Christians Taking A Healing Path
How do great leaders invest the closing years of their lives, when the wisdom of experience has borne its fruit and time narrows down for one final harvest?
Pope John Paul II, failing in body but towering in spirit, is investing in a gentle force at the heart of the Christian faith: reconciliation.
Speaking to last week’s World Youth Day in Paris, the feeble pontiff fired off words favoring changes of historic magnitude.
He spoke, he noted, on the anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. On Aug. 24, 1572, French Catholics tried to unify the faith by slaughtering their neighbors. Protestants, known as Huguenots, had shocked majority Catholics in a multitude of ways - splitting from the mother church, allowing women to join in services of worship and promoting literacy among the laity so ordinary people could read the Bible for themselves. Marking themselves with white crosses on their hats, Catholics went on a rampage that left 3,000 Huguenots dead.
To his audience of a million young Catholics from around the world, Pope John Paul II said: “Christians did things which the Gospel condemns. … Acknowledging the weaknesses of the past is an act of honesty and courage which helps us to strengthen our faith. I am convinced that only forgiveness, offered and received, leads little by little to a fruitful dialogue, which will in turn ensure a fully Christian reconciliation. Belonging to different religious traditions must not constitute today a source of opposition and tension.”
Those words are backed by his labors to unite the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. And now, building bridges to the Protestants?
No one could accuse this very conservative pope of seeking the kind of reconciliation that abandons principle. Indeed, his stand against the ordination of women has alienated many of the faithful.
But reconciliation occurs in steps. And John Paul II seems to view it as an overarching principle of his faith.
So do others. Southern Baptists formally apologized for slavery two years ago. This month, several Protestant denominations knocked down walls that inhibited the sharing of pastors. The Promise Keeper’s movement, filling stadiums nationwide and planning a million-man pilgrimage of repentance and prayer this fall in Washington, D.C., has made it a priority to build bonds between white and black Christians who long have worshiped separately. Here in Spokane last fall, white and black churches traded pastors and choirs, and joined in the Arena for a service of reconciliation and apology.
These stirrings could spring like cool water across the scorched ground of secular society. People of faith, who have done so much to divide, may, by focusing on the mission of their common Lord, bring some healing to a culture cracked along the fault lines of race, gender, class and resentment.
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