Interdenominational Dialog

And while I am on the subject, I had better say once and for all that I do not intend to discuss with you in future, if I can help it, any of the questions at issue between our respective churches. It would have the same unreality as those absurd conversations in which we are invited to speak frankly to a woman about some indelicate matter–wh. means that she can say what she likes and we can’t. I could not, now that you are a monk, use that freedom in attacking your  position which you undoubtedly would use in attacking mine. I do not think there is any thing distressing for either of us in agreeing to be silent on this matter: I have had a Catholic among my most intimate friends for many years and a great deal of our conversation has been religious. When all is said (and truly said) about the divisions of Christendom, there remains, by God’s mercy, an enormous common ground. It is abstaining from one tree in the whole garden.

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“Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, 4 April 1934,” in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004), 135-6.