Has the ecumenical movement lost steam?

That’s the big question behind Peter Steinfels’ column this Saturday, marking the centennary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

A snip from the New York Times:

In many countries, Christians deeply devoted to unity among their separate groups will gather in one anothers’ churches to pray and reflect on passages from Scripture. Since 1968, prayers and readings for the week have been jointly planned by the Vatican and the World Council of Churches.

But for most Christians, the week, centennial or not, carries no more resonance than, say, National Secretaries Week (now officially Administrative Professionals Week).

Has the ecumenical movement lost steam? Or has it, perhaps, fallen victim to its own success? One way or the other, does it make any difference?

In 1908, it certainly did to the Rev. Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White, an Episcopal priest and nun, founders, in Garrison, N.Y., of a small Anglican religious community in the Franciscan tradition. They initiated eight days of prayer between what were then feast days associated with Saints Peter and Paul.

These two leaders and their Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement soon became Roman Catholics, so the week of prayer naturally had little appeal to Protestants. Still, all sorts of other streams fed into the cause of joining in prayer for Christian unity: the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, often described as the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement, and efforts by the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A.

Christian unity was, of course, a chief goal of the Second Vatican Council, when the world’s Catholic bishops invited Protestant and Orthodox leaders, now known as “separated brethren” rather than “heretics” and “schismatics,” to observe and consult during the council’s four sessions from 1962 to 1965.

That work has been carried on by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox ecumenical officers and theologians engaged in interchurch dialogue. These highly committed people track the progress of unity the way brokers watch the stock ticker.

But people in the pews appear to have other things on their mind. They take for granted the lowering of what were once painful barriers dividing spouses and family members and even citizens. In the question period after John F. Kennedy’s oft-cited presidential campaign speech on church and state to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, several ministers worried out loud that a Catholic president could not fulfill the ceremonial responsibilities of the office because the church normally barred Catholics from attending non-Catholic worship services.

For those ministers, it was unthinkable that a president and two former presidents might be photographed, as they were in 2004, attending the funeral of a pope. Today, for younger Americans, it is unthinkable that anyone might have once considered such a sight unthinkable.

So the success of the movement for church unity has itself removed much of the urgency behind it. There are three other reasons, however, why the cause has cooled, and they reveal much about the religious landscape generally.

Click the link to read those reasons.

And let’s keep praying — as Jesus did — that all may be one.