Interesting article regarding RC and Baptist dialogue...
Krispy Kreme Catholics & the Baptist Vatican
By Terry Mattingly
NASHVILLE -- As a boy in upstate New York, Father Bob Dalton learned
how to talk to Italians, Poles, Ukrainians and various other kinds of
neighbors.
"My Irish mother was always saying, 'They're just not our kind of
people,' " said the 68-year-old priest, hinting at her accent. "But,
you know, we learned to get along. ... It helped that almost everybody
was Catholic."
Before long, Dalton became a priest in the Glenmary Home Mission
Society, which works across the rural South. This meant learning a
whole different cultural vocabulary. It meant learning how to talk to
Southern Baptists.
By the early 1980s, Dalton was representing the Church of Rome at
Southern Baptist Convention's annual meetings and in the hallways of
the giant "Baptist Vatican" in downtown Nashville. He has talked to
Southern Baptists in state conventions and regional associations, too.
He has talked to Southern Baptists at the all-important level of the
local church.
And this is what he has learned.
"Catholics and Baptists have a lot in common," said Dalton, who
recently returned to his SBC liaison role. "But we're still looking at
each other and saying, 'They're just not our kind of people.' ... We're
two massive groups of people who still don't know each other."
Recent statistics gathered by the Glenmary Research Center found 62
million U.S. Catholics and 20 million Southern Baptists -- the nation's
two largest flocks. These two culturally conservative giants continue
to grow, but they are not growing closer together.
Official dialogues began three decades ago, with key leadership coming
from "moderate" Baptists who were willing to risk being called
"ecumenists." Progressive Baptists huddled with progressive Catholics,
while Baptist conservatives seethed.
Then conservatives seized control of the SBC and, to the surprise of
many experts, this soon led to an intense, but radically different, era
of Catholic-Baptist work. Liberals howled about right-wing politics,
while "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" and similar efforts found
common ground on issues such as abortion, sexual abstinence and human
rights.
A key 1994 document made news by affirming that Catholics and
evangelicals are "brothers and sisters in Christ" and that both streams
of tradition represent "authentic forms of discipleship." Before long,
powerful SBC voices -- especially in regions heavy in ex-Catholics --
began saying that enough is enough. Southern Baptist leaders recently
shut down the formal dialogue.
What happens next? The bottom line is that many Southern Baptists do
not believe that years of dialogue have produced consensus on issues of
salvation and biblical authority. A growing awareness of the Vatican II
statement that salvation can be found through faith in non-Christian
religions has only widened the gap.
One of the SBC's most outspoken scholars did not mince words on CNN's
Larry King Show.
"I believe the Roman Church is a false church and teaches a false
gospel," said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary. "Indeed, I believe the pope himself holds a false
and unbiblical office."
Clearly, SBC leaders realize "that those are fighting words," said
Dalton.
The irony, said the priest, is that the lives of most Roman Catholics
today are not radically different from those of Southern Baptists.
The Glenmary statistics show that waves of Catholics have moved to the
Sunbelt, far from the northern ethnic enclaves of the past. They live
in sprawling suburbs and eat Krispy Kremes at church coffee hour like
everybody else. They live next door to Southern Baptists, who long ago
shed their rural roots and went suburban.
But many Catholics and Baptists have not realized how much times have
changed, said Dalton. They still do not know how to talk to their
neighbors.
"Maybe the formal dialogue did its thing," said Dalton. "It got us
talking to the Baptist left and then we learned to talk to the Baptist
right. But the next level of dialogue will not occur with our leaders
sitting in conference rooms. It's going to have to happen between
ordinary people over their backyard fences and down at the local Home
Depot.
"We're living next door to each other. The question is whether we can
learn to trust each other. Can we ever learn to see that we are one in
Jesus Christ?"
Terry Mattingly (
www.tmatt.net) teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic
University and is senior fellow for journalism at the Council for
Christian Colleges & Universities. He writes this weekly column for the
Scripps Howard News Service.