The Sudbury Massachusetts United Methodist Church held a worship service to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first time a Roman Catholic Cardinal spoke at a Protestant church. The service attracted an overflow crowd of more than 500. When Cardinal Richard Cushing spoke in the church in 1964, Catholics and Protestants were deeply wary of each other.
Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean O’Malley led the service. The only female clergy to participate in the service was Anne Robertson, a Methodist minister.
During the service Robertson and a Catholic priest on their way to an overflow group in a side room, stopped in front of O’Malley to receive a ceremonial drop of consecrated “holy water” on their foreheads from the cardinal. Cardinal O’Malley asked Robertson to return the favor.
“My heart immediately went to my throat,” Robertson said. “To be asked that by the man who might be pope someday – I was stunned. I was choking back tears for hours.”
“What moved me was not so much that I was anointing him,” she said. “It was him being willing to accept that from my hand – to ask me, as a woman in ministry, to do that.”
The ecumenical movement, which has a lot of emotional elements, has gained a lot of traction in recent times, and is drawing Protestants right back into the bosom of Rome.
“All the World Wondered…” Revelation 13:3