Musings from Porto Alegre

Bishop Richard J. Sklba's "Herald of Hope" column in the March 9, 2006 edition of our Catholic Herald is on his recent trip to the meeting of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The trip included a few geography lessons as I discovered a thriving metropolis even further south than the bottom of Africa ...

You recall that Bishop Sklba had a bit of a problem with history and physics. He has a bit of a problem with geography, too. Look at a map and it's no surprise that Porto Alegre is at latitude 30° 03' South while Cape Town, South Africa, is at 33° 55' South (about 275 miles or 450 kilometers further south).

He doesn't make it sound like religion is his strong suit, either.

As recently reported in the [sic] Catholic Herald, I was asked to take Cardinal Kasper's place in a Bate Papo (the Brazilian word for an informal conversation) with a young woman from the Netherlands who worked as a campus minister for the Reformed Church (a daunting task for me on all levels), and together to address the question of "whether there was a place for Christianity in the 21st century." We each held our own in the dialogue across the generational divide and the issues of contemporary western secularity.

I had the idea that for a bishop a conversation with a campus minister wouldn't be daunting, and the bishop would be expected to do more than hold his own.

Not surprisingly at a WCC event, that wasn't his only dialogue.

Pentecostals and others generally grouped under the label of "Evangelicals" now comprise almost 20 percent of the world's Christians ... some open to ecumenical cooperation (and even publicly apologizing for having taken advantage of Catholicism's weakness in Latin America) and others (often funded by American resources) quite opposed to any religious dialogue.

I live in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, which is also funded by American resources, yet Catholicism seems a bit weak here, too. For example, our auxiliary bishop leads us to believe he could do more than hold his own if up against an evangelical campus minister.

Update: In the WCC account, Bishop Sklba met his match in vagueness.