An Urgent Centennial
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - January 18, 2008
Today the Church begins the annual Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. This year's eight days of joint prayer among Christians is particularly special because it marks the centenary of the first octave.
It was on January 18, 1908 in Graymoor, New York, that Fr. Paul Wattson, in coordination with other religious communities in the United States and England, led the Anglican Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement in eight consecutive days of supplication for the unity of Christians. The initial response was so encouraging that he began to promote it far and wide among the various Christian communities. Pope Pius X warmly welcomed the initiative and gave it his blessing in 1909, extending its observance the following year to the whole Roman Catholic Church. But two months prior to that papal acceptance came an obvious sign of its fruitfulness: Fr. Wattson and several other members of his community in Graymoor entered the Catholic Church and founded the Society of the Atonement to pray and work continuously for the unity among Christians.
Prayer for Church unity, however, has a history that extends far beyond one hundred years. It goes back to April 6, 30 A.D. in a small upper room in Jerusalem. That is the day, according to the opinion of most Biblical scholars, that Jesus celebrated the new and eternal Passover with his apostles. On the night before he would be executed, during the celebration of the first Mass, Jesus poured out his heart to his Father in what was truly the first Eucharistic prayer. He prayed for his apostles and then all of us who would owe our faith in Christ to the preaching of the apostles and their collaborators and successors. And he asked for something specific and almost incomprehensible: "that they may be all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us" (Jn 17:20-21). Jesus prayed that our unity with each other be as complete as the perfect unity that exists between the persons of the Blessed Trinity.
We might be tempted to dismiss Jesus' prayer as something that, however beautiful, is clearly utopian and unachievable. But Jesus would never have prayed for something intrinsically impossible. Prayer for him was never an exercise in "wishful thinking," and he was fully aware of what was possible. Moreover, it is inconceivable that God the Father would refuse the prayer of his Son. As Jesus acknowledged before he raised Lazarus from the dead, "I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me" (Jn 11:42). Therefore, if Jesus were praying that we be one, that we be as united among ourselves as the Persons in the Blessed Trinity are united, then that must mean it is not impossible and that the Father heard that prayer.
While it is true that this dual communion will be achieved in heaven — when the communion of saints within the communion-of-persons who is the Blessed Trinity will reach its zenith — it is also clear that Jesus was praying for it in this world. During the same discourse he said, "I am not asking you to take them [us] out of the world." He wanted us to be "in" the world without being "of" it, and gave us the reason why: he wanted our unity in this world to be the greatest sign of all of who God is and how God loves us. "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you," he implored, "may they also be in us, so that … the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (Jn 17:15-23). Christian unity, in other words, will be the greatest testimony of the truth of Christ's words and deeds as well as of God's love. Division among Christians, on the contrary, will obscure that truth and love.
It is obvious that we — Christians and Catholics — do not have the type of union in the world sought by Christ. Take any three members of the same parish or even of the same Christian family and we would be hard-pressed to find an image of the communion of love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit that Jesus wants to exist among his disciples throughout the world. Hence it is obvious why, from the second day of his papacy, Pope Benedict has stressed the unity of Christians as his top priority.
But it is not as if this type of unity has never been approximated. The first disciples approached it. The members of the Church in Jerusalem "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers," as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people." And the impact of their loving union was dramatic, obtaining the results Jesus prayed such union would bring about: "Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved" (Acts 2:42-47).
The chronicle of division that has happened in the Church since then — from the Great Schism with the Orthodox in 1054 to the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, to so many other separations through the centuries — is not a sign that Jesus' prayer was ineffectual or had an expiration date. Jesus' prayer was heard and God the Father will certainly not withhold the graces necessary for this communion. The reason for division rests in our rejecting those graces, in the actions various Christians have committed over the course of the centuries against communion, and in the various things we have failed to do in order to keep communion. Every sin ruptures communion. Every genuine act of Christian love begins to repair it.
If this communion with God and with each other meant so much to the Lord that he poured out his very soul praying for it to the Father, then each of us who loves him must make it our life's mission to try to bring about that union of love.
The 100th anniversary of the Octave of Christian Unity, and the common prayer of the next eight days, are propitious opportunities to recommit ourselves to Christ and to the unity he seeks.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
