Seeking to heal centuries-old rifts between Christians

When Christians from different denominations converged on Our Lady Queen of Peace Catholic Church in South B, Nairobi, last Saturday, one woman stood head and shoulders above the rest – not just figuratively, but also literally.

Standing 5’8”, Lady Kate Davson is certainly endowed with height — and more. A widow for the last 10 years, the peace ambassador of the International Ecumenical Fellowship (IEF) is of rare descent.

“I am very proud of my ancestry, that I am a great-great-great granddaughter of William Wilberforce, the man most responsible for leading the campaign to end the slave trade and slavery in the 18th-19th century.

Actually, he spent more than 40 years of his life actively involved in this campaign, which finally ended in success two days before he died, so he died with a light heart, “ she told DN2.

A former International President of the IEF, a grassroots fellowship founded in 1967, Lady Kate links her passion for ecumenism — the ideal of uniting, in reconciled diversity, the different branches of the Christian faith, to her descent from William Wilberforce.

In a recent interview, she explained why she thought her famous ancestor was a factor in her passion for ecumenism.

“At a certain point in my life, suddenly the penny dropped, and I became aware that his example, that his courage, was what set me on my way with ecumenism; that I became passionately involved in my campaign for the unity of Christianity.”

Pressed further on why she thought William Wilberforce was her ecumenical exemplar, she shied away from drawing direct links. After all, by the time she started to see the anti-slavery icon as a factor in her Christian unity mission, she was well advanced in her involvement with ecumenism. Nonetheless, she saw William Wilberforce as an “example of courage and persistence in the face of enormous opposition,” which, she says, gave her the courage and the example to follow.

An acknowledged worldwide expert in European ceramics in which she was actively engaged for more than 40 years, Lady Kate describes her current interest in ceramic ware as “fringe”.

“I’m no longer involved commercially with them... Now I’m just involved with it for the beauty of the object and for the friendships that I made over those 40 years.”

Brought up in a Christian family, Lady Kate is on a twin mission to Kenya.

The International Ecumenical Movement Kenya Chapter (IEM-K), (IEF Africa was launched in Uganda in 2013), invited her to help it reach out to the leaders of Christian denominations ahead of a regional ecumenical conference in 2016.

Lady Kate also joined worshippers in marking the end of the 2015 Week of Prayers for Christian Unity in South B.

During the interview, she delved into the sensitive subject of inter-denominational strife, and how the wounds it inflicted on her family have festered for decades.

William Wilberforce, she said, had four sons. His two daughters died when they were young adults.

Although they were all Anglican initially, three of the sons, two of whom were already Anglican priests, converted to Roman Catholicism, attracted by the famous Oxford Movement, and abandoned their brother, Samuel Wilberforce.

Samuel was, in fact, Bishop of Oxford at the time his brothers converted to Roman Catholicism.

“This dramatic departure from the family tore the family apart,” Lady Kate says, adding: “The historical wounds of that division were could still be felt when I was growing up. My mother was appalled when one of my sisters married a Roman Catholic.”

While she notes, to her mother’s credit, that she got over her hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and became a great ecumenist, the real healing of the wounds inflicted by the denominational rift within the family is much more recent.

The full impact of the division, she says, was felt on March 27, 2007 — the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade Act — at a commemoration service attended by Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey that brought together 40 of William Wilberforce’s descendants.

Although many more traceable family members were locked out of the international service, which could only accommodate 40 of William Wilberforce’s progeny, Lady Kate describes the reunion as an “operation of reconciliation and healing of the family” and “a form of ecumenism”.

During the service, she was charged with reciting William Wilberforce’s mission statement that reads: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners”.

After the service, she said, 85 direct descendants of William Wilberforce, and some of their children, but excluding their spouses, met at the British Parliament. Despite the great reunion, it will take a lot longer to heal the wounds of more than 150 years.

Lady Kate ponders the rifts among the various Christian denominations, which go against the unity message of Jesus Christ, and which theologians consider scandalous: “The wounds of history are very mysterious, but they run very deep and if they are not dealt with fairly quickly, they fester, and there’s a bitterness which is deep down”, calling for forgiveness.

“Not that there is anything in today’s time to forgive, really; they’re still Christians, so why should we have to be forgiving each other, except that we need to forgive anybody whom we have hurt, or in whose history we’ve been part of a hurt?” she wondered.

Living in a small town called Rye in Sussex, which had Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Baptist churches and a Quaker Meeting, Lady Kate recalls how the churches had been involved in learning from each and worshipping together every so often. It started in wartime when different priests and pastors felt they had to act together. “In times of trouble, we have to be seen to be acting together,” she said.

Her involvement in international ecumenism goes back to 1994, when the undersea tunnel connecting England and France was officially opened to ease crossing between the two countries. The ecumenical group in her town asked themselves: “How can we get nearer to our friends on the other side?”

“We remembered our history that for 300 years, our town had belonged to the Benedictine monks of a small town called Fécamp in Normandy.”

The tunnel, Lady Kate said, was an obvious mission to renew their links with the French town. What followed was a programme of exchange visits between the two parishes in England and France.

That is how the group linked up with the IEF, which was holding a conference in the UK in 1994. They were invited to the conference, which, according to Lady Kate, hooked her to international ecumenism.

She explains: “When we arrived as total strangers, we were greeted very warmly. We were not asked which denomination we came from. We were not asked if we were lay or ordained, and we were caught up in the warmth and the joy of that fellowship with delegates from 12 or 13 different nations and from about 25 different denominations.”

Since then, the IEF has held conferences every year in a different country through national groups (regions) in 10 different countries of Europe, including those previously behind the Iron Curtain, like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Rumania.

Their joining the IEF was “a matter of great rejoicing because they were mostly people who had found their Christianity in an underground church...

They not only brought the joy of being able to be free with their faith, but were mostly young people, and this gave an injection of fresh life into our fellowship,” the IEF peace ambassador says, without glossing over obstacles to full reconciliation.

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How the ordination of women led to a rift between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches

Despite great efforts to reunite Roman Catholics and Anglicans, the question of women priests remains divisive.

It is, therefore, a testimony to Kenyan ecumenists’ commitment to the oneness of the Church that at this year’s service of prayers for Christian unity, a young Presbyterian woman minister, the Reverend Dawn Gikandi of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa in Bahati, Nairobi, was picked to preach the sermon at a Catholic church – Our Lady Queen of Peace, South B Parish in Nairobi.

Although it is a tradition at such prayers for the host church to welcome a preacher from a different denomination, female preachers are rare.

During an interview with Lady Kate Davson, the peace ambassador of the International Ecumenical Fellowship (IEF), she revisited issue of women’s ordination and how Pope Benedict’s welcoming of disaffected Anglican priests widened the Rome-Canterbury rift.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was then Rowan Williams, and Pope Benedict were on very good terms. They exchanged visits, and as theologians, they were great scholars together, so that for the Archbishop of Canterbury, it came as an absolute shock, that without the Pope having said anything to him about this, and, indeed, the Pope did not even inform his UK bishops conference, that suddenly, de facto, there is what is called the ordinariate, which opens its doors to disillusioned Anglican priests, who are opposed to the ordination of women,” Lady Kate said.

She added: “And, despite the fact that many of them are married, they (Rome) welcome the married priests as well, and their families. Not only that, but they also welcome their congregations, so that in one fell swoop, a parish could find itself without a priest and with half of the congregation who didn’t feel in the same way left without a shepherd.”

The shock was total and the reaction passionate. “It was almost contempt that a man of God could act without consulting an ecumenical partner, let alone his own bishops. It immediately ruptured for a time the very positive ecumenical goodwill that existed between our two churches.”

But things have calmed down. “I think we could even say that Pope Benedict has been forgiven for that. The Roman Catholic Church, and particularly Pope Francis and our new Archbishop Justin Welby, have embraced very closely, and if anything, the relationship is better than it has ever been. In consequence, a breath of fresh air has entered the relationship.”

Ironically, Lady Kate says, the Roman Catholic Church in the UK is finding it difficult to assimilate the personal ordinariate. While Catholic priests are not allowed to marry, Rome is having to find the money to support the new Catholic priests and their families.

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Who was William Wilberforce?

Lady Kate speaks of the dramatic conversion of her great-great-great-grandfather, William Wilberforce, whose name is synonymous with the anti-slave trade movement.

Although she says the Wilberforce family was once Quaker, the family practised a very strict form of Anglicanism — at least until William’s father died.

Then William was sent to live with his cousins in London, who were active in a movement that later became Methodism. William’s mother apparently totally disapproved of this turn of events and brought him back to York.

He later went to Cambridge, where, Lady Kate says, “he led a somewhat dissolute life” and “almost totally abandoned religion”. He was determined to be a Member of Parliament and at the age of 20, he and his best friend at university William Peat, then 21, who was to become British Prime Minister at an incredibly young age, joined Parliament.

William later consulted John Newton — a one-time captain of a slave ship and a supporter of slave trade — who had become a Christian and taken Holy Orders, and wielded great influence in London. He asked Newton:

“Father! Here I am persuaded that I must give my life to Christ. But I’m in Parliament; do I abandon all that or does giving one’s life to Christ mean one can’t do two things at the same time?”

Newton saw William’s fervour and persuaded him to take on the anti-slavery mission.