Unusual Harmony Marks Unity Observance : Christian Groups Shed Old Rivalry

As it marks its 80th anniversary, a worldwide trans-Christian observance has shed its one-time note of rivalry and now resonates harmony, both in planning and participation.

The occasion is the annual week of prayer for Christian unity, Jan. 18-25, sponsored jointly by Roman Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox organizations.

It has “spread and touched deep chords” in the various churches, said Dutch Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, president of the Vatican’s Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity.

The Rev. Emilio Castro, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, including most Protestant and Eastern Orthodox denominations, said the observance “has become a model of international ecumenical cooperation.”

It involves millions of believers of different denominations around the Earth. Citing Christ’s prayer before his death that “they may all be one . . . so that the world may believe,” Castro added:

“When we pray that the church may be one that the world might believe, we are putting our very being as churches and as professing Christians on the line.”

The observance was started in 1908 by the Rev. Paul Wattson, an Episcopal priest turned Roman Catholic, as prayer for return of all Christians to Roman Catholicism.

That slant by Wattson, founder of the Graymoor Friars of the Atonement at Garrison, N.Y., did not suit Christians outside the Roman Catholic fold. In 1926, Protestant ecumenists started urging annual prayers simply for Christian unity.

In 1934, a French Catholic priest, the Rev. Paul Couturier, began advocating a universal observance of prayer for “the unity Christ wills by the means he wills.”

This formula enabled a Catholic ecumenical agency of Lyons, France, and the Protestant and Orthodox groups to begin joint preparation in 1958 of annual prayer observance materials.

However, the common approach reached full flower only in the wake of Roman Catholicism’s reforming Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, whose decree on ecumenism abandoned the old demand for a return by all Christians to Catholicism.

Roman Catholicism also dropped insistence that it was the only true church, and recognized other churches as sister communities of Christian faith.

In that new perspective, the annual prayer observance came under joint sponsorship in 1966 of the Vatican unity secretariat and the World Council of Churches, with common materials prepared by their agencies.

Sponsorship in this country is by the National Council of Churches and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, with U.S. materials adapted by the council’s faith and order department and the Graymoor Friars.

‘Love Casts Out Fear’

Theme for the observance, to be marked by millions in this country and abroad, often in joint church services, is, “Love casts out fear,” from 1 John 4:18.

In a joint message for the occasion, the Rev. Arie R. Brouwer of New York, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and Msgr. Daniel F. Hoy, general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, said:

“While Christians share the fears and anxieties overshadowing our age, we continue to pray and work in a spirit of joy and love and hope”--a hope firmly founded in “faith that God loves the whole world with all its people.”

They said the “quest for Christian unity is a vital component of the quest for human unity,” both “more urgent and more necessary than ever before.”