130 PART TWO: AN EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT Christians and spoke with them at length. Here, he met Catholics and Reformed, both interested in Orthodoxy. BF describes this experience as “a sort of new world that was opening.”309 Especially in the small community in Switzerland, in which he was sent to live soon after joining Bose, he became aware of the similarities between his own Catholic Church and other Christians. Not only did they not answer to the polemic and caricatural descriptions he knew from books, but they encountered very similar ecclesial and pastoral struggles and problems: I had a chance to have a sort of practical life to show you that Protestants are, uh, like us {laughs}. I mean, they are not the devil, they have not strange things, so, very simple and grassroots opportunity, to know really the other people and the problem~ the pastoral problem that they had, like uh, the priests.310 It was only after spending two years in this context that it became “normal” to him to “consider uh… … other Christians just as Christians.”311 He needed this practical experience, as well as the groundbreaking work of Vatican II which forced everyone to review their vision of ecumenism.312 He recognized their faith and efforts to live as Christians even though their journeys had differed so significantly from his own: This was one of my also experiences in Switzerland, to know true, serious, and clever Christians, trying to live their life according to the Gospel, uh, being part of another church, who received another Christian education, having used another, while having another relationship with sacraments, with uh, but seeing how they can face everyday challenges with their own Christian faith, uh, not so different frommine. While the, the way, the roads through which we arrive there, are so different.313 Brother TC recalls his youth in Canada, some seven hundred kilometers north of Toronto. He explains that in his area, most French-speakers like TC and his family descended from French Catholics. The other half of the population was English speaking, made up of Catholics and various types of Protestants. TC, however, had detached himself from the Church somewhat. When a religious sister invited some people over who had been to Taizé to speak 309 BF-1,2c. 310 BF-1,2d. 311 BF-1,2e. 312 BF-1,2e. 313 BF-2,8b.
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