Bridgefolk Executive Director Gerald Schlabach has just had an article published in Commonweal magazine, entitled “You Converted to What? One Mennonite’s Journey.” In it he offers nine “non-Roman” reasons why he became Roman Catholic, even while remaining Mennonite in many ways. Commonweal has granted Schlabach permission to post the article on his web site. You will find it at http://personal.stthomas.edu/gwschlabach/rc/.
Here are three excerpts:
At Pentecost 2004, I made a small yet formidable step in my life of Christian discipleship. Having considered myself a “Catholic Mennonite” for years, I entered into full communion with the Roman Church and became what I think of as a “Mennonite Catholic.” Catholic friends were gratified but puzzled. After all, this might not have seemed an auspicious time to join the church. The body blow of the sexual abuse scandals; a shortage of priests that has left many parishes without regular Eucharists; a gnawing generation gap between incoming priests and the generation trained in the glow of Vatican II. “Thank you for joining us,” my friends’ faces read. “But why now?” …
Central to Mennonite faith and self-understanding is a sense that the work of God in Jesus Christ is preeminently one of reconciling broken relationships with God, with neighbors, and even with enemies. The memory of sixteenth-century persecution at the hands of both Catholics and Protestants runs deep in the Mennonite psyche. But a Mennonite witness to the nonviolent love of God-extending even to enemies and reconciling what has been broken by sin-will fall short if it becomes the basis for defining ourselves in opposition to other Christians. We Mennonites cannot pray “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” if we do not live out this peacemaking vocation by reconnecting with the historic church from which we emerged.
I do not ask my Mennonite brothers and sisters to rejoin the Catholic communion quickly or en masse. Mennonite peace-builders around the world know that their task is long and arduous; peacemaking differs from war-making precisely in its refusal to adopt quick or simplistic solutions. What I ask is this: Please recognize that for some of us, exploring how to be Mennonites in full communion with the Catholic Church is itself a living out of our faith….
…In this time of great stress in Catholicism, Catholics continue to share the Eucharist with one another, even those they disagree with. St. Paul, of course, warned against partaking unworthily, in a spirit of bickering and competition for places of influence in the church. The way to come worthily to the table is to recognize that none are worthy-that none may boast of their own special rectitude when all find the source of life and salvation in Christ Jesus. Precisely as we embrace one another in the awareness that we are “not yet” the fully realized body of Christ, we nonetheless celebrate God “already” having completed salvation. All this converges in the Eucharist.