✣ Highlights from the week online
Ecumenical angst Pope Francis’s ecumenical efforts caused considerable discussion. Fr Dwight Longenecker welcomed his apology to Protestants, but said he was “waiting to hear the same from the other side”. On his Standing On My Head blog he wrote: “I was living in England when Pope St John Paul II issued the apologies during the Jubilee Year. I thought how marvellous it would have been if the Queen, as head of the Church of England along with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, were to set up a similar service of repentance and apology in Westminster Abbey and return the courtesy. It didn’t happen. Perhaps it happened when Benedict XVI visited England and I missed it.” Meanwhile, Rod Dreher at the American Conservative (theamericanconservative.com) said the Pope’s decision to commemorate the Reformation with a visit to Sweden was “insane – just as insane as if Lutheran leaders showed up at a worship service to ‘commemorate’ the Counter Reformation”. Dreher, who was raised a Methodist but eventually converted to Orthodoxy, via Catholicism, says: “I don’t begrudge Protestants celebrating the Reformation at all, though I think it was a terrible tragedy (as was the Great Schism separating the Roman and the Eastern churches). It is appropriate for Protestants to celebrate throwing off the yoke of Rome. But why on earth would a pope join in an official event marking that celebration?” But John Allen at Crux said Pope Francis was “no ecumenical revolutionary” and was only following the path set out by popes for the past 50 years – “including figures whose own narratives would tell you they were iron-willed (St John Paul II) or arch-conservative (Pope Benedict XVI).” Our Shia link The split between the two main factions of Islam, Shia and Sunni, can be compared to the division between Catholicism and Protestantism, according to Erasmus, the Economist’s religion blog. The article said: “Both Shia Muslims and Catholics have a respect for clerical authority and for theological tradition as it has evolved over time; that is in contrast with the stress put by many Sunnis, and Protestants, on going back to the original divine revelation and ignoring whatever came later.” Some of the similarities between Shia and Catholicism are striking, the article argued. “In the Shia tradition, as in the Catholic one, there is a long line of succession through which sacred authority is thought to have been transferred over the centuries. Both among the Shias and the Catholics, there is emphasis on the idea of martyrdom leading to redemption.” But while Catholics and Protestants are working together, it said, the divisions between Shia and Sunni grow.
