THE
P RTAL
February 2016
Page 24
Celebrate the
Reformation?
Geoffrey Kirk asks some pertinent questions
It will
have escaped the notice of many readers of The Portal that 2017 will see
the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. As Lady Bracknell might
have said: ‘And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?’
The abortion death-cult, the near-extinction of
marriage, the wholesale acceptance of LGBT lifestyles
– these are no longer positions adopted by the
eccentric offspring of the radical Enlightenment: they
are the policies and doctrines of Churches with whom
the PCPCU deals on a daily basis.
the clarity has gone
In the early decades of the last century, when modernday ecumenism first got off the ground (spurred on, it
might be added, by American Anglo-Catholics), none
of this was remotely imaginable. Nobody then could
mistake Christian Unity for downright apostasy. But
the clarity has gone.
Modern-day Protestantism has so enthusiastically
and zealously baptised the zeitgeist that Catholics who
genuinely seek that unity for which the Lord prayed
need to be ever more and more circumspect about
what it is, and where they will find it.
Liturgical material has recently appeared from
the snappily titled Pontifical Council for Promoting
Christian Unity (PCPCU) for joint services with
Lutherans, celebrating the event and committing
the participants to greater understanding and
reconciliation – ‘From Conflict to Communion’.
more ground is given
You get the drift. A careful reading of these liturgies
(cf. the Women’s World Day of Prayer) indicates, as
one would expect, that more ground is being given by
Catholics than by Protestants.
There is a major problem here.
As mainstream Protestantism in the West assimilates
itself more and more to the mores of post-Christian
secularism (and since the ecumenical attention of
European Catholics is understandably directed toward
the non-Catholics in their midst) there is an almost
inevitable inclination to compromise with what (in
any other circumstances) would be seen as alien and
unchristian.
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