142 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT Eucharist and in order to enable the entire community to partake of it together, the brothers who were ordained pastors in non-Catholic traditions chose to abstain from presiding over the community’s Eucharistic liturgy. This was further inspired by the high hopes for an imminent restoration of full visible unity between the churches. And then I understood uh, understood that the brothers~ and this was this quite original idea ... that they... most the brother who have, who are ordained pastors didn't celebrate anymore, when I came... they didn't preside anymore, because they hadmade a sort of choice to say, if... to renounce to celebrate for some time... waiting for things to be settled, could help, uh, that you don't have the situation of, of demands of each side, a kind of symmetric demands, but that is, we, we recognize that the Eucharist has been, more present in the Catholic Church, more central... that there are different forms in the Protestant churches, different traditions, and... and if, if that would help, to say, we recognize that we are... a bit younger brothers in that... in this regard, we would accept. And that is what I understood here, as a young brother. A sort of, not, not seeing the whole thing as a negotiation, and sort of positions, strength, and of... theological agreement only, but that there was something else. There was readiness also to yield to the others, to, to... to... say, yes... And it's in this context, and, and that was not so easy for everybody here. Maybe for some brothers, but mainly also for people, that then, in the seventies… no sorry, in the eighties um, it became more and more clear that would not happen like this, this agreement, not so quickly... ... and then it was very important, that, and that is what I understood also for the brothers to be able to receive Holy Communion together, and that was possible in the Catholic celebrations.346 This shows straight away that the Taizé-style is not only about integration and inclusion of different spiritual resources but also about sacrifice. The community’s desire to celebrate the Eucharist together even outgrew the individual pastors’ wish to preside over it. The gesture of the pastors is highly impactful: it sparked in TB the understanding that ecumenism is not about a negotiation of power. This does not mean that power is absent. TB and TC both indicate that the community took this turn because the preceding practice in which Protestant and Catholic ministers alternately presided over the Eucharist proved insufficient, since the Catholic Church would not accept that the 346 TB-1,4d.
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