From The Economist
CAN people of different religions, or different interpretations of the same religion, pray together? In religious history, that has been a very thorny question. The early fathers of the Christian church, furiously determined to preserve the integrity of their faith in all its details, took a very firm line on this matter. They threatened with excommunication anybody who prayed with “heretics”—a word which often, in practice, meant the losing side in whichever theological argument had just shaken the Christian world.
The issue still excites passion. Ultra-conservative Catholics were dismayed by the willingness of Pope John Paul II to pray publicly with Muslims (in Morocco, for example) and to acknowledge that “because of the faith we have in common, Christianity and Islam have many things in common [including] the privilege of prayer….” His successor (whether as pope or in his earlier days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) seemed to take a stricter view. He thought it was wrong for a Christian to pray with a non-Christian if the latter expected his or her Christian partner or friend to water down or relativise the fundamentals of faith in Jesus Christ. He also argued that in Christianity alone, God was present on Earth (through his Incarnate Son) in contrast to the “distant” God of other religions.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, has often been criticised by doctrinal hardliners for remaining part of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), whose membership is mainly Protestant. According to the hardliners, belonging to the WCC inevitably involves joint acts of worship with liberal Protestants which blur the intregrity of a tradition-minded church. Any Orthodox participants in the tenth assembly of the WCC, now in progress in South Korea, will doubtless hear fresh allegations that they are keeping inappropriate company. For those who object to joint prayer by different shades of Christian, the idea of Christians and Muslims jointly addressing God is presumably inconceivable.
