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Catholics and Evangelicals: Praying Hopefully Towards Unity

Unity and love among Christians is an integral part of our missionary witness to the Lord whom we serve. "A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13). If we do not love one another, we disobey his command and contradict the Gospel we declare. As Evangelicals and Catholics, we pray that our unity in the love of Christ will become ever more evident as a sign to the world of God's reconciling power. Our communal and ecclesial separations are deep and long standing. We acknowledge that we do not know the schedule nor do we know the way to the greater visible unity for which we hope. We do know that existing patterns of distrustful polemic and conflict are not the way. We do know that God who has brought us into communion with himself through Christ intends that we also be in communion with one another. We do know that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14) and as we are drawn closer to him -walking in that way, obeying that truth, living that life- we are drawn closer to one another. Whatever may be the future form of the relationship between our communities, we can, we must, and we will begin now the work required to remedy what we know to be wrong in that relationship. Such work requires trust and understanding, and trust and understanding require an assiduous attention to truth. We do not deny but clearly assert that there are disagreements between us. Misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and caricatures of one another, however, are not disagreements. These distortions must be cleared away if we are to search through our honest differences in a manner consistent with what we affirm and hope together on the basis of God's Word.

- Chuck Colson, Richard Neuhaus, et al. (Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium). Bolded emphases added.

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"To a converted Mason Father Pio one day said: "All human ideas, no matter from where they come, have their good and bad points; one must assimilate all the good in them and offer them to God, and eliminate the bad."

-from the book Padre Pio: the Stigmatist by Rev. Charles Mortimer Carty

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Happy Friday! Here's a Red-tailed Hawk in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 3

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Regardless of the weather, the moon shines the same; it is the drifting clouds that make it seem different on different nights.

by a former priest of the Komponji Temple, collected in Matsuo Bashō's A Visit to the Kashima Shrine, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa

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A Prayer for the President of the U.S.A.

adapted from Cardinal Dolan's prayer on the occasion of the inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency.

We, blessed citizens of this one nation under God, humbled by our claim that "In God We Trust" [in Deo fidemus], gather to pray: God of our fathers, in Your wisdom You set man to govern Your creatures, to govern in holiness and justice, to render justice with integrity. Give our leader wisdom, for (he/she) is Your servant aware of (his/her) brevity of life. If wisdom, which comes from You, be not with (him/her), (he/she) will be held in no esteem. Send Wisdom from heaven, that She may be with (him/her), that (he/she) may know Your designs. Please, God, bless America; please mend her every flaw. You are the God in whom we trust, who lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.

The Inauguration of Washington

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The Christian Mission of the Third Millennium: Evangelicals and Catholics

As Christ is one, so the Christian mission is one. The one mission can and should be advanced in diverse ways. Legitimate diversity, however, should not be confused with existing divisions between Christians that obscure the one Christ and hinder the one mission. There is a necessary connection between the visible unity of Christians and the mission of the one Christ. We together pray for the fulfillment of the prayer of Our Lord: "May they all be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me" (John 17). We together, Evangelicals and Catholics, confess our sins against the unity that Christ intends for all his disciples. […] As we near the Third Millennium, there are approximately 1.7 billion Christians in the world. About a billion of these are Catholics and more than 300 million are Evangelical Protestants. The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics. In many parts of the world, the relationship between these communities is marked more by conflict than by cooperation, more by animosity than by love, more by suspicion than by trust, more by propaganda and ignorance than by respect for the truth. This is alarmingly the case in Latin America, increasingly the case in Eastern Europe, and too often the case in our own country [the United States]. [...] We enter the twenty-first century without illusions. With Paul and the Christians of the first century, we know that "we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6). As Evangelicals and Catholics, we dare not by needless and loveless conflict between ourselves give aid and comfort to the enemies of the cause of Christ. The love of Chris compels us and we are therefore resolved to avoid such conflict between our communities and, where such conflict exists, to do what we can to reduce and eliminate it. Beyond that, we are called and we are therefore resolved to explore patterns of working and witnessing together in order to advance the one mission of Christ. Our common resolve is not based merely on a desire for harmony. We reject any appearance of harmony that is purchased at the price of truth. Our common resolve is made imperative by obedience to the truth of God revealed in the Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, and by trust in the promise of the Holy Spirit's guidance until Our Lord returns in glory to judge the living and the dead. The mission that we embrace together is the necessary consequence of the faith that we affirm together.

- Chuck Colson, Richard Neuhaus, et al. (Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium). Bolded emphases added.

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Huh, today I learned that this inauguration was supposed to have the first inaugural blessing performed by a Muslim community leader?

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Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

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Yes, it's indeed true that Brother Martin Luther King would have been 95 years old on Monday; and he, like myself, comes from a tradition of a great black people who have been hated and terrorized and traumatized for four hundred years — but we still here fighting, we still here swinging! […] Martin Luther King, Jr. said "I'd rather be dead than afraid," "I'd rather be a corpse than a coward"; we need courage! We need love and freedom, and freedom in love […S]o when you hear all the lies that hide and conceal the crimes, remember what Brother Martin used to say: "No lie can live forever," "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again!"

- Cornel West (We Want Equality, We Want Equality, We Want Equality!)

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Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury

The Lord calls each of us to be builders of unity; and although we are not yet one, our imperfect communion should not prevent us from walking together. […] Our differences do not diminish the importance of the things that unite us: they cannot prevent us from recognizing one another as brothers and sisters in Christ by reason of our common baptism.

Pope Francis, in his address to the 2024 Anglican Primates' Meeting.

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from a letter to Kendig Cully, dated September 25th, 1937. The English is original to Jung.

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

-Carl Jung

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the joker is so fucked up for this one. OCD based death trap is crazy

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A prayer intention for this year's Week of Christian Unity: In the words of Fr. Paul Courterier, Father of Spiritual Ecumenicism, we we pray "for the unity of the Church as Christ wills it, and in accordance with the means He wills."

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The Goal of Ecumenicism: Ecclesiastical Unity

Before offering Himself up as a spotless victim upon the altar, Christ prayed to His Father for all who believe in Him: "that they may be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that Thou has sent Me" (Jn 17,21). […] We believe that this unity subsists in the Catholic Church as something She can never lose, and we hope that it will continue to increase until the end of time. [...] Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly condemned. But in subsequent centuries much more serious dissensions made their appearance and quite large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church — for which, often enough, both sides were to blame. The children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces them as brothers, with respect and affection. For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect. The differences that exist in varying degrees between them and the Catholic Church —whether in doctrine and sometimes in discipline, or concerning the structure of the Church— do indeed create many obstacles, sometimes serious ones, to full ecclesiastical communion. The ecumenical movement is striving to overcome these obstacles. But even in spite of them, it remains true that all who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ's Body, and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.

- Unitatis redintegratio (§2,3a)

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[...] New York (which is to say, the world) [...]

Pete Hamill (Forever, page 424)