This year Catholics have been given two weeks for the price of one. The Week for Christian Unity overlaps Laudato Si’ week. The latter week always begins on May 17, the date on which Pope Francis’ issued his document on our care for our environment. The former is shaped by the Church calendar: it begins on the Feast of the Ascension and concludes on Pentecost Sunday. This year, Pentecost Sunday is celebrated on May 25.
Some would think that it is a mistake to combine the two weeks, fearing that neither might receive proper attention. In fact, however, they complement one another. Both weeks are concerned to broaden the attention of Christians to match God’s love and care for the Church and world. The Week for Christian Unity was part of a movement among Churches in the early years of the twentieth Century to insist that God’s love and concern extended more broadly than to the members and life of only one Church. It extended to all Christians and their Churches. The Week for Christian unity allowed them to come together in prayer for unity, even though they might differ on what that unity involved. For Catholics the Second Vatican Council focused on what religions and Christian Churches had in common, while recognising their differences, and encouraged them to pray and work together.
In Australia Vatican II coincided with the secularization of society and the beginning of a decline in strong Church allegiance. Although hostility between Churches diminished, so did the energy for unity between Churches, each of which became preoccupied with its own challenges. The Week for Christian Unity invites us to return to what lies at the heart of Christ’s Church: namely gratitude for God’s reconciliation with the human race and the calling to Christians to be reconciled with one another. We are to be one as Christ and the Father are one. That spirit is desperately needed in the divided world today. It stresses the need for each community to welcome others and to pull down fences, not because we value our own tradition less but because we want to meet and work with the people on the other side of the fence.
Laudato Si Week also invites us to share our lives as Catholics, It reminds us that God is interested in us not only as individuals but also as part of the precious world that God has made. We do not have an environment but are part of it. To care for our environment is to care for ourselves. To poison our environment is to poison our own lives and to spit on the God who loves us. Laudato Si also invites us to focus on the needs and humanity of the poor who are most affected by the destruction and of our natural world and the scorched earth we leave to our children.
Both Laudato Si Week and the Week for Chrisitan Unity remind us that our faith is about more than our individual relationships with God. It also embraces God’s love for all human beings and for our world, and our mission to think, feel and go beyond our narrow interests.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
