Dialogue Document
Heaven and Earth are Full of Your Glory: A United Methodist and Roman Catholic Statement on the Eucharist and Ecology (2012)
Heaven and Earth are Full of Your Glory: A United Methodist and Roman Catholic Statement on the Eucharist and Ecology, April 13, 2012
Preamble
On May 9, 2008, Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church and Bishop William S. Skylstad of the United States Conference of Bishops agreed on a mandate for the seventh round of the dialogue between their churches. They would assemble an equal number of scholars and theologians from both churches to discuss the precise topic, “The Eucharist and Stewardship of God’s Creation.” The stated goal was to produce a consensus document, the exact scope of which was left for the participants to determine. At subsequent meetings, the members decided to aim at a document that would raise up for our respective church memberships issues about the Eucharist and the environment for reflection, prayer and action. It also became clear in the course of the meetings that the sources of Catholic teaching about the Eucharist were not matched by similar sources for the United Methodist partners, and vice versa. For example, unlike Catholics, United Methodists give great theological weight to hymn texts sung at the Eucharist. All of our respective theological, magisterial and liturgical sources were mined and discussed in the course of the dialogue with great respect, profound learning and mutual enrichment on both sides.
As we present this agreed statement, we realize only too well its limitations. We aimed to frame the statement according to the historic liturgy of both churches. In doing so we respected the ancient axiom, lex orandi, lex credendi (“what the church prays is what the church believes”). At the same time we also fully realize that this statement does not reflect the breadth of what either church holds to be the total content of its Eucharistic belief or practice. Catholics and United Methodists will not find in this text all of their Churches’ pivotal theological understandings of what the Eucharist is and does. But in the end we judged that our mandate was more focused and precise. This agreed statement is modest, focused, grounded in what we can say together and what we could say to each other. Our task was to put these two rich traditions in dialogue and to discuss them in words and to pray about them together in the Liturgy of the Hours and the Eucharist (experiencing painfully the lack of full communion which prohibits intercommunion). No document can say everything, especially an ecumenical document of this sort. All such ecumenical documents are a work in progress about the topic(s) at hand and about the movement to grow together in faith and practice with the eventual goal that “all may be one.” We submit this text to the faithful of both our churches for their consideration in the hope that it will elicit prayerful and critical discussion not only about out differences but also about how much we share as Christians.