Bridgefolk shares its Mennonite-Catholic rite of footwashing

7 April 2025
Press release

One of the major challenges that ecumenical dialogue between estranged Christian churches always faces is the question of eucharistic intercommunion: Can they share the Lord’s Supper, or Table of the Lord, or Eucharist, as varying traditions call it?

After struggling with this question for nearly ten years, the board of Bridgefolk — the grassroots organization for dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics — decided that they could not resolve it. There were simply too many ecclesial and liturgical differences. They would need to explore a different approach in order to celebrate, liturgically, the measure of unity and communion that Bridgefolk participants were experiencing when they came together.

^{Footwashing service at Bridgefolk 2011.}

As a result, the Bridgefolk board charged Professor Mary Schertz of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Abbot John Klassen OSB of Saint John’s Abbey with the task of creating a liturgical framework for footwashing. Now, after practicing this rite in its annual conferences for nearly 15 years, Bridgefolk is making it available to all Christians on its webpage, at www.bridgefolk.net/rite-of-footwashing, along with background materials.

As is well known, in John’s Gospel, chapter 13, where one would expect to find an account of Jesus handing on the Eucharist to his disciples, instead he washes their feet in a profound act of service and humility. Since deepening ecumenical relationships involve precisely those commitments, and since John’s Gospel provides a precedent, a rite of footwashing seemed to offer an alternative expression of communion where the sharing of Eucharist is not yet canonically allowed.

In response, Schertz and Klassen created a full liturgy that draws on both Mennonite and Catholic traditions. It includes a formal opening with the sign of the cross, a formal liturgical greeting (from Saint Paul), a specially crafted opening prayer, followed by a Liturgy of the Word (first reading, responsorial psalm, Gospel, and homily). They also composed a major prayer modeled after a eucharistic prayer which includes an institution account, an epiclesis, and anamnesis. After this prayer, the invitation to the sacrament of footwashing follows. The rite concludes with a sign of peace, intercessions, a concluding prayer, and an invitation to an agape meal.

Schertz and Klassen likewise structured an agape meal with formal prayers and scripture that echoes eucharistic language from the early Christian centuries (Didache, chapters 9 and 10). The liturgy opens to a simple meal shared by all participants. A variety of hymns and chants from both Mennonite and Catholic traditions can surround these elements, and a menu of possible scripture readings is available for different situations.

“Bridgefolk has found that this foot washing-agape rite has served us well as a body,” notes Klassen, “because we have freedom to choose preachers and presiders, men or women, from either tradition. The celebration of this rite has become the high point of our conferences each year because it embodies our unity in the mission of Jesus Christ.”

Klassen also notes that the experience of taking an existing rite and shaping it for Bridgefolk’s specific purposes has brought the group to a fundamental insight about the work of mutual exchange. “In formal ecumenical dialogues, there tends to be little formal prayer and liturgical experience because usually those very elements are contested, and adequate ecumenical agreement does not yet exist to practice them. As Bridgefolk, we found it essential to create and shape some existing liturgical experiences to help us celebrate our being together.”

What does the 500th anniversary of the start of the Anabaptist movement mean for the unity of the church?

Jeremy Bergen
for Salt+Light Media
25 March 2025

_{Woodcut of 16th-century Anabaptist leader and eventual martyr Dirk Willems halting his escape from prison to rescue the guard pursuing him. From Wikimedia Commons.}

In this recently-published article, Dr. Jeremy M. Bergen of Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo introduces the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement for Canadian Catholics and reflects on its significance for other Christians.

Just over 500 years ago, on January 21, 1525, several adults gathered in a home in Zurich. After prayer and discussion, former Catholic priest George Blaurock asked one of the men present, a university student named Conrad Grebel, to baptize him. After Grebel did so, Blaurock proceeded to baptize the others gathered there. This group had initially been keen on Ulrich Zwingli’s religious reforms in the city, but were frustrated by its slow pace and the role of the secular authorities in implementing change. The emerging movement of dissenters believed that baptism was exclusively for (adult) believers. They placed an emphasis on a life of discipleship as following the teachings and example of Jesus, and the local congregation as a voluntary community of committed believers who interpret the Bible together. They believed in the separation of church and “state,” and the rejection of the sword. A movement with these commitments emerged in Switzerland, South Germany, and the Netherlands.

This ritual act in 1525 marked the beginning of the Anabaptist movement. …

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Pope Francis releases 2nd apostolic exhortation on the climate crisis

Bridgefolk board member Michelle Sherman draws our attention to the importance of Pope Francis’s second apostolic exhortation for all people of goodwill on the climate crisis, Laudate Deum [“Praise God”], released on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, October 4. Sherman notes that the theme coincides with that of the Rooted and Grounded conference that Bridgefolk had co-sponsored just days before, in place of its own 2023 annual conference.

Encouraging Bridgefolk participants to read the document, Sherman notes that it is relatively short and can be read in one sitting. She offers the following excerpts in order to illustrate how its message resonates with that of the recently conference:

11. It is no longer possible to doubt the human – “anthropic” – origin of climate change. Let us see why. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which causes global warming, was stable until the nineteenth century, below 300 parts per million in volume. But in the middle of that century, in conjunction with industrial development, emissions began to increase. In the past fifty years, this increase has accelerated significantly, as the Mauna Loa observatory, which has taken daily measurements of carbon dioxide since 1958, has confirmed. While I was writing Laudato Si’, they hit a historic high – 400 parts per million – until arriving at 423 parts per million in June 2023. [7] More than 42% of total net emissions since the year 1850 were produced after 1990. [8]

69. I ask everyone to accompany this pilgrimage of reconciliation with the world that is our home and to help make it more beautiful, because that commitment has to do with our personal dignity and highest values. At the same time, I cannot deny that it is necessary to be honest and recognize that the most effective solutions will not come from individual efforts alone, but above all from major political decisions on the national and international level.

72. If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, [44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.

73. “Praise God” is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies.

Catholic Nonviolence Initiative lecture series on gospel nonviolence now available

We are created out of Love and for Love. Conflict is a regular part of this human journey and an opportunity to grow. How do we grow into the persons and communities that God calls us to become? How do we construct a more sustainable just peace?

In October the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International, offered a series of virtual lectures on gospel nonviolence:

Why ‘Nonviolence?’ (includes 2 young adult speakers)
Returning to and Exploring the Power of Nonviolence
Christian Foundations of Nonviolence
Embracing Nonviolence: A New Moral Framework
Embracing Nonviolence: Transforming the Church.

These lectures are now available for personal or group study. All five videos are divided into speaker chapters, and the presentations run from between 15 to 29 minutes. Immediately following each presentation is a slide that has three discussion/essay questions.

A one-stop web page for these resources is available at https://cniseries.info. The page includes find brief lecture and presentation summaries, a link to each video and a downloadable study guide.

Videos from Bridgefolk 2022 now available online

Videos from the 2022 Bridgefolk conference, “Standing at the Crossroads” are now available online at Bridgefolk’s website. The conference “stood at the crossroads” in two ways: It offered the opportunity to look back in gratitude and forward as participants discerned a future path for Mennonite-Catholic dialogue and peacemaking.

Additionally, the conference continued the ongoing exploration of what it means for Mennonites and Catholics who seek a Just Peace to address issues of racial justice, which it began at its 2018 Conference. In particular, Bridgefolk sought to engage with indigenous communities, acknowledging the legacy of injustice and harm done by the historic removal of indigenous communities from traditional homelands by European settlers and the forced attendance of indigenous children at residential schools. The conference featured stories, including indigenous voices, of this work of repair and healing at the institutional, community, and personal levels.

We invite you to linger prayerfully at the crossroads by sharing videos of the conference sessions in parish or congregational settings and discussing how you and your community are called to respond.

Videos from five conference sessions are available on the 2022 conference website, along with the discussion questions used at the conference. Click here to visit.

Mennonite-Catholic Theological Colloquia now available in one volume

News and reflections:
Pope Francis’s apology for church abuses to indigenous peoples of Canada

Pope Francis makes historic apology to Indigenous of Canada for church abuses

by Nicole Winfield

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Friday made a historic apology to Indigenous Peoples for the “deplorable” abuses they suffered in Canada’s Catholic-run residential schools and said he hoped to visit Canada in late July to deliver the apology in person to survivors of the church’s misguided missionary zeal.

Francis begged forgiveness during an audience with dozens of members of the Metis, Inuit and First Nations communities who came to Rome seeking a papal apology and a commitment for the Catholic Church to repair the damage. The first pope from the Americas said he hoped to visit Canada around the Feast of St. Anna, which falls on July 26 and is dedicated to Christ’s grandmother.

More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior. … To continue reading, click here.

But is it enough? Here are representative responses:

Murray Sinclair – Ojibwe lawyer, judge, and senator from Manitoba who chaired Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission – calls Francis’s expression of contrition “a major step” but argues that the Catholic Church must go on to address deniers.
Jeremy Bergen – Mennonite theologian who studies church apologies for historical wrongs – elaborates on needed next steps and insists that the Catholic Church must not only apologizes for the actions of sinful Catholics but take responsibility for harms it has inflicted as an institution.
Associated Press reporter Peter Smith anticipates that US churches to will now face their own reckoning concerning boarding schools.

For other reports, see

Vatican News article
Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops press release
LaCroix International article

Read Pope Francis’s statement in its entirety or watch Vatican event.

_{Photos provided by Vatican website}

New book in Bridgefolk series released

Intercessory Prayer and the Communion of Saints: Mennonite and Catholic Perspectives, Edited by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek and Margaret R. Pfeil

CA$29.95
Order from Pandora Press
Also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

“This miracle will be one of the bridges between Roman Catholics and Mennonites in an ecumenical point of view,” said Pope John Paul II in 2003 on the occasion of the canonization of Joseph Freinademetz, S.V.D. He was speaking of the miraculous healing of Jun Yamada, son of a Japanese Mennonite pastor, through the joint intercessions of Catholics and Mennonites united by faith in Jesus and love of God. That miracle, as John Paul predicted, has inspired ongoing ecumenical friendships, dialogues, and engagements between Mennonite and Catholics, leading to this volume. Moved by this healing story, Bridgefolk, a Mennonite-Catholic ecumenical movement in North America, centered its annual conference in 2015 on that story. Following that conference, the Mennonite Catholic Theological Colloquium convened in 2016 to consider the Christian practice of intercessory prayer and doctrine of the communion of saints from the perspectives of both traditions. This volume collects the presentations from those two events, including the personal and theological reflections of Nozomu Yamada, brother of Jun, and Alfonso Fausone, S.V.D., who initiated the intercessions for Jun.

Praise for Intercessory Prayer and the Communion of Saints

“In a culture where the “praying hands” emoji is nearly ubiquitous, this mind-blowing collection—narratives surrounding an amazing healing and carefully articulated theological reflection—is a must read, whether or not we have an established prayer practice. Here we are offered the fruit of decades of Mennonite-Roman Catholic conversation. And although the volume does not directly address this, Intercessory Prayer reminds Euro-American Anabaptist descendants of rich and faithful insights blossoming among siblings in Christ in other cultures.”

—Nancy R. Heisey, Professor at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and Past-President of Mennonite World Conference

“This book constitutes an excellent contribution to what was once thought to be church-dividing and off limits: the communion of Saints and intercessory prayer. While written as part of Mennonite-Catholic dialogue, and not least, stemming from the ecumenical conversations of Bridgefolk, this work is of benefit to all Christians. Clear articulations of both Mennonite and Catholic positions in dialogue add to the value of this book. I highly recommend it.”

—Maxwell E. Johnson, Professor of Theology, The University of Notre Dame

Book review:
The Hunger Inside by Bradley Roth

The Hunger Inside: How the Meal Jesus Gave Transforms Lives
by Bradley Roth, Paraclete Press, 2022 (224 pages)

Reviewed by Marlene Kropf

In a welcoming, conversational style, pastor-author Brad Roth offers both a personal story of encounter with the Eucharist, and thoughtful historical and biblical reflections on the role of the Eucharist in the church’s life and witness. His purpose in writing, he says, is to leave a “bread crumb trail” to the Lord’s Table for others to discover the richness of the feast to which all are invited.

Raised in an evangelical Mennonite family and congregation in Illinois, Roth grew up with infrequent exposure to the Lord’s Table. Like many other Protestant churches, his congregation celebrated communion only a few times a year. And when they did obey Jesus’ command to eat and drink at the Lord’s Table, the church taught him that the bread and cup were symbols, nothing more. Yet a hunger persisted within him for something more – for a more vivid experience of the living presence of the Risen Christ. Though he knew Jesus, he had not encountered him.

No one was more surprised than he was, Roth says, by the turn of events which brought him to recognize that more was going on in communion than he could account for with his mind alone. His heart was being stirred and his body enlivened by the palpable presence of Jesus. Hours after the ritual, he could still feel the lingering frisson of joy emanating from the meal.

To understand his own experience more fully and to encourage others to do the same, Roth went “deep and wide” in his search to illumine what God is doing in the communion ritual and what is happening in those who partake of God’s gifts. In one of his strongest chapters, he lays a foundation for the idea of a “sacramental universe” in which God’s presence and activity are known not only through the revelation of scripture but through the molecules and atoms of the material world itself. He draws on a wide array of thinkers and writers as varied as Augustine, Hans De Ries, Immanuel Kant, David Brooks, and Marie Kondo to support his vision of the sacraments as “the way God communicates his grace into human life in real time.”

Having established a sturdy foundation, Roth goes on to examine biblical themes traditionally associated with eucharistic theology: sacrifice, communion, hospitality, thanksgiving, remembrance, real presence, marriage supper, and mission. What stands out in these chapters is their breadth, clarity, and blend of scholarly sophistication with on-the-ground experience and vocabulary. For example, he uses contemporary metaphors to good effect when he speaks of the Lord’s Supper as a “superconductor” of God’s action or the encounter on the Emmaus road as “the Christian Big Bang” because it is the moment when the Christian sacramental universe unfolds. Likewise, his description of real presence comes alive when he says, “Jesus is not present because he has hacked reality and imposed himself, but because reality was always meant to be open to him.” Such fresh comparisons and analogies will delight and enlighten readers.

In the midst of theological explorations, Roth does not avoid some of the thorny questions surrounding communion: Who can participate? What about children? What is the relationship between baptism and communion? His discussions are generous; even when his study leads to conclusions that satisfy him, he finds what is worthy in varying viewpoints.

A feature of Roth’s eucharistic theology that many will appreciate is his attention to Anabaptist voices. Though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and some Protestant traditions have given exhaustive attention to the Eucharist, Mennonites and other Anabaptists, with few exceptions, have not explored this territory in depth.

An original contribution of Roth’s thinking is the connection he makes between “Gelassenheit” and the bread and wine of communion. Describing Gelassenheit as “Anabaptism’s little treasure,” Roth defines this German loan-word as the stance of disciples who are being transformed as they “yield to the will, ways, work, and presence of Christ.” In a brilliant analogy, he perceives the miracle of communion as a similar transformation: the bread and wine yield to the presence of Christ and become a kind of material expression of Gelassenheit, representing “bits of mended reality, a reality that depends on and finds its fulfillment in the risen Christ who in his resurrected body is not limited to a local presence in heaven but can be anywhere with his people.” The Bread of Heaven indeed!

Despite the thoroughness of Roth’s work, he misses a maternal aspect of communion that would have enriched his book, especially in his treatment of Jesus’ words, “This is my body … this is my blood.” Since the early days of Christian history, theologians such as Irenaeus and Chrysostom perceived Jesus as our Mother, feeding us during gestation and nourishing us at his breast in the blood flowing from his side. “Christ himself is food,” they agreed, not as a theological abstraction but as a warm and intimate feeding like that of an infant at her mother’s breast. The 14^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, wrote similarly:

Our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself and does most courteously and most tenderly with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life … our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side.

In a final inspiring chapter, “Ite missa est” (“Go, it is dismissed”), Roth makes a strong connection between the celebration of communion and the church’s life of mission. He says, “The grammar of Christian worship isn’t a period, but a colon. You have been gathered, you have heard the word, you have been fed at Christ’s table: now go forth.” What follows are

heartwarming stories – an account of what happened when his own congregation made communion a centerpiece of their life for a year as well as stories from other faith communities.

With regard to the Bridgefolk community, both Roman Catholics and Mennonites will benefit from reading The Hunger Inside. The book offers Roman Catholics an inside look into the mind and experience of Mennonites who have not been formed in a sacramental world view; it can also refresh and renew their own understanding and experience of Eucharist. Because of Roth’s attentiveness to scripture and especially to Anabaptist history, the book can also provide a reliable pathway for Mennonites who desire a deeper and broader understanding and experience of the Lord’s Supper. Though Roth may have intended the book to offer a “bread crumb trail” toward such understandings, many readers will find instead that they have been served huge chunks of nourishing whole-grain bread on their journey. Let’s eat!

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