By Michael Miner
Besides the Lutherans, the churches celebrating the painstakingly negotiated “formula of agreement” at Rockefeller Chapel were the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reformed Church in America, and United Church of Christ. These denominations represent a total membership of ten and a half million people. Only a dim knowledge of the schisms, heresies, and doctrinal wars that have fouled two millennia of Christian history is needed to appreciate that this was a big day. “We gather to recognize each other as churches in which the gospel is rightly preached,” said the general secretary of the Reformed Church, as leaders of the four denominations gathered around a baptismal font. The presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church said, “We gather to repent of the ways we have condemned each other, to recognize our mutual baptism.”
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If nothing else, said Shafer, the ceremony offered a terrific photo op–representatives of four churches filing in full regalia along four aisles to converge and parade as one body to the front of the crowded chapel. “We have been blinded to our essential unity in the faith, and this has kept us apart,” preached the Reverend James Echols, president of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, leading his audience into historical waters perhaps too deep for a brief news story to fathom. “When we look back, we see that the Marburg Colloquy, with its differing interpretations of the sacramental presence of Christ in the holy meal, blinded us to our essential unity.”
“Goodness knows, there’s plenty of Protestant leaders in Chicago we should be talking to more often,” Ahern said the other day when I asked her to elaborate. But journalists don’t necessarily enjoy covering plenty of leaders. Life’s simpler when they can turn to one or two old reliables and consider the job done. “I really do come back to Cardinal Bernardin, who turned everything around, having one central figure everyone can turn to,” Ahern told me. “The archdiocese is right downtown, and think about all the press conferences Bernardin would call–not just on church-related issues but on the death penalty, El Salvador, a vote in Congress. It’s a ready-made story, you got a minute-30–what else do you need?
“She said what Abigail Adams said a long time ago–‘Remember the ladies,’” says festival president Eileen Mackevich. “I took her point.”
“I hope they do,” says Delacoma.
The Sun-Times front-loaded last Saturday’s lead story on George Ryan and the truckers’ licenses. Headlined “Ryan pal derailed probe–ex-agent,” the piece immediately got to the good stuff: former secretary of state investigator Russell Sonneveld was claiming that he’d wanted to look into whether Ricardo Guzman got his truck driver’s license illegally, but was shooed off by a “top aide and longtime friend” of Ryan. Guzman was the trucker involved in the 1994 accident near Milwaukee in which six children were killed.
