Angels and ecumenism

When my kids were young, I taught in a Lutheran preschool. My home, Anchorage, Alaska, didn’t have any Catholic preschools at the time.

Religious tradition mainly involved saying grace before snacks, and we had an ecumenical staff. A highlight was our Christmas program, featuring the Gospel of Luke’s Christmas story.

One day Gail, a teacher who was a member of my parish, and I were conducting a dress rehearsal. One of the school directors, a creative lady who had made most of the costumes, stopped in. She told us we had the angels’ wings on upside down. They were glitter-covered appendages with tips — did the tips point upward, or did they swoop downward? Ours were wrong. We chuckled as we readjusted them.

So, the next day, another rehearsal, and the director walked in. She started laughing. We’d accidentally done it again.

“Obviously,” she joked, “Lutheran and Catholic angels wear their wings differently!”

I grew up in a small town where there was a subtle but real Catholic-Lutheran divide. If you’re of an older generation, you may remember being taught that no one got to heaven outside the Catholic Church. Fortunately, the Second Vatican Council helped us get over this narrow approach to God’s mercy.

Blessed John Sullivan reminds me of those angels during this month of St. Patrick. This Irishman was beatified in Dublin, Ireland in May 2017. Becoming a “blessed” is the last stage before being approved for canonization in our church.

Sullivan was a Jesuit priest born in 1896. His father was an Anglican, a Lord Chancellor of Ireland. His mother was Catholic, but John was raised in his father’s Protestant faith.
Sullivan was handsome, a member of the elite, and once described as the “best dressed man in Dublin.”

But something tugged at him. In 1896, at age 35, he was received into his mother’s Catholic faith, and four years later he entered the Jesuits. Well-educated, he became a teacher who dressed in well-worn clothes and visited the poor, often carrying his mother’s crucifix to the ill. Many healings have been attributed to him.

Today, Sullivan’s earthly remains are in the Jesuit parish at Gardiner Street, Dublin, where a webcam gives you access to Mass, and to Sullivan’s tomb.
In a beautiful ecumenical tribute, both at the beatification and in other celebrations of Sullivan’s life, Church of Ireland (Anglican) prelates have been welcomed. Sullivan spent the first half of his life as an Anglican, and Dublin Catholic Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said the Jesuit’s Anglican heritage “enriched” his faith.

When Sullivan was declared “venerable” (an earlier step toward sainthood) in 2015, many of his family’s Protestant relatives came from England for the ceremony, and the Anglican Bishop of Ireland attended.

At that service, Archbishop Martin reminded the congregation that “holiness knows no denominational boundaries.”

Archbishop Martin continued, “Indeed in our ecumenical reflection and activity we pay too little attention to the fact that saints can be a bridge between what is deepest and common in all our traditions.”

In a secular world where many ignore the pilgrimage of faith completely, or where many use their faith as a cudgel against others, we need to walk that bridge with those who seek the God who is love.

I’m still not sure about those angels’ wings. But I feel deeply for the Protestant angels and saints who have accompanied me on this faith journey, for my Muslim friends praying now during Ramadan, for my Jewish brothers and sisters. Holiness, as Archbishop Martin said, knows no boundaries.

May the angels guide us, and may St. Patrick pray for us.

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