Earlier this month Bridgefolk co-founder Ivan Kauffman spoke at Assembly Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana. His talk offers a succinct overview of how Mennonite-Catholic dialogue has unfolded in the last 50 years.
Called Together to Be Peacemakers
Mennonite Catholic Dialogue 1962-2012
Ivan J. Kauffman
Assembly Mennonite Church
Goshen, Indiana
July 8, 2012
It has been said we over-estimate what can be changed in one year, and under-estimate what can be changed in ten years. My life experience confirms that. But I would add that we can not even imagine the change that can take place in 50 years.
When the Second Vatican Council opened 50 years ago this October I was a student at Goshen College, at a time when Carl Kreider was still wearing a plain coat, and Mary Oyer was still wearing a covering. None of us then had any idea this event would affect us—that it would permanently change relationships between Mennonites and Catholics and launch us into a new era in the Church’s peace witness—but that is what has happened.
I could keep us here for hours telling stories about how this happened but I will briefly mention only a few.
On the Catholic side the Vatican Council did not ratify the Just War doctrine and instead called for an entirely new approach to warfare. On the Mennonite side C.J. Dyck, the executive of the Mennonite World Conference, attended the council as an observer and reported favorably on it in Mennonite publications—surely the first time most Mennonites had heard anything Catholic described positively.
These actions opened a new door for both Mennonites and Catholics. After the Council Mennonite and Catholic intellectual leaders began talking and a whole new set of personal relationships emerged.
The impact of these relationships became apparent in 1983, 20 years after the Council, when the U.S. Catholic bishops published a new statement on war and peace entitled The Challenge of Peace. Its primary author was Fr. Bryan Hehir, who had been Lawrence Burkholder’s student at Harvard, and who was a friend of John Howard Yoder. The bishops’ Challenge of Peace footnoted Yoder’s Politics of Jesus.
Three years later Pope John Paul convened an inter-religious World Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi in 1986 and Paul Kraybill, then executive of the Mennonite World Conference participated, sharing an embrace with the pope at the Christian prayer service.
Three years later the Berlin Wall fell, in an historic triumph of faith-based nonviolent resistance. And three years later in 1992 planning began for a formal ecumenical dialogue between the Mennonite World Conference and the Vatican. That effort was led on the Mennonite side by Larry Miller, who grew up here in Goshen.
The first session was held in 1998 at the Mennonite World Conference headquarters in Strasburg and it continued with annual weeklong sessions for six years.
While it was underway Pope John Paul called a second World Day of Prayer at Assisi in 2002, in response to the 9.11 attacks. This time the Mennonite World Conference was represented by its president, Rev. Mesach Kristeya, the Indonesian Mennonite leader. He was given a prominent place in the program, next to the pope himself. At the first Assisi event the Mennonite representative had been seated at the end of the row of Christian leaders. Now he had been moved to the head of the line.
Two years later, in 2004, the international dialogue published its report. To our astonishment it was titled Called Together to Be Peacemakers. This title was proposed by the Catholic delegation, and I have reason to believe it was suggested by Pope John Paul himself.
The next year John Paul died and numerous appreciative comments appeared in Mennonite publications.
Now the question was whether the new pope would continue Pope John Paul’s support for joint Mennonite Catholic peacemaking? The answer was not long in coming, and it was unequivocal. One of the new pope’s first actions was to invite the leaders of the Mennonite World Conference for a weeklong visit to the Vatican. The red carpet was rolled out and the visit was publicized on Vatican radio and in the Vatican newspaper.
At a private meeting with the pope the Mennonite leaders offered him two gifts—a copy of Martyrs Mirror and an image of Dirk Willems. Some of you will have seen the photo of Nancy Heisey, a Mennonite laywoman who was then president of Mennonite World Conference, explaining the Dirk Willems engraving to Pope Benedict XVI. It was taken by the official Vatican photographer.
What followed was even more unprecedented. Immediately following this visit a committee of Mennonites and Catholics met for two days to prepare a joint position paper on peace for submission to the World Council of Churches International Ecumenical Peace Convocation held in Jamaica in 2011.
I will read just two sentences from that document: “Spirituality consists in following the teachings and the life of Jesus, making his manner of life our own”—a very Anabaptist statement. And this very Catholic statement: “How can we ask the world to live in peace when we ourselves fail to heed the call to ‘maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’?”
Unless you are reeling in disbelief you may not have understood what I have just said. It is that the Catholic Church, at the papal level, has stated, in a formal international ecumenical setting, that the Mennonite Churches and the Catholic Church share a common commitment to peace, and a common theology of peace. The full document is available on the Internet, and I recommend it to you.
There are two questions now before us. The most obvious is how this could happen? The answer to that question it seems to me is also obvious. It is that Catholics, especially at the leadership level, know they must change their position on warfare, and that Mennonites, at all levels, realize they must find new sources of spirituality. We cannot follow Christ if we are not fed by Christ, and we cannot be fed by Christ if we do not follow Christ.
The second question is this: If Mennonites and Catholics are called to join in peacemaking how do we act on that calling?
At first the challenge seems overwhelming, but the good news is what we learned in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement—that we as churches have great power when we subordinate our personal and denominational interests to the common good.
The leaders of the Catholic Church are asking their members to “undertake a completely fresh appraisal of war,” in the words of Vatican II. They need help from Mennonites. Those who have been formed in the Mennonite community have a gift to give the wider Church no other group can give. It is the evidence that a group of completely nonviolent Christians have been able to survive, and thrive, for 500 years. We dare not hide that light under a bushel, in the words of the Sermon on the Mount.
Later his month the eleventh annual Bridgefolk Conference will be held at the women’s monastery adjacent to Saint John’s. We will wash each other’s feet, and this year for the first time we will share in a double Eucharistic celebration, one Mennonite and another Catholic.
We in Bridgefolk are building a bridge, but in the words of Marlene Kropf, our long-time Mennonite co-chair, it is not a bridge between two places which already exist, it is a bridge to a place none of us have ever been before. If you would like to help us build this bridge please join us at one of the Bridgefolk conferences, as several members of this congregation already have.
In addition we have now established The Michael Sattler House adjacent to Saint John’s Abbey as a permanent home for the Mennonite Catholic exchange of gifts now taking place, and you have an open invitation to join us there for a visit long or short.
It is clear something important and substantial is happening. It is a work of the Spirit, and we have three choices: We can ignore it, we can resist it, or we can embrace it. I beg you to embrace it. Peoples’ lives, now and in the future, depend on our actions—and our lack of action.
Let us go forward in faith. And love.