Healing and Hope: Memories of an Irish Ecumenist

The author has been involved in the movement for Christian Unity in Ireland and overseas since 9 March 1960. On that date he gave a Milltown Park Public Lecture on the topic in Dublin and, as he puts it himself, ‘was never allowed to look back’, such was the general interest at the time. In this book Michael Hurley SJ reflects on his forty years and more of ecumenical experience. Its pre-history is covered in an early chapter. Here he reviews his pre-1960 years - his boyhood in Ardmore, Co Waterford with its ecclesiastical remains and post-Reformation Church of Ireland parish, his Jesuit studies in Louvain and Rome as well as here at home - in a search for the possible seeds of his ecumenical vocation. In this chapter he also sketches in outline some of the highlights of his ecumenical apostolate or ministry. He notes the fact that as far as he and his superiors were concerned this apostolate was not foreseen, not planned; such are the strange ways of Providence. Three chapters are devoted to Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian ‘Memories’, two chapters to ‘Catholic Memories’. These are followed by ‘Memories’‘ from the author’s stay on Mount Athos in September 1980 and from his visit to China in March of the following year. The last chapter, entitled 'Ecumenism: Forty Years in the Desert?’ explores the biblical meaning of ‘the desert’‘ and of the figure 'forty’‘ and concludes on a positive note: our forty years wandering in an ecumenical wilderness will surely bring us to the promised land of Christian Unity and so we travel with hope.