The following is excerpted from an article by one such admirer, Timothy George:
Charles Colson's 'Ecumenism of the Trenches': Recalling the man who helped forge Evangelicals and Catholics Together and the ‘Manhattan Declaration.’ by TIMOTHY GEORGE - NCRegister.com
Over the years, Colson came to see the close connection between despair within the prisons and the “culture of death” in society on the outside. Colson was drawn to the Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity, and he knew that genuine reform had to embrace the family and the community as well as the state.
Today, the Colson Center for Christian Worldview is shaping leaders in every walk of life to become citizens of faith and conscience, ambassadors of good will in Jesus’ name.
At heart, Chuck Colson was an evangelist, and this was why he worked so hard to promote unity among believers in Christ. He took seriously the words of Jesus in his prayer to the heavenly Father for his disciples, “May all of them be one, Father … so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).
In the early 1990s, Colson joined with his close friend, Father Richard John Neuhaus, to begin the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT). Catholics and evangelicals were, and remain, the two largest faith communities in North America. Increasingly, they found themselves drawn together in what I described at the time as “an ecumenism of the trenches,” especially in defense of the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/charles-colsons-ecumenism-of-the-trenches/