Jesuit Ecumenism in Three Acts: Lessons from the Life of Robert Mcafee Brown

chapter 18 Jesuit Ecumenism in Three Acts: Lessons from the Life of Robert McAfee Brown

Paul G. Crowley*

Jesuit involvement in ecumenical work has not been the most widely noted feature of the work of the Society, either before or since the time of the restoration. There was a handful of Jesuits who worked in very careful ways alongside Protestants and Orthodox Christians through the two hundred years since the restoration, but rarely with an explicit view toward furthering the dream of Christ “that all may be one” (John 17:21).1 One mid-twentieth-century Jesuit did pursue such a dream: Gustave Weigel (1906–64), of the New York province and a member of the faculty at Wood- stock College. Weigel was the trailblazer who, because of his existential courage and theological imagination, made possible for future Jesuits the work that has been done since in both the ecumenical and interreligious fields. A major part of his story involves his collaboration with a relatively young Protestant

* I am grateful to the following colleagues for their help in talking through with me some of the issues raised in this chapter: Philip Riley, Thao Nguyen, s.j., and Rev. Dr. Diana Gibson, who was a protégé and friend of Robert McAfee Brown. 1 Among these were Jesuit Frs. Gerard W. Hughes (1924–2014) of the British province; John Courtney Murray (1904–67), editor of Theological Studies; Max Pribilla (1874–1954) of Ger- many; Joseph Masson (1908–98) of Belgium; and Daniel O’Hanlon (1919–92) of Alma Col- lege and later, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. There were several others working with these pioneers, including the esteemed Augustin Cardinal Bea (1881–1968), first head of the old Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and a major force for openness at the Second Vatican Council. Not to be forgotten was the pioneering work of Yves Congar, o.p. (1904–95), Georges Tavard, o.s.a. (1922–2007), and Louis Bouyer (1913–2004), a convert from Lutheranism, as well as Augustin Léonard, o.p. (1917–). The results of a 1951 symposium in Huy, Belgium (Roger Aubert et al., Tolérance et communauté humaine: Chrétiens dans un monde divisé [Paris: Casterman, 1952]; Tolerance and the Catholic: A Symposium, trans. George Lamb [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955]), were effectively suppressed when that book was withdrawn from circulation due to the then advanced views of Léonard, much to the consternation of ecumenically minded Protestants. It was remarkable for reaching beyond Protestant–Orthodox relations with Catholics to a consideration of interreligious dialogue— well before the council was to open up this possibility in Nostra aetate (October 28, 1965).

694 Crowley churchman at the time, Robert McAfee Brown (1920–2001), a Presbyterian theologian, Protestant observer at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), pro- fessor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and soon-to-be appointed faculty member at Stanford University. Their collaboration marks what I call here “Act One” of Jesuit involvement in ecumenism. This Act, however, pre- cedes two further acts, each foreshadowed and shaped by Brown in particular: the ecumenism of Gospel praxis, evidenced in collaboration between Jesuits and Protestants in the liberation theology movement; and the ecumenism of interreligious dialogue, evidenced by Brown’s early work in Christian–Jewish dialogue. My claim here is that Brown’s involvement in ecumenism serves as a lens through which to understand Jesuit involvement in ecumenism, and how the very notion of the ecumenical—a word that derives from the Greek oi- kumene, denoting what encompasses the whole word—has morphed since the middle of the twentieth century from a term with reference to intra-Christian affairs to a term that encompasses the world of the religions. This change in understanding has been reflected in the ways that Jesuits have taken up the work begun in the council and carried it forward. We have now reached the point where we can look back and see that the task for an “ecumenical theology” must be to draw all three senses of the ecumenical together into an inter- related whole, especially if a Christian ecumenical theology can emerge that has any relevance to the world in which we find ourselves now. I argue that this is a task well suited for a Jesuit imagination, and that the example of Brown, in explicit collaboration with Jesuits and through the inspiration of his example, offers a template for Jesuit thinking about ecumenism in the future. But before we move forward, it is important to understand just how mo- mentous was the move of Jesuits such as Weigel and those who followed him into the ecumenical arena in the mid-century. For Catholic teaching until the council itself overwhelmingly militated against this possibility. Those involved in this work were filled with an existential, intellectual, and religious courage that might cause us to take pause:

• In 1864, one hundred years before the council, and only fifty since the restoration of the Society, Pius ix (r.1846–78) had published the Syllabus of Errors, which set the vectors for consideration of opinions about Protestantism for another century. Among the errors listed was the view that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church.”2

2 Church documents preceding the pontificate of Leo xiii are now found on the Vatican web- site. For the Syllabus of Errors (1864), see http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm (accessed January 3, 2017).