Mission, Ecumenism, and cricket in Rome

Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby with Fr Robert McCulloch in Rome. - Photo: Fr Robert McCulloch SSC

Some people say to me: “So, you live in Rome. You’re supposed to be a missionary. That doesn’t sound very missionary.”

It certainly wasn’t said to St Peter when he moved from Jerusalem to Antioch in Syria, which was the New York of the Roman Empire, and then to Rome about AD 50 so that the missionary work of the new church could be better organised. I think it’s a matter of perspective and vision for the future instead of just sitting in the past. Three cheers for St Peter because he stayed in Rome even though he lost his life and was martyred. That’s not my fate but my being in Rome has opened for me wide horizons about the meaning, purpose, and future of mission, not least being the ecumenical horizon and opening for mission that living in Rome offers.

The dourly uninformed grit their teeth and say “Rome and ecumenism? Impossible!” Sitting on the terrace of the residence of the Methodist minister and her husband in Rome on the evening of June 29, this year, just 300 metres from St Peter’s Basilica and directly opposite Castel Sant Angelo, to have dinner with ecumenical friends and to watch the fireworks presented by the city of Rome to celebrate the feast of its patrons, Saints Peter and Paul, confounds such grim negativity. I as a Columban, together with an Irish priest working in the Vatican office for ecumenism, Salvation Army officers, a theologian of the Waldensian Church and his wife, the vicar of All Saints Anglican Church Rome and his wife, and the coordinator for Lutheran theological students coming to Rome to study, came together at the invitation of Rev. Sarah Mae Gubayo, a Methodist of Filipino background who was born in Italy and her husband Janos, who is an ordained minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church and a research scholar at the Pontifical Angelicum University Rome, which is run by the Dominicans.

This sort of ecumenical encounter happens all the time in Rome. I was the first to welcome Sarah Mae and Janos when they arrived in September 2023. Cordial and heart-felt ecumenical relations and connections are characteristic of my being a Columban in Rome.

I grew up in a family where ecumenism was lived and breathed before anyone was using the term and where friendships, mutual encounters and social services softened the boundaries of our Christian divisions and made us comfortable with one another as we lived out our faith. I was a little boy seeing and watching and listening and that little boy learnt those great values that are now grandly called ecumenism.

I volunteered to go to the new Columban mission in Pakistan in 1978. The hostility then of Muslims towards Christians as a despised religious minority was tangible, although I, as a Catholic priest, did not face this personally. What horrified me was the animosity between Christians of the various denominations. It seemed then that most Catholic clergy were still unaware of the decree of Vatican II on ecumenism, Nostra aetate. When I became Academic Dean of the National Catholic Institute of Theology (NCIT) in Karachi in 2002, I invited the Church of Pakistan (Anglican) bishop in Karachi to teach Greek, the Rev. Gerard Mull from St Thomas Church of Pakistan Theological College to teach Hebrew, and I facilitated the exchange of priests teaching at NCIT to lecture at St Thomas. NCIT staff became the preferred retreat preachers for ordination students at St Thomas.

Coming to Rome in 2011 was the opportunity for my commitment to ecumenism to flourish and bear even more fruit.

I arrived in Rome at a time when the seeds of ecumenism, sowed in hope by Pope Paul VI, 50 years ago, were taking root and flowering. The Presbyterian Church, the Methodist International Fellowship, the American Episcopalian Church, the Lutherans, the Baptists, and the Anglican Church - I, as a Columban missionary have walked with, participated with, and acted with them in making Rome, the centre of the Catholic Church, one of the most credible and creditable centres of effective ecumenism.

Here is an example of what can and is being done. Since October 2023, Rev Tara Curlewis has been the minister at St Andrew’s Church of Scotland in Rome and is the personal representative of the Presbyterian Church and the Reformed Churches at the Vatican. Tara is from Australia. Just a few days after her arrival, I welcomed her for lunch at the Columban house in Rome. One of her predecessors was quite different. I visited him in January 2012. He was from Glasgow. He hated Rome and loathed Roman Catholics, didn’t care at all for St Mary of the Cross McKillop whose father was from Scotland and had studied in Rome, and was only in Rome because he couldn’t get an appointment anywhere else. Thank God, the Presbyterian lights came on after he left and have continued to shine in Tara’s ministry and presence in Rome.

2013 was the beginning of my special and deep relations with the Anglican Church in Rome and beyond to Canterbury. That year Archbishop Sir David Moxon arrived from Wellington in New Zealand to be the director of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the personal representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Vatican. We immediately began to plan and talk and do much together. The same year, John McCarthy, the new Australian Ambassador to the Holy See, arrived and manifested his addiction to cricket. He began immediately to plan for a Vatican XI to challenge the Archbishop of Canterbury’s XI. I was Ambassador McCarthy’s first cricket board member. From the ecumenical dynamism of Archbishop Moxon, the cricket enthusiasm of Ambassador John McCarthy, and my own commitment to both endeavours emerged my enduring link with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral.

In August 2014, Pope Francis’s XI played the Archbishop of Canterbury’s XI at Kent County Cricket Ground in Canterbury. The Catholics allowed the Anglicans to win at the 5th ball of the final over. The papal nuncio was present, together with a fine gathering of Anglican and Catholic bishops. It was a grand day and what great things ecumenical have come from it!

I returned to Canterbury later in 2014 for the celebration of the feast of St Thomas Becket on 29 December. I took the opportunity to arrange with Archbishop Justin Welby and Dean Robert Willis for Cardinal George Pell to celebrate Mass at the high altar of the cathedral. Through their warm and expansive ecumenical hospitality, this took place the following year on July 7, 2015. It was the first time that a Catholic cardinal had celebrated Mass at the high altar since Cardinal Reginald Pole in 1558.

Six months later in January 2016 was the opportunity for us to return this ecumenical hospitality. Archbishop Welby had called all the leading Anglican archbishops from around the world for a crisis meeting at Canterbury about teaching on doctrinal and moral matters affecting the unity of the Anglican Communion. I took from Rome to Canterbury for this meeting the crozier of Pope St Gregory the Great as a symbol of Catholic prayer and ecumenical concern for the Anglicans during this important and difficult meeting. It was Pope St Gregory who sent St Augustine of Canterbury in 596 to convert the English. While vesting for Evensong in the cathedral at the end of the first day of the meeting, Archbishop Welby said to me: “Pope St Gregory has saved the Anglican Communion.” We pray for his continuing intercession.

The crozier Archbishop Welby now uses in Canterbury Cathedral is a replica of Pope St Gregory’s crozier. Pope Francis presented it to him during an ecumenical service in Rome in October 2016 at the Basilica of St Gregory the Great. Other significant ecumenical events have happened, including the celebration for the first time of Anglican Evensong in St Peter’s Basilica in March 2017 with the choir of Merton College Oxford singing and presided over by Archbishop Sir David Moxon and Cardinal George Pell.

Great ecumenical events happen but their sure foundation is the ongoing growth in harmony and working towards the unity of all Christians for which Our Lord prayed. I cannot see how ecumenism can be separated from my vocation and ministry as a missionary priest.

As a postscript, the Dean of Canterbury has invited me to preach in the cathedral on December 29, 2024, for the feast of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket. And so continue the effects of that game of cricket we planned in 2013.

Columban Fr Robert McCulloch lives and works in Rome.