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For the Association of Interchurch Families in England there have been three outstanding events in 1998. First, Fr John Coventry, SJ, founder-member of AIF in 1968, Co-chair 1968-97 and President 1997-1998, died in April. Second, the first bilingual World Gathering of Interchurch Families was held in Geneva in July, hosted by foyers mixtes but bringing together both French and English-speaking families. Third, the Bishops of England and Wales, in association with the Bishops of Scotland and Ireland, issued their long-awaited guidelines on eucharistic sharing for interchurch families in October, in the context of a teaching document on the eucharist, One Bread One Body.
There are many echoes from Geneva in this number of Interchurch Families. We shall return later to a study of One Bread One Body (AIF’s initial response is available on request). We shall also return to the subject of John Coventry’s contribution to the theology and pastoral care of interchurch families. In the meantime we are glad to print this tribute to him by Fr Michael Hurley, SJ, founder of the Irish School of Ecumenics, who will give the first John Coventry Memorial Lecture at 2.15 pm on 6th March 1999 at Heythrop College, London (details from AIF).
John Coventry, SJ
In October 1969, John Coventry and I were both in Chicago attending a meeting of the International Congress of Jesuit Ecumenists; these take place every two years. Dublin was chosen as the venue for the 1971 Congress with John as President and me as Secretary. That was how John and I came to work closely together.
When the Irish School of Ecumenics (ISE) began in Dublin the year after Chicago, John gave it every encouragement and support. During the 1970s we so arranged things that, as soon as second teaching term was over at Heythrop and in Cambridge, but ISE was still in session, John would come across and take a short course with double periods on ‘Interchurch Marriage’.
John played a large part in the preparations for ISE’s 1974 International Consultation on Mixed Marriage, the proceedings of which were published the following year under the title Beyond Tolerance. He introduced me to Gordon Dunstan of King’s College, London, and to Adrian Hastings, both of whom made particularly significant contributions to the Consultation. John himself contributed two papers, one on ‘Positions and Trends in Britain’ and the other on ‘Baptising the Children’, and he was the principal drafter of the ‘Final Statement’.
It was from John and Gordon Dunstan that the idea originated of an annual ISE London lecture, held at King’s College. This began in 1977 and continued until quite recently; it gave an English platform to some distinguished Irish academics of all religious and political traditions and helped in its own way to give the infant ISE some status and stature in the older, larger academic world.
John’s visits to Ireland were not confined to the South. At the 1974 International Consultation in Dublin he made friends with members of the Northern Ireland Mixed Marriage Association (NIMMA) who invited him to address their first weekend conference at Corrymeela in North Antrim in January 1976. For many years afterwards his annual visit to ISE included an overnight stay in Belfast, meeting NIMMA members and saying a house mass for them.
John was generous in sharing himself, his time, his energies, his experience and his expertise. He made a special visit to Dublin in 1993 to help launch the Festschrift which Oliver Rafferty, also of the British Jesuit Province, edited for my 70th birthday. I was very happy therefore to accept the invitation to give the first John Coventry Memorial Lecture and very honoured, of course, to receive it.
Michael Hurley, SJ
7.1.1
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Published by the Association of Interchurch Families, England
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