Reportaje
Serving post-war reconstruction
In a post-war Europe in great need for reconstruction and cultural and spiritual renewal, the WCC established at Bossey a training centre later called “Ecumenical Institute.” The word “ecumenical” in the name of the institute expressed the WCC concern both for justice and peace in the whole world and for the unity of divided Christian churches.
The impending mission of the Bossey training centre was to challenge, equip, and encourage lay Christian women and men, to join hands and hearts and contribute to the solution of the multiform post-war problems confronted by their societies and churches. Who attended the first courses? “We had young people who had come out of concentration camps, or had served in armies, or who had been active in resistance movements. We had them from different parts of Europe and therefore from countries that had been at war with each other.”
Bossey conferences brought together in those early years “men and women of the same profession or sphere of work in secular society” such as lawyers, “industrialists,” doctors, artists, or social workers. The aim was to help them discern and strengthen the spiritual and public dimensions of their professional activities. Other conferences and short courses addressed important spiritual and existential questions of the time, gathering philosophers, theologians, and sociologists.
By the end of 1949, 443 persons from 45 countries had attended Bossey courses and conferences. Four years later, the number of participants had significantly increased to 4,400 from over 50 countries, and by 1959 they were nearly 10,000.
At the frontiers of the modern world
During the years of “cold war,” decolonisation, scientific and technological advance, and secularisation, Bossey remained faithful to its original vision of relating Christianity to contemporary historical challenges.
In the words of a report from 1975, “the whole work of the Institute can be termed frontier work.” A growing number of students and participants came from the global south. The Graduate School enrolled 27 participants from India and 16 from Korea between 1952 to 1972. They were 46 Indians and 33 Koreans from 1972 to 1992. Altogether, 3,500 people participated in Bossey programmes between 1968 and 1975.
The Bossey Graduate School of Ecumenical Studies, accredited by the University of Geneva, was a semester-long course in which students from different cultures and diverging Christian traditions from around the world came together for a residential experience of common life, academic study, and spirituality.
In such unique landscape and intellectual setting, faculty and students explored a wide range of cutting-edge issues such as participation in social and political change; dialogue with different religions and political ideologies; relations between church, state and power; and justice, peace and ecology.
At the same time, shorter “specialised consultations” addressed similar timely themes: penal policies, “with criminologists, psychologists and prison administrators”; capacity to change, “with scientists, psychologists and specialists in cybernetics”; the price of progress, “with ecologists, sociologists and philosophers,”
Dialogue for unity and peace in a century of growing conflicts
Despite their long struggle for survival throughout the 1970s, the Château conference centre and the Ecumenical Institute found ways to engage with the changing spirit of the time. This is visible in the new focus on inter-religious encounter and dialogue for justice, peace, and the protection of nature. As early as 1978, Bossey had organised its first inter-religious course, bringing together 30 Christians and 30 Jewish. Since the early 2000s, three-week inter-religious summer courses, with the participation of Muslims, Jews, and Christians have become a constitutive element of the Bossey programme.
Other innovations, in continuity with the early vision, were implemented. Always in cooperation with the University of Geneva, the Institute’s one-semester Graduate School of Ecumenical Studies was replaced by three courses running simultaneously and leading to university certificates or to a master’s degree on ecumenical studies. The residential-only tabu was broken by the offering of online courses. The library remains a world reference for ecumenical research. The conference centre left behind part of its ancient family way of organising daily life and equipped itself to become a professional meeting place open to international organisations and corporations, offering several meeting rooms and quality accommodation.
When the World Council of Churches acquired Bossey, the Château reminded a museum with portraits, battle scenes, and caricatures of the French Emperor Napoleon. The past 80 years have made of Bossey a reference place for the encounter between Christian traditions and historical changes. When the Ecumenical Institute turned 70 in 2016, Bossey marked the event by welcoming Dr Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the renowned Al-Azhar Mosque and University in Cairo. Two years later, Pope Francis visited Bossey and expressed the recognition of the Roman Catholic Church to its longstanding contribution to Christian witness and unity in and for the world.
https://www.chateaudebossey.ch/
Learn more: The Céligny congregation, Bossey, and the memories of Arnold Mobbs