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Ecumenical Anti-Jihad?

I’m at the Madrid airport with just a few minutes before boarding begins, but I wanted to say something about Ross’ last column and Noah Millman’s response to it. My impression is that Ross wanted to discuss Pope Benedict’s outreach to conservative Christians, whether they are tradtionalist Catholic or Anglican, and he would usually settle […]

I’m at the Madrid airport with just a few minutes before boarding begins, but I wanted to say something about Ross’ last column and Noah Millman’s response to it. My impression is that Ross wanted to discuss Pope Benedict’s outreach to conservative Christians, whether they are tradtionalist Catholic or Anglican, and he would usually settle for seeing these moves in terms of Western culture wars, but perhaps he wanted to be a bit provocative and make more out of the outreach than it requires. Just as the Pope’s Regensburg address was frequently misconstrued as principally anti-Islamic rather than a meditation on the Christian understanding of reason, Ross seems to be making forthright Catholic proselytism into something other than what it is to make it seem relevant to non-Catholic readers. I would take the same event and see it as another step in the progression of pan-conservative ecumenism in which political-cum-cultural issues carry more weight than theological ones. Of course, Pope Benedict is engaging in this consistent with his obligations as pontiff, so it is not quite that watered down, but it is these political/cultural issues that are the fault lines that have created the opportunity to lure conservative Anglicans away from the Communion.

Whether or not Anglican conservatives in the “global south” and throughout the world crave Pope Benedict’s type of leadership (and it wouldn’t surprise me if some did), we should bear in mind how swiftly the Vatican backtracked in the wake of the Regensburg address. Stressing that it was an exercise in philosophical reflection, the Vatican actively distanced itself from the claims of both protesters and admirers that the address represented a great intellectual blow in a clash of civilizations. It’s also worth considering that any ecumenical anti-jihad of this kind has the same problems as the “ecumenical jihad” to which it bears some resemblance: it is fundamentally negative in its foundations and attempts to give a religious character to what is primarily a political project. Were there to be a “united Anglican-Catholic front” against Islam, my guess is that it would be as damaging and destructive to the integrity of these confessions as Byzantine unionism was to the integrity of Orthodoxy in the 13th and 15th centuries. One need not prefer the turban to the mitre to see that attempting to end schisms even partly for anti-Islamic purposes does nothing to heal Christian divisions and instead tends to deepen and embitter both parties.

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