In Defense of Disliking Ecumenical Services

I just read a somewhat indignant post by Deacon Greg Kandra entitled "Different faiths gathered to pray together. And someone said: ‘Yuck’"

I was more than a little surprised to read that one-word reaction to a Facebook post Sunday night, in which I described taking part in an annual interfaith Thanksgiving service in my neighborhood. The event, held at a reform temple near my home in Queens, brought together nearly a dozen Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy — an imam was to attend, but got delayed and couldn’t make it — along with a few hundred congregants from the different churches.

The commenter who weighed in with “Yuck!” explained that he’s not a fan of interfaith gatherings. So I thought I’d explain just what we did.

In an attempt to rebutt such reactions, Kandra describes the service:

I read a passage from the Gospel According to St. Matthew, which includes these words:

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

A rabbi, filling in for the imam, read this section from the Quran:

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Praise be to God, Lord of all that is created. The Beneficent, the Merciful, Master of the Day of Requital. It is you that we worship and it is you that we seek support from. Guide us to and on the path of integrity. The path that you bestow your favors upon. Not the path that has earned your wrath. Nor the path of those whom are astray. Verily, my prayers and all my actions, my living and my dying, are for you, O Lord, of all that is created.

The Presbyterian minister offered a short but stirring homily on the “path to gratitude.”

One of the choirs launched into a rousing rendition of “Soon and Very Soon.” Two of the reform temple’s choirs — one of adults, one of children— offered “Ki Eilecha” and “Roll Into Dark.” We took up a collection for the International Rescue Committee (www.rescue.org.) . A minister read John F. Kennedy’s Thanksgiving Proclamation from 1962.

Then, as a final prayer, all the clergy offered the Aaronic Blessing (Numbers 6: 24-26).

We concluded by singing two verses of “America the Beautiful” — and that was followed by a little hospitality with a lot of food.

At a certain level I agree with his contention: What is there here that can be offensive? At another level, what I find offensive about these ecumenical efforts is precisely how inoffensive they are.

I agree with the section from Nostra Aetate which Kanda does on to quote that as Catholics we must not engage in discrimination or harassment of those who belong to other religions. But what's in question with these "inter-faith service" events is not "should we persecute other religions" but rather whether it does justice to anyone's faith to gather a group so disparate for a semi-liturgical "service" which must necessarily be so vague in its religiosity as to accommodate everyone's divergent beliefs.

Perhaps what encourages people to engage in this kind of activity is what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of liturgical prayer. That purpose is not to gather together a community and feel the warmth of the similar sentiments and experiences we all have. That purpose is to offer worship to God.

It may be that when we go to mass on Sunday, we feel a union with and love for the others in the congregation, and if one feels that way one might want to have a similar feeling of union and love towards others who, because they are of different faiths, are not usually at mass. But we must remember, we are not at mass for those feelings of community, and the mass itself is not the less for it if we don't have those feelings. We're at mass to participate in and receive the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the sacrifice that earned for us the graces of salvation.

An interfaith service is necessarily going to aim towards a lesser worship. We can't share the sacrifice of the mass with people who don't believe the mass is truly a sacrifice, or indeed with people who don't believe that Jesus was God and saved us all through His sacrifice.

Yes, Christians, Jews, and Muslims can get together and all express how they are grateful to the one God for all that He has given us, even though in other respects we all believe radically different things about who that one God is. However, in order to maintain the illusion of all being united in worship, it's necessary to make that worship so vague that I question how worth while it is. If Catholicism is true, then the mass is a far greater prayer. If some other form of Christianity is true, and the Catholic Church in error, then some other form of worship would be more true (and thus pleasing to God) than the "idolatry" of the mass. If some form of Islam is true, then surely the worship prescribed by Mohammad is better than some inter-faith weak tea. And if Judaism represents the fullest revelation of God to his people, of which Islam and Christianity are odd messianic heresies, then surely the proper worship is Jewish worship (of whatever tradition one takes to be the true tradition.)

This isn't to say that the divisions between faiths mean that people of different religions should have nothing to do with one another. It's good to understand the faith of others, to understand the truth they do see, even while recognizing the errors. There are also common experiences which religious people even of very different faiths may have in facing our secular world. It's good to understand these commonalities and doing so can help us see people who believe very different things as people who at a human level are not so different from ourselves.

However, I'd question whether trying to create common worship between such different groups, particularly in the formal setting of a liturgical event, is the best thing to do. The meal shared afterwards in this event sounds like a better and more human approach than the interfaith liturgy. It might be a much better reflection of the shared humanity but divergent faiths to simply gather for a meal, have the different religious leaders offer prayers of thanksgiving according to their own traditions, with no attempt to make those something everyone could pray, and then enjoy the human community of eating and talking.

I do not think that the rejection of the sort of least-common-denominator worship liturgy in which interfaith liturgical efforts typically result is a rejection of the humanity and worth of other religious believers. Rather, it represents an understanding that worship is important, and it should be done in full, not in some neutered form that is acceptable to all.

Further, just as we need to remember that worship performs a much deeper function than creating an experience of community, we should also remember that the experience of community need not be liturgicized. We can form friendships and spend time with believers in other faiths without trying to construct some sort of common liturgy for us to share. Let human interaction be human, and respect that the worship of different faiths is different because we do in fact believe different things.