CHAPTER 4: MONASTIC VOCATION WITH ECUMENICAL IMPLICATIONS 129 academic and ecclesiastical debates and dialogues). The themes of model and sign will be explored in more detail in section 6.4. 4.2 LIVED ECUMENISM AS CATALYST FOR ECUMENICAL COMMITMENT The interviewees were not primarily attracted by the ecumenical mission of the communities they chose to join. Yet today, they fully participate in a mission they now consider of the utmost importance. With respect to their ecumenical awareness and commitment, their life stories are marked by either of two characteristic experiences. BF, TB, and TC express a radical change in their perspective when they encountered Bose and Taizé. All three of them indicate that they were not used to ecumenical contacts; they only recall very few and specific examples of ecumenical encounters prior to their introduction to the ecumenical communities. They grew up in rather exclusive Catholic or Protestant environments and experienced the confrontation with other Christians in the monasteries as something totally new. The other group, consisting of BE, BG, and TA, experienced more continuity between their youth and their life in the communities. Yet, for them too, the encounter with the communities they chose to join inaugurated a new phase in their ecumenical commitment. “A new world:” Discovery of ecumenism To start with the former group: BF, for instance, only brings up two examples of people he met in his youth whom he knew to belong to churches other than the Roman Catholic Church. He recalls: We had a neighbor in our building, an Arminian lady who was probably Orthodox. But we never really knew her, it was not a question of discussion. And, with the youth group, we helped the poor of the parish by collecting wastepaper. One of the families we assisted was Waldensians, but again, we knew no more than to respect them in a different way and the relationship was with people in need, no matter of their belief or Christian belonging.308 His relationship with people of other confessions was not so much ecumenical in nature but rather diaconal. Non-Catholics where merely an odd exception in his context. BF’s ecumenical awareness only awakened when he was introduced to Bose. That was the first time he actually got to know non-Catholic 308 BF-1,2b.
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