# Five Walls Between Us and the Room We Already Share

A Catholic priest and a Church of Ireland rector once spent forty minutes arguing about whether an eighty-three-year-old bride's grandmother could receive communion. She sat in the front pew looking quietly amused. She had survived a famine family, a civil war, and six decades of Irish religious politics. She already knew something both clergymen were still working out: that the argument was real, and that it was not the whole story.

That grandmother is, I think, a better guide than most theologians to what Catholic-Protestant relations should look like in a culture that no longer remembers why Christians ever split, and increasingly does not care. She held the tension without resolving it falsely. That is harder than it sounds.

## The Ecumenism Nobody Wants

Two bad options are on offer, and most people default to one or the other.

The first is a sentimental ecumenism that smooths everything over in the name of love. Doctrine becomes embarrassing. The Reformation becomes a misunderstanding. Five hundred years of bloodshed, martyrdom, and serious theological labour get reduced to a regrettable historical awkwardness. Everyone hugs. Nobody believes anything specific enough to be wrong about, and so nobody believes anything specific enough to be right about either. That is not unity. It is amnesia with a smile.

The second option is tribal hostility — the inherited reflex of suspicion that treats the other tradition as scarcely Christian at all. Protestants who think Catholics worship Mary and have never read a sentence of Aquinas. Catholics who think Protestants are spiritual freelancers with no liturgy and no history. Both caricatures are tedious, both are wrong, and both are sustained mostly by people who have never actually sat in the other's pews, eaten with the other's families, or read the other's better writers.

There is a third way, and it is older than both of these: honest difference as the only path to honest unity. The walls between Catholics and Protestants are real. There are at least five of them, and they are not trivial. But the room we already share is so much larger than most outside observers — and a fair number of insiders — realise. We need to be able to say both things without flinching.

## The Room We Already Share

Before the walls, the room.

Catholics and Protestants confess the Nicene Creed. We worship one God in three Persons. We believe that the eternal Son took on human flesh in the womb of a Jewish woman in a particular town in a particular year, that he lived, taught, healed, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried, and rose bodily from the dead on the third day. We believe he ascended, reigns, and will return to judge the living and the dead. We believe the Holy Spirit is poured out on the church. We believe in the forgiveness of sins and the life of the world to come.

We share Scripture. The canonical disagreement over the deuterocanonical books is real but narrower than people think — both traditions read Genesis, Isaiah, the Gospels, Romans, and Revelation as the authoritative word of God. We share a moral tradition built on the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and the apostolic letters. We share a basic anthropology: human beings made in God's image, fallen, redeemable only through grace.