What I learned from my 7-year Mennonite–Catholic dialogue

Eight or nine years ago I wrote a major piece on the relationship of Canadian evangelicals to Roman Catholics. It took me on a journey. I learned far more about the Roman Catholic Church than I had ever known before and I discovered some of the many points at which evangelicals and Catholics were finding one another.

It also led to an involvement that began in 2000 with a small group of Mennonites and Roman Catholics, all of Winnipeg, who entered into active dialogue and fellowship with one another. We’ve kept it up until the present – meeting three times a year for a five-hour meeting interrupted only by a common meal. Worship and prayer always form a part of our time together. Out of these meetings grew others last winter, in four parts of our city.

Our times together have held a particular Mennonite–Catholic focus and because my Anabaptist forebears suffered many losses during the Reformation period – often at the hands of Catholic magistrates – there was a history to deal with. But it is telling that formal meetings with a group appointed by the Vatican and the Mennonite World Conference that preceded ours began under the title “Toward the Healing of Memories” and concluded with a document wondrously headed “Called Together to Be Peacemakers.”

My experience in these encounters with Roman Catholics has led me to a number of conclusions.

The first of these is the deepened conviction that if we are to find one another as fellow believers, it must be rooted in Jesus Christ. Genuine communion with one another can be based in one reality only and that is the confession we make that salvation is in Christ Jesus alone.

I have learned that ordinary Catholics too are encouraged to read the Bible, not only those who are teachers of the church. Catholics in my presence have spoken of how they were once discouraged from reading and now are urged to read. One told a group of us that she had made a promise to herself to read through the Bible the year she turned 40.

I know that we think of the Roman Catholic Church as emphasizing works as the way to salvation. But on an evening when we were discussing salvation from a Mennonite document, an ordained Catholic deacon declared with moving emphasis, “Salvation is a pure gift of God.” The catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way: “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of His own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.” It was on the basis of statements like this that the Catholic Church found a way of reconciling with world Lutheranism on the issue of justification by faith. I have learned that on core issues such as salvation, we are closer than I might have thought.

I thought of this as I read the news that a leading evangelical scholar, Francis Beckwith of Baylor University, had laid down his position as president of the Evangelical Theological Society when he made the decision this past April to return to the Church of Rome in which he had been baptized and confirmed.

He is one of a not insignificant number who have made that journey. A young couple I once worked with very closely in the church – the husband now a doctoral student at Oxford University in England – made that journey. For them the authority of the church to maintain faithfulness to its confession was a powerful attraction.

For many evangelicals – as for me – a number of elements of the Roman Catholic Church are large barriers to full communion. But I’ve come to appreciate what Roman Catholics have to give evangelicals. Perhaps the most important has come to be the richness of its teaching and the far greater role that the teaching tradition plays in maintaining consistency with the past. With our enormous desire to fit into the culture, evangelicals are susceptible to great winds of change. Some clearly do so to their detriment. Roman Catholics are far less likely to change and that is going to help all Christians. Some might think of that as a drag on world Christianity, but I would like to think of it as an anchor.

Harold Jantz is former editor of the MB Herald and lives in Winnipeg. This article was originally published in ChristianWeek newspaper.