stranger he has struggled with all night long is not really a stranger. Although he behaved like a man fighting another man, the stranger was “God seen face to face” (v.30). Henceforth every stranger in the Land bears the face of God. Even more, God has destined every human being to belong to the Land, and thus to show the face of God. Psalm 87 sings: "Of Zion it can be said, man after man was born in her" (Ps. 87,5), because, according to a rabbinic interpretation, “Zion is the source of all human life[[13]].” Exemplified in biblical stories, presumably sung in liturgical settings, this is already the principle of catholicity, understood essentially even when formulated geographically.

Christian hospitality

                        It is not by accident that the icon of the Holy Trinity, showing the three angels visiting Abraham and Sarah, is traditionally called “the Hospitality of Abraham”. The icon depicts the Holy Trinity as angels, presumably because, in the following chapter 19 of Genesis, two angels go to the city of Sodom. The angels are understood as representing the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. The ultimate meaning of the biblical episode, and of its interpretation in the corresponding icon, is that the fundamental relation of the creature to the Creator ought to be a relation of hospitality, the creature welcoming the Three Persons’ loving visit, and thankfully receiving all of God’s generous gifts. Because God, the Holy Trinity, is magnificent in giving, the creature’s reception and response can properly be called “catholic,” embracing the entire horizon of the divine purpose. And since God does not give Herself partially, a proper, though never adequate response entrusts the whole of one’s creatureliness to God.

                        In this essential sense catholicity qualifies the Ecclesia in the letter of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrniots (VIII, 2): “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the Church catholic,” which Ignatius also calls “the Church of God the Father and of his beloved Jesus Christ.” In 325 the Council of Nicaea acknowledged catholicity as one of the marks of the Church, so central to the Christian community that it was placed in the creed. And there it remains, in the creed that is basic to all Churches and is proclaimed  in many of them. Like the Land for its People, the Church of Christ for the Christian believers is commensurate with the entire purpose and design of God for the creatures. Everyone of its members belongs at the same time to God and to all the other faithful. In the context of catholicity this mutual belonging points to what Christian hospitality ought to be.

Tradition as hospitality

                        When the Council of Trent, in its fourth session (February 8 to April 8, 1546), discussed the problem raised by the Reformers’ advocacy of Scriptura sola as the only ultimate authority for faith, theologians and bishops faced the fact that Catholic theology gives considerable authority to traditions believed to be apostolic, deriving from the Apostles. They were aware of the difficulty of distinguishing between truly apostolic original traditions and ecclesiastic traditions that originated after the apostolic times. Nevertheless the Tridentine decree adopted on April 8, 1546, upheld the apostolic traditions, which it declared to receive and venerate “with equal affection of piety and equal reverence” as Scripture itself[[14]]. Reception, one can see here, is not a new concept in theology. As the Council of Trent spoke of the reception of apostolic traditions, it assumed that the two notions, tradition and reception, are closely related. The tradition,  or traditions (the council made no distinction here between the singular and the plural), need to be received in order to be effective. There is no tradition until it is received. Reception ensures that an original doctrine has effectively been transmitted, and has thus become tradition. This transmission cannot take place unless the members of the Church, and the Church itself, are hospitable to it. The nature and tone of this hospitality are well indicated in the Tridentine formulation, where pari reverentia, “equal reverence,” goes with pari pietatis affectu, “equal affection of piety,” or “equal pious love.” The piety of this formulation not directly evoke prayer and devotion, as piety progressively came to be understood in the following centuries. In keeping with the original Latin meaning of pietas, it evokes the basic relationship of children to parents and vice versa. The Council of Trent, and therefore the Catholic Church, receive the traditions coming from the apostles because they have been handed on quasi per manus, “as though by hand,” by our fathers in the faith, who were  historically and emotionally closer than we are to the revelatory presence of the Word Incarnate, at the time when the Holy Spirit also “dictated” divine instructions to them.

                        Hospitality is precisely the attitude of reverence and the affection of piety that characterize the Christian reception of Holy Scripture and of the traditions from the Apostles. It is a contribution and witness of the members to the continuity of the Church. It is as such inseparable from the basic structure of the Church, even when the attention of bishops and theologians is drawn in other directions by temporary circumstances.

The Principle of Catholicity

                        In the diachrony of the Church, reception and hospitality constitute a dimension, an aspect, of catholicity. It is both the teaching of the present by the past, and the welcome of the past by the present. In the synchrony of what the Church is at every moment, reception and hospitality flow from the actual welcoming of all by each, and of each by all. They show forth the reciprocal togetherness of all the baptized, the solidarity among his disciples that Jesus intended when he said: “A second commandment is like the first: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mat. 22,39). That is, you shall receive your neighbor as you would receive yourself. The prayer of Jesus in John 17,21 placed this love and unity in its Trinitarian context: “As you, Father, are in me and I in you, may they also be one in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” True Christian relationships express our reception, welcome, hospitality of the others who share the grace of God and the faith once for all communicated to the saints.

                        The mutual hospitality of the faithful mirrors the mutual indwelling of the creatures and the Creator. This is hospitality in its deepest Christian sense. When they reflect on the Trinitarian indwelling in their heart, the faithful discover that they are more than themselves, that in charity, if not in essence, they are also the others whom they welcome as their own selves. Hospitality is properly ecumenical when it is practiced by communities which have discovered that in the design of God they should all be catholic, commensurate with the whole (kat’olon, in Greek). As the Epistle to Diognetus  said of Christians, “every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is a foreign country” (VI,3). The disciples of Christ belong nowhere exclusively, because they belong everywhere.

                        Christian hospitality implies a spiritual and moral identification with one’s guest. When it placed the common life in a monastery under the sign of unanimity, the Rule of St. Augustine[[15]] borrowed expressions of solidarity from both the Bible and the New Testament: Ante omnia, propter quod in unum estis congregati, ut unanimes habitetis in domo, et sit vobis anima una et cor unum. Which I would translate: “First of all, the purpose for which you are gathered into one is to live in unanimity in the house (Ps. 67,7) and to be of one soul and one heart (Acts 4,2).” From this the Rule of St. Benedict went on to draw a practical conclusion: In the monastery, “let all the guests who arrive be received as Christ, for He himself will say: I was a guest and you received me” (Rule, ch.53). When the visitor, the other, is received tamquam Christus, he or she is seen, one could say, in persona Christi, and becomes a divine blessing on the monastery. The monastery, schola caritatis, as St. Bernard said, is a “school of love,” patterned on what the Church is at its deepest, namely, the Communion of Saints, in which everything belongs to all.

Hospitality as welcome of God

                        There comes a moment in the course of the spiritual life when God’s presence in oneself becomes the exclusive center of attention. This is expressed theologically in the doctrine of the “indwelling of God,” in keeping with the assurance of the Gospel of John: “If  someone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our dwelling with him” (J. 14,23). As John Calvin translated this verse in his commentary on John, printed in 1553, he wrote: Nous viendrons à lui, et ferons demeure chez lui (“We will come to him and dwell in his home.”) The home I understand to be “his soul:” “We will dwell in his soul,” even though Calvin goes on to explain this with a surprisingly scholastic perspective on created grace: “We will come in the home of  the one who loves me; that is, he will sense that the grace of God resides in him, and from day to day he will have new increases of God’s gifts[[16]].” The grace of God, one should add, is in the soul because God,  the Giver, is there first of all. There would be no interior testimony of the Holy Spirit, - a belief that is central to Calvin’s understanding of the Christian life, - unless, together with the Eternal Word and with God the Father, the Spirit had taken residence in the believer. God is not only the Creator of the universe, in whom faith believes. God is also the interior guest to whom faith attests and whom it trusts. The faithful response to the divine indwelling is spiritual hospitality as its highest.

                        Admittedly, many of the faithful are only occasionally attuned to the internal Presence. Few sense it as John of the Cross did when, in the last stanza of  his poem, The Living Flame of Love (composed in 1582-1585), he whispered to his divine beloved:

                               How gently and lovingly                          ¡Cuán manso y amoroso

                               you wake in my heart,                               recuerdas en mi seno,

                               where in secret alone you dwell!              donde secretamente solo moras!

                              And in your tasty breathing                      ¡Y en tu aspirar sabroso

                              full of good and glory,                              de bien y gloria lleno,

                              how delicately you fill me with love!       cuán delicadamente me enamoras!

                        Even if mystical graces are not given to all of the faithful, all in whatever Church who receive communion with faith practice hospitality toward God in a way that is uniquely characteristic of the Christian faith. The welcoming of divine grace is profoundly inscribed in the doctrine and practice of all the sacraments, whether there are two, or seven, or more. St. Augustine wrote: “The word comes to the elements and the sacrament is made, itself being like a visible sign” (Accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum, etiam ipsum tanquam visibile signum[[17]]). This should be read at two levels. There is the level of the words pronounced by the minister over a given matter, the purpose and use of which are transformed by the words. And there is the higher level of the Word who is now spoken by the Father over the creature, by Whom the creature becomes properly sacramental, a repository and channel of the divine Presence. The two levels so communicate that in the Eucharist the divine Word is himself received, and the human participants are hospitable to the divine Gift.

                         Likewise, faith is given by God and received by the believers. Here again, the Christian attitude is reception. And when the reception of grace is fully conscious and intended, it is truly a gesture of hospitality to God. The life of faith rests on a desire to be as hospitable to God as God is generous in giving us his very Being. But, as Jesus reminded his questioner, a second commandment is like the first. The first is worship and adoration of God, the Creator, the Absolute. There can be several, even many second commandments, depending on the situation and the needs around us. But one of them is like the first: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And the young man asked: Who is my neighbor? There is a neighbor in the good Samaritan who takes pity and does a charitable action without expecting a reward, as in the parable. There is also, more fundamentally, a neighbor who gives of self beyond any possibility of adequate response. This is, precisely, God, the Creator, the Absolute, the Holy One. The most basic hospitality that can be offered to that neighbor is our own being, body and soul, as a dwelling place available whenever God wills. When God does come to us in contemplation we then may realize that hospitality to God is the beginning and the end of all creaturely relationships. It is acceptance of God and of the structure that God has given the universe, acceptance of God’s sovereign Reality, and of one’s fundamental unreality.

                        I like to think that Pope Paul VI had something like this in mind when, in India in 1963, meeting with members of traditional Indian religions, he quoted a prayer from the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad: “From the unreal lead me to the real; from darkness lead me to light; from death lead me to immortality” (Brh. 1,3,27). I do not think any previous bishop of Rome had ever quoted a Upanishad. Hindus may identify the unreal with the individual and the personal, the real with the invisible universal Absolute (the Great Atman). Paul VI presumably identified the real, the light, and immortality as the Godhead everlastingly alive as Three Persons beyond what philosophy can conceive as either divinity or personhood. It is not very hard, in any case, to find converging formulations among Christian authors.

                        God, Thomas Aquinas taught, “is not in a genus.[[18]]” Because of this we do not know quid est, what God is; and we cannot define God[[19]], since, in the logic of Aristotle, definition requires a  specific difference within a common genus. God, however, can be adored and can be loved. To human eyes, as Martin Luther confessed, after the mystics of the Rhineland, God is Deus absconditus, a hidden God, revealed nevertheless in Christ. Luther drew the practical consequence when he affirmed, in a language that was misunderstood by most Catholic theologians at the time, that Justification is not the fruit of what we do. Why not? Simply because our ways are not God’s ways. The contingent has no handle on the Absolute, the creature on the Creator. Compared with the sacredness of God we can only regard ourselves as sinful, however holy we might be in the eyes of fellow human beings. Our acceptance with God, our justification, must be God’s gracious gift, known to faith alone, and therefore surprising to the merely rational intellect. Our welcome of God is not our doing. It is God’s generous and loving gift. By its location at the heart of the Christian faith it determines both how we stand before God, and how we stand before the neighbor.

                        The Eastern Christian tradition also speaks of the hospitality of God. Not only does God receive us, is tenderly hospitable to us, but God, so to say, yearns to be received by the creatures with welcoming hospitality. As the book, Receive One Another puts it, “In many ways, God’s seeking to share God’s home with us is not unlike the behavior of a beggar desperately seeking our love. God begs us to join him by loving him and thus one another[[20]].” Hospitality can become the very paradigm of our relationship with God. Before we even think about being hospitable to God, God himself has been tenderly hospitable to us. The dialogues between Lutherans and Catholics that were inspired by Vatican Council II opened a window on God’s hospitality when they led to the Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith, which was signed in the Cathedral of Augsburg, on 30 October 1999, by representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and of the Catholic Church. When we confess that our own justification before God does not result from our endeavors or works, however good these may be, but comes from God’s gift that is acknowledged in faith, we implicitly pay homage to the graceful hospitality of God, who does not wait for us to be ready, but who takes us in, clothes our nakedness in the merits of his  incarnate Son Jesus Christ, and regards us as his beloved sons and daughters. This is of course hospitality at his best and highest. It is well formulated in the Joint Declaration:

            Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of                          any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our                 hearts  while equipping and calling us for good works[[21]].

                        The hospitality of God, who receives sinners as just without any merit of their own, should be the model of our behavior, both as we personally respond to God in faith, and collectively as we gather in communities for the praise and glory of God.

Hospitality as Ecumenical Paradigm

                        One may well wonder how ecumenical relations would look if they were ordered around hospitality. To the best of my knowledge no one so far has explicitly suggested that the bilateral commissions between the Catholic Church and other Churches explore the notion of hospitality as applying to their mutual relationships. Nevertheless several documents include pointers in the direction of ecumenical hospitality. When Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey met in Rome on 23 and 24 March 1966, they were conscious of inaugurating a new kind of relationship between their Communions. Their vision for the future specified that Catholics and Anglicans should arrive at a point where they “may be animated by the same sentiments of respect, esteem and fraternal love” that the two prelates felt for each other as they met[[22]]. Referring to the injunction of Jesus that “His disciples love another,” they declared  that, with His help, they wish to leave in the hands of the God of mercy all that in the past has been opposed to this precept of charity, and that they make their own the mind of the Apostle which he expressed in these words: ‘Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before’ (Phil. 3,13-14).  This declaration of “forgetting” echoed the previous gesture of Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, who, on 7 December 1965, “committed to oblivion” the excommunications of 1054 between the Orthodox and  the Catholic Churches, thus indicating that a similar path might be open in regard to the anathemas of the Reformation.

                        Following the declaration made by the pope and the archbishop, the Anglican-Roman Catholic Preparatory Commission met three times, from January 1967 to January 1968. The Commission issued a report, - the Malta Report, - that could have been epoch-making had all its recommendations been implemented. The Commission listed, not only “being open to God’s guidance,” but also “being receptive to each other’s faith and understanding,” as conditions for reconciliation. The reception of each other that was envisioned required a careful preparation. The Report in fact made a series of remarkable proposals. It recommended first a solemn declaration of the two Churches’ common faith. Then it proposed a series of common actions that would bring the Churches closer together in their daily life:

                        - Theologically: Sorting out “the differences that are merely apparent and those that are real;” and examining together “the way we assent to and apprehend dogmatic truths...”, especially in regard to “comprehensiveness” understood as enriching diversity.

                        - Practically: Multiplying mutual consultations, joint committees; joint use of churches and buildings; sharing facilities for theological education; collaboration in theological scholarship; engaging in prayer in common; cooperating in liturgical and sacramental updates and initiatives; making joint or parallel statements at international and local levels; keeping in mind and looking forward to the “final stage in our quest for the full, organic unity of our two communions.”

                        In this program, mutual reception functions as a goal, not as a point of departure, since one can only start from where one is. It is also seen as a developing process, not as a sudden happening. The overall program was conceived as the course of action that was the most likely to bring the Communions together. Had it been implemented, it would have led the Churches through a process of growing ecumenical hospitality. The two Communions indeed came close to implementing it. In a letter to Archbishop Ramsey that is dated 10 June 1968 Cardinal Bea approved the main recommendations, notably the idea of making a common declaration of faith.[[23]]

                         In  January of 1970 ARCIC-I started to work. In their preface to the Final Report of 1981 the co-chairs remarked that koinonia was the governing concept of the report, and that it is not a static concept, but rather “demands movement forward, perfecting.” They also noted a convergence in the two communions on the necessity of conversion. Precisely, the implication of the process through which two communions hope to become one is truly a conversion (metanoia), from oneself to the other. When they further added, “We need to accept its implications[[24]]”, they implicitly drew attention to the mutual hospitality without reservation or afterthought that full communion requires.

                        The full ecumenical process can be summed up as follows: It starts from estrangement; it grows into meetings of theologians and of leaders for better mutual understanding; it develops through dialogue; it flourishes in acknowledgment of partial communion and desire for full communion; it engages in a more or less long period of learning and implementing mutual hospitality on the way to full organic reunion.

Obstacles

                        I do not wish to sound naive. I am aware of the difficulties. Neither the Preparatory Commission which composed the Malta Report, nor ARCIC, or anyone who was engaged in the early bilateral dialogues, ever thought that the ecumenical path would be smooth. ARCIC itself issued several “clarifications,” and knew well that these could not satisfy all critics. That the “official response” of the Catholic Church took as much as ten years to be released, and formulated a number of critiques, shows that the Commission had not anticipated all the problems. An ecumenical dialogue, however, is more than a problem-solving exercise. “Our declared purpose,” John Paul II said in reference to the Orthodox Church, “is to re-establish together full unity in legitimate diversity” (Ut unum sint, n.57). The same purpose dominates the relations of the Catholic Church with the Churches and communities of the Reformation. In both directions it presupposes that all sides have at least a working idea of the extent of legitimate diversity in the Communion that they wish to restore. There is, however, no theoretical way to  arrive at such an assessment. It has to flow from experience, and for this to happen several types of diversities may have to be tested.

                        In the Churches of the West at the present time there are unreconciled diversities in the area of structures (regarding the episcopate and the papacy), in the area of  liturgy and sacraments (why do we not fully worship together, but only partly in various liturgies of the word?), in the matter of ordination and the appropriate functions of women in the Church. Recent events have multiplied questions in the area of morality according to the Gospel, regarding medical ethics, regarding marriage and procreation, regarding the nature of homosexuality and the proper place of homosexuals in the human community. These questions may seem to add up to a negative score, which challenges, and may possibly outweigh, the positive score of forty years of dialogue. They at least show that the situation between the Churches is not static. And it may well be getting worse at the very time when it gets better. In 1981, at the end of the Final Report, ARCIC-I declared: “Some difficulties will not be wholly resolved until a practical initiative has been taken, and our two Churches have lived together more visibly in the one koinonia[[25]].” Admittedly, this unveiling of the ecumenical horizon failed to reveal some of the preliminary steps that could justify a limited restoration of communion. The chief of these, and the key to others, is the acquisition of a profound sense of mutual hospitality. The separated Christian communities should accept one another as they are before they can reach the point where it is possible and reasonable to mesh their singularities together in a consistent whole. Although it was not immediately practical, the suggestion of ARCIC-I expressed a hope for the Church. Hope is one of the three theological virtues. It also is an eminently therapeutic remedy to dissatisfaction with the present.

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                        In conclusion let me express my hope that after modeling their work on the structures of reciprocity that are essential to an authentic dialogue, after carefully studying together the basis and the structures necessary to a full Christian Communion, the Churches and Ecclesial Communities of the West, as well as the Churches of the East, will commit themselves anew to seeking together how to  receive the others as Christ himself knocking at their door. One may still need to learn how to hear the sound and to recognize the hand of Christ who knocks. One needs to pray for the imagination, the courage, and the strength to open the door to Christ in the persons of his other disciples. Hospitality is now the paradigm that we should follow toward Christian reconciliation and organic reunion.