Forty Ecumenical Years

Extract

It is not quite forty years since I produced my first published writing concerned with Christian unity; it was a review article on the Report of the Malines Conversations, which the then editor of Blackfriars asked me to undertake, soon after I finished my studies for the priesthood. But my thought and ideas about ecumenism – the clumsy word had not then been invented – have deep roots in my Anglican background. I have always been profoundly grateful for the religion I was grounded in by the Church of England; and that I was able to take it with me into the Catholic Church whole and entire. With a minimum of detailed adjustment – but a complete re-orientation of mind – I was received, without conditional baptism, in 1917.

What I took with me was a religion essentially biblical and liturgical. From earliest childhood – in our daily family service at home, and in similar daily services at school and at Cambridge, I learned to recite the psalter and listen to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Built into this biblical background was the training, more by atmosphere and surroundings than by explicit teaching, of a happy home life, in a large family, with parents at the heart of whose religious practice was the deep personal love of Christ characteristic of the sober Tractarianism of Keble and Newman.