Noreen and I were 5 years old. She lived across the road in a white house with green window frames and a garden at the back with a lawn where we played on Saturdays.

It had to be Saturday: from Monday to Friday we went to different schools, and on Sunday, Noreen wasn’t allowed out to play. She was a Protestant and I was a Catholic in Lowland Scotland in the 1940s. But playing house in the back garden seemed to be all right.

I was, even then, a quite enthusiastic and determined catechist. I really wanted to spread the faith. One sunny morning, I explained to Noreen, over the teacups, what the Catholic Church was all about.

The window above our heads opened, and her mother leaned out. “What are you two doing down there?” she called.

“Mummy,” said Noreen, “I’m going to be a Catholic.”

“You come in here at once!” said her mother, and the window came down with a bang.

Noreen went in the back door, I went home across the road, and, as far as I can remember, we never played together again. So much for my first ecumenical encounter.

Children, enthused by friendship, but confronted by an adult world of history and fear and separation. The window comes down with a bang, and the road runs between two alien gardens.

Something was wrong between Catholics and Protestants, certainly. Even the children knew it and moved uneasily in the times and spaces when the lack of unity became obvious.

Childhood experience is individual, unrepeatable and shapes us for life. I connect that sharp memory from 60 years ago in a strange, profound manner with a meeting, in Rome in 2005, with the theme of “The Ecumenical Movement in our Times.”

Forty years ago, the leaders of the Catholic Church, gathered at the Second Vatican Council, authorized a document called Unitatis Redintegratio, which clearly welcomed the ecumenical movement as integral to the Church’s being and pastoral activity.

This overturned much of the narrow Counter-Reformation outlook of the Church. It called for a return to the Biblical traditions of the early Church and the medieval traditions. It understood the Church as the people of God on pilgrimage. Efforts to promote and nourish unity among churches were seen as an integral part of this pilgrimage.

In this document, the Council made clear that, as Catholics, we were joining with the ecumenical movement, which was already taking shape, including the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948.

In the Catholic Church, there had been encouragement for “Prayer for Christian Unity” and openness to the ecumenical movement, but something new began with Vatican II. The meeting in 2005, bringing together more than 200 men and women concerned with unity among the Christian faiths, celebrated the gifts of the work of the ecumenical movement since the publication of Unitatis Redintegratio.

Among those gifts has been the close cooperation between the Catholic Church and the WCC. I work on the World Council staff in Geneva to enable understanding and cooperation between the missionary personnel of the Catholic Church and the missionary work of the member churches of the WCC.

At the meeting were representatives from the Conferences of Bishops from all the continents of the world—an astonishing company of different languages and cultures. Plus, there were fraternal delegates from many of the churches and ecclesial communities from around the world.

Inner Conversion & New Possibilities
It is clear that the ecumenical movement is intimately connected with the mission movement. The two belong together, as Cardinal Walter Kasper said during the meeting’s introductory address. Certainly, in Columban missionary work as we understand it today, the missionary meets people in their own culture. Missionaries listen and hear; they share in an exchange; they bring an understanding and energy from the Gospel. They give and receive new gifts and understandings.

In the same way, the Catholic Church, through its members, enters the culture of another faith community. The encounters, the dialogues, enrich both. Valued traditions are not lost.

At the heart of ecumenism is a spiritual reality of inner conversion. It brings a change of heart, sanctification of personal life, humility, love and patience.

These are remarkable gifts, the same gifts that are at the heart of Church renewal and reform. Because these are spiritual gifts, not just human skills or practices, the whole ecumenical movement is based upon prayer, individually and together.

I wonder if Protestants and Catholics had met and prayed together all those years ago, if Noreen would have been summoned through the back door and if I would have been so doubtful about her eternal salvation.

The Catholic Church must find ways to help its members understand the history and possibilities of true ecumenical cooperation and its relation to the call to mission we all share through baptism.