Challenged by ecumenism

Abstract

Through pointing to internal challenges related to the Catholic church identity and self-understanding, this chapter critically analyzes its approach to ecumenical responses to the European migration crisis. The article suggests the need to depower the church, that it must surrender its power to build authority in public matters and to regain her moral authority to hold a common Christian position in respect to public hospitality. There is a blind-spot in faith-traditions in the interpretation of who the neighbor is – without the religious other, there is no Christian practice of hospitality. The Catholic church must prove that it is not for hospitality to take attention away from its own internal challenges and external allegations. Hospitality must entail freedom of religion, and spaces for it, and embrace challenges to own truth claims. The article discusses shame in relation to migration, the sense of shame of the drowned bodies on our shores. However, hospitality cannot be founded on guilt, it needs another locus. The author suggests this to be outside the churches themselves, in a reinvention of the urban character of church in globalized civilization.