He continued: “I began to wonder what it means to belong to a religion and, in fact, what a religion is. I’m planning my life, thinking of becoming a priest, and these kinds of questions are very present within me.” One of Kargm’s closest friends in the student residence is a Protestant young man. Both of them are big fans of the German soccer team Bayern Munich, which brought them together from the very beginning.
For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, on Jan. 25 the students of the Studienjahr enlivened the prayer in the Upper Room — which is just a few meters from the Dormition Abbey and where Jesus is believed to have shared the Last Supper with his apostles before his passion — with song and music. Passed down through the generations, the room has been incorporated into the Jewish complex of the “Tomb of David” and is available for Christian use only a few days a year.
“Music is a very good approach to ecumenism because it is universal: Everybody can relate to it and the feeling that the music conveys brings us all together,” Johanna Wirth, a member of the choir of students, told CNA after the ecumenical prayer on Thursday evening, adding: “In this room, listening to the same music or singing the same songs brings us together.”
Wirth, a Lutheran, attends the Studienjahr program. She told CNA that being in contact with different Christian and religious traditions in Jerusalem “challenges me, because I have to go out of my comfort zone and question my own faith, because it is questioned by others — by their traditions, by their prayers … In the end, all that makes me go back to my own tradition even more than before: I learn to appreciate what I have in my own tradition and I also gain a lot of positive things from other traditions and religions.”
The prayer in the Upper Room was presided over by the Benedictine abbot of Dormition, Father Nikodemus Schnabel, an expert in ecumenical studies and the Eastern churches.
“We are really one of the ecumenical places in Jerusalem. The Last Supper Room is above any denomination and specificity, because it is not a church, it doesn’t belong to any of the churches,” Schnabel said. “This is the place of the Pentecost, the place of the Last Supper, of the washing of the feet, of the first apostles’ council. What happened here is a heritage and vocation to really be engaged in ecumenism.”
Schnabel continued: “I feel the prayer of the Lord ‘that they all may be one’ is more and more important these days because we’re a hotspot of anti-Christian hate. All this anti-Christian hatred by Jewish extremists is never ‘death to the Catholics,’ ‘death to the Orthodox,’ ‘death to the Lutherans’ — it is ‘death to the Christian,’” he said. “Enemies of Christianity are more ecumenical in their thinking than we as Christians… We should learn from the people who hate us.”
During the prayer evening, Schnabel shared his dream that next year in 2025 — “when Eastern and Western churches will celebrate Easter and Pentecost together, and 1,700 years after the Council of Nicea that all Christians accept — we can gather all the heads of the Churches together in the Upper Room. It would be a strong sign to the world from Jerusalem that we are united as Christians.”
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
Born and raised in Italy, Marinella Bandini has been a professional journalist since 2008. She works for several news agencies and online newspapers in the Catholic space. Currently based in Jerusalem, she collaborates with the Custody of the Holy Land.
Credit: Source link
