An ecumenical mind
Jeffrey Gros, one of the liveliest and most penetrating ecumenical thinkers I ever encountered, died earlier this month. A conversation with Jeff was always illuminating as well as a bit disorienting, for he had the many voices of global Christianity freshly cataloged in his brain.
Jeff, who belonged to the De La Salle Christian Brothers and began his career as a Catholic schoolteacher, served 14 years as associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. More striking, he spent ten years as director of Faith and Order for the National Council of Churches, that mostly Protestant body of which the Roman Catholic Church is not even an official member. He was astute enough on all things Protestant to serve as president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.
Jeff had an indefatigable appetite for the day-to-day work of ecumenism as well as for ingesting and editing ecumenical documents. He regularly sent the Century reviews of what were, to me, rather obscure volumes on ecumenical proceedings, in hopes that those conversations would be more widely known and appreciated.
