The Deacon's Bench
From The Boston Globe:
One freezing winter day when he was a child, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley told a congregation of Catholics and Methodists Sunday afternoon, the pipes in his house burst and his father opened the phone book to find a plumber.
O’Malley’s mother sang out, “Be sure you call a Catholic!”
These days, O’Malley said, the split between Catholics and Protestants has been replaced with a “new polarity . . . between believer and nonbeliever,” a shift that should spur Christians to greater cooperation.
Christians also share a common enemy, he added: what Pope Francis has called “the globalization of indifference” to those who are poor and suffering.
“The call to unity is an imperative,” O’Malley said.
The cardinal was preaching at a special service at Sudbury United Methodist Church in honor of the 50th anniversary of Cardinal Richard Cushing’s historic visit to the same congregation to discuss the Second Vatican Council’s work on ecumenism, or efforts toward Christian unity. Bishop Sudarshana Devadhar of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church also presided at the service, along with the Rev. Joel B. Guillemette, pastor of the host church, and the Rev. Richard Erikson, pastor of Our Lady of Fatima Parish in Sudbury.
The service fell on the Sunday on which many Christians celebrate the baptism of Jesus. After the homily, O’Malley and Devadhar received congregants one by one, making a sign of the cross on their foreheads with water, telling each, “Reaffirm your baptism and be thankful.”
Beverly Paro said she enjoyed Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley’s homily at a service at Sudbury United Methodist Church.
“It was wonderful to get both congregations together,” said Jim Carleton, a member of Our Lady of Fatima, at a reception after the service. “We could have more of this, really.”
Cushing’s trip to the Sudbury church, at the height of council’s work toward modernizing the Roman Catholic church and forging improved relationships with other Christians and faiths, was a remarkable event at a time when Protestants and Catholics often regarded one other with suspicion and rarely entered one another’s houses of worship.
A Globe story published after Cushing’s visit called it “the most remarkable hour and a half ever experienced by church people in the old town.” A photo caption marveled: “In the congregation, you could not tell which were Protestants and which Catholics.”
“I think of what he did in Sudbury as something similar to what Nixon did when he went to China — it was real detente,” said Guillemette. “Doors were opening, and that all came out of Vatican II.”
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