The winter business meeting of the Christian Family Movement has neither the excitement of its circus-type annual convention nor the power-charged atmosphere of a smoke-filled room. It is more like a New England town meeting, where there is a noticeable absence of prepared speeches and the presence of people who know each other well enough to speak their minds without fear of offending. This intramural, give-and-take atmosphere offers a fine opportunity to assess the movement after a decade of its existence.

The 1960 meeting at the Fatima Retreat House on the Notre Dame Campus was officially the semiannual meeting of the movement's governing body, the Coordinating Committee. This body is composed of a couple and a priest from each diocese in the United States and Canada in which CFM exists. About fifty couples and fifteen priests were in attendance.

True Strength

At one session each couple gave a short report of the movement in their diocese. These reports were largely a recital of projects of local groups. In Portland, Ore, the main concern was the World Refugee Year. They considered the thirteen families which they had resettled to be only a start. In Omaha, Neb., CFM represented the diocese at hearings of a Congressional subcommittee on indecent literature and in preparation for the White House Conference on Children and Youth. In the Diocese of Saginaw, Mich., they were arranging a God-and-man lecture series and an art exhibit. Richmond, Va., reported on its racial integration efforts and its work on behalf of lay missionaries. The Detroit groups were involved in projects dealing with foreign students, retarded children and a citizens' committee on religious liberties. Chicago's CFM had sponsored a lecture series on politics and lent support to projects dealing with migrant workers, film forums and urban renewal. It is difficult to think of a single facet of American life which did not become the concern of some CFM group across the country.

Unless one has had experience with CFM at the local level, the detailing of reports can be quite deceptive. Actually, the strength of the movement is not in its projects, in spite of their impressiveness. CFM is basically a couple-centered form of Christian witness. Through its concern with every facet of life that even remotely touches the family, it helps members to live an integrated Christian life.

CFM specializes in producing good neighbors. Its best work is done in the apartment building, the block or the rural community in which the couple lives. Nevertheless, it is hard to conceive of a San Francisco layman boarding a plane for South Bend on Friday morning to tell the national committee that families who hardly spoke to each other are warm and friendly, that parishioners are more cooperative, or, that 28 people in one parish attended their first city council session after a meeting on political life. These are pedestrian things that every Christian should be doing, so on the plane he searches his mind for sensational projects to report—adopting Korean babies, for instance.

Is true Christian friendship or love pedestrian? Can it be taken for granted in the enchanting land of suburbia, where the "cult of togetherness" finds its midday, ritualistic expression in coffee-klatches? And where does friendliness gush forth more than in our own living rooms, when the unctuous and toothy ad man tells us about his soap? Or is there a compulsiveness about our "togetherness" which betrays our deep-seated insecurity and consequent distrust, loneliness and neurotic clamors for constant support and approval? Maybe this explains the high incidence of alcoholism among both men and women in upper income suburbs.

Erich Fromm writes trenchantly in The Sane Society: "There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference."

In all human relationships, whether in an apartment building or an office, Fromm's distinction between superficial friendship and Christian love can be recognized. It is something sensed rather than defined. It is this inability to assess and verbalize the quality of Christian friendship that makes it difficult to spell out the goals of CFM in terms of brotherly love.

In the 'thirties Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin dramatized the need we had of Houses of Hospitality for the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless and the naked. Unfortunately, these love centers expanded and contracted with the business cycle, as though love and friendship were subject to market fluctuations. In an affluent society there is little drama in, or patience for, the storefront Christianity of the 'thirties.

We would like to think that every time a couple stand before a priest and pronounce their marriage vows, another family-style House of Hospitality has been established in some neighborhood. Because the couple standing at the altar is so enmeshed in our secular culture, there is little hope that they will rise above their surroundings and create an oasis which will bring peace, light and refreshment to all who come in contact with its members. It is to this task that CFM addresses itself. CFM is a school for teaching the art of loving through the present-day realities of family life. With every couple joining CFM there is the prayer and hope that, given two or three years under the discipline of the movement, love will find a trysting place in another neighborhood.

CFM Procedure

Probably the greatest thing the storefronts did was to teach the meaning of love to the staff and volunteers. It helped close the gap in communications between the "haves" and the "have-nots." Somehow the affluent must come to a firsthand knowledge of the people in our pockets of poverty and our racial islands. A graph or a table plotting incomes and places is not enough. Ordinarily there must be some emotional experience supporting the knowledge if love is to flame. This CVM attempts to provide by its discussion-action method. Slowly and haltingly it leads people through a feet-wetting process to discovering Christ in others.

CFM is aware that if its concept of love is genuine, it must reach beyond the patio and the barbecue pit. Without divorcing themselves from the challenge of love in their own backyard, each couple must see a neighborhood in the context of the entire metropolitan area and widen their vision to a concern for the blacks in the Union of South Africa. With our residential areas stratified according to incomes, the eliciting of this emotional experience of the needs of other categories of peoples demands creative programming and discerning local leadership.

CFM usually starts in a parish unostentatiously. Following the outlines suggested for beginners, the couples begin to explore a new way of life. It is an exciting adventure for a couple who, after years of married life, have tended to take each other, the children, the home and all they have in common, for granted. Conversation has a tendency to descend to

World reaction to the prospect of an ecumenical council on behalf of church unity must have been extremely encouraging to the Pope. The dramatic decision of John XXIII, which burst upon the public on January 25, was in the main interpreted quite favorably by those who have no particular reason to indulge in perfunctory applause. Orthodox and Protestant leaders, as well as editorialists in the secular press, displayed their unmistakable interest in the Pope's plan and their sincere respect for his motives. His announcement was taken as something to be expected from one whose personality had already established itself in the popular mind as that of an amiable man who wants to be friends with everyone.

Indeed, from all indications, the proposal was the Pope's own idea; it is certainly stamped with his generous and expansive character. There is every reason to expect that the Holy Father will try to start the Fathers of the council off in a mood of conciliation comparable to his own. In the meantime it is already evident that the mere anticipation of a general council under the sign of unity has put this old and much-argued problem on an entirely new basis in everyone's mind. Of itself, the Pope's decision indicates that the Catholic Church believes the time is ripe for serious new initiatives to resolve the tragic historic division of Christians.

What will all this lead to? Speculation is, of course, very hazardous at this stage. One can only size up the elements of the situation, examine the moods of the interested parties and then make an extrapolation from the present state of minds to situations that may materialize in the next few years. As one reads the mass of statements issued by both Orthodox and Protestant leaders after the news broke, it is obvious that the instant, articulate response was nothing less than the explosion of pent-up feelings and thoughts. In these statements two themes recur. Together they indicate, each in its own way, the two dominant elements of hope and doubt that may be expected to be at work in all hearts.

On the one hand, it is evident that the unity of all those who invoke the name of Jesus Christ is an aspiration which means a great deal indeed to non-Catholic Christians. The desire of Christ, expressed so clearly and so often in the gospels, is in striking contrast to present religious divisions. In this common desire for the unity of Christians, no doubt divinely inspired, lies the best hope for its ultimate realization.

On the other hand, a pessimistic note tempers the praise of the Pope's plan. Orthodox and Protestant spokesmen raise points on which they are convinced Rome will not yield. The difficulties—let us be candid about it—of a union with the Catholic Church loom so large at this moment as to seem beyond the possibility of resolution. So set is each of the two major parties on its own standpoint that no compromise formula compatible with the convictions of all concerned appears anywhere on the horizon. If the Catholics are resolute and frank in expounding their own minimum conditions of reconciliation, the Orthodox and Protestants are no less vehement in their rejection of these conditions. Not even the kindly and humane new Pontiff can conjure away a thousand years of theological and historical problems that will confront the 21st Ecumenical Council, to be convened in 1961 in quest of Church unity.

While it is customary to link the Orthodox and the various Protestant denominations in any discussion of the ecumenical movement, these two groups are, as is well known, quite different in the challenge they present from the Catholic point of view. In each case a distinct set of theological and historical issues is at play. In the coming months, therefore, it will be necessary for observers of the preparations for the council to keep this in mind.

Reactions Among the Orthodox

On the side of the dissident Eastern Churches, undoubtedly the man to watch is Athenagoras I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. This prelate's own subjects are reckoned at only two million (by contrast, for instance, with the 7.35 million Orthodox in Greece, not to speak of the 125 million who recognize the Patriarch of Moscow). But the see of Constantinople is "first among equals" and bears the prestige of ancient Byzantium, the "New Rome." Athenagoras studied in the United States where, according to reports, he came to know and admire the Catholic Church. In the past few years he has been quite outspoken in advocating an end to the divisions of East and West. In 1952 the late Pope Pius XII sent to the Patriarch, through the Apostolic Delegate in Istanbul, a commemorative medal of the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The Patriarch on this occasion warmly received the Delegate and devoutly kissed the medal which, need, it be said, represented a belief particularly dear to the Eastern Churches.

It is doubtful that the Pope has ever met the Ecumenical Patriarch personally. That they have been in communication recently is known from the Patriarch's own declaration. It is possible that the Orthodox leader's reaction to the Pope's Christmas appeal for unity was the deciding factor that led to the decision on the general council. In his own New Year message the Patriarch referred to the Christmas appeal at length: "We gladly welcome," he said, "every sincere appeal for the sake of peace in the Church. And our gladness is naturally the greater when such a Church union appeal comes from a Christian center such as Old Rome." He urged that every call for unity be "accompanied by such concrete deeds and actions as are necessary to prove our intentions in full harmony with our words...." At the time, these words appeared only to reflect the Patriarch's known hope of achieving some common practical action among all Christians in the ideological fight against communism. Now it is necessary to view them in the light of the soundings that Pope John XXIII was at that moment undertaking on the opportuneness of an ecumenical council.

The words of Athenagoras should not be overestimated. Few, if any, other Orthodox leaders are on the record in such terms. It may be wondered, in fact, just how far the Patriarch's views are supported by the clergy and laity of his own jurisdiction. Indeed, even he had to add his own note of caution: "Such a uniting of spiritual forces is, of course, not possible in the present state of division and discord which has existed for centuries."