God knows where the women bishops vote leaves Anglican-Catholic relations - Mgr Mark Langham, The Tablet - Blogs

15 July 2014 by Mgr Mark Langham            

The vote by the Church of England to ordain women as bishops changes nothing in its official relations with the Catholic Church. And yet it changes a great deal. It is to be noted that the decision in England only confirms a reality that has existed in worldwide Anglicanism since 1989. The Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue has been dealing with the reality of women clerics since the 1970s, (early ordinations took place in Asia, North America and New Zealand) and so this decision in one part of the Anglican Communion changes little; indeed, a woman bishop from Canada, Linda Nicholls, is a member of the current Anglican-Catholic dialogue commission, ARCIC III.

But ecumenical relations are not just about cold theological facts. Progress in dialogue is built also on personal co-operation, on feeling comfortable in each other’s presence. And here the decision does create a problem. Anglicans can be frustrated by Rome’s concentration on what happens at Canterbury (or, in this case, York). In 1989, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, noted this fixation, suggesting that Rome had ignored “ the actual existence of women priests in the United States for a number of years … We have never tried to hide this.”

Yet among most Anglicans, the Church of England does have a sentimental position as “mother Church”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is the “first among equals”. If anyone is a spokesman for Anglicanism, it is he, and accordingly Rome is right to take notice of developments in Anglicanism as they occur in the Church of England. The discussions leading to the 1992 vote for women priests occasioned a particularly frank exchange between Pope and Archbishop, and it was to a gathering of Church of England bishops in 2008 that the then-head of the Vatican’s ecumenical office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, gave his dire warning that the ordination of women would move Anglicanism away from Catholic orthodoxy and closer to the continental Reformed Churches.

Thus, this is a critical moment for ecumenical dialogue. Anglicans do not seem always to realise how difficult such a move is for Catholics. In 2009 Archbishop Rowan Williams tried to suggest that the ordination of women as priests is a “second-order issue” of mere canonical or juridical significance. ARCIC had previously argued that the question of the ordination of women is of a “different kind” to more serious theological issues. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith gave short shrift to these notions, asserting that the ordination of women is a doctrinal issue, intrinsic to the theology of priesthood.

Thus, it is true to say that hope of union has receded. There is no mid-point now between having women bishops and not having them. From speaking of unity, realistically dialogue now considers how two traditions, one of which ordains women bishops and one which does not, co-exist. The rug has been pulled from under those who longed for unity within the foreseeable future.

Yet ecumenists are upbeat; they have come too far, and weathered too many disappointments, not to continue to have faith in the movement. Ecumenism, they point out, is not a human construct, but a divine imperative. Wonders have happened; the Holy Spirit is not discouraged. At a time when, institutionally, we seem far away apart, faith in God’s will for unity has to be stronger than ever.

Mgr Mark Langham is Catholic chaplain to the University of Cambridge and was previously co-secretary to ARCIC III and an official at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity
Source: The Tablet - Blogs, with grateful acknowledgement
And see The Tablet's report on the General Synod's decision and the ecumenical implications here.

Two traditions, one holy ground - The Tablet

19 June 2014 by Christopher Lamb                                  

After his visit to Rome, the Archbishop of Canterbury tells  Christopher Lamb where he finds the most important points of unity between the Catholic and Anglican Churches




One is an Argentine son of Italian immigrants, the other an Old Etonian whose mother worked for Sir Winston Churchill.

Yet despite coming from opposite ends of the earth – both literally and metaphorically –  Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury have some uncanny similarities.

The two leaders of Christianity’s largest global communions were both considered outsiders when chosen for their roles, both took up their positions within a week of each other and both are renowned for their no-nonsense, down-to-earth style.

If their immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and Lord Williams of Oystermouth, had a love of the early Church Fathers in common, with Lord Williams able to read Benedict’s theology in the original German, Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby have decided to roll up their sleeves and put the Gospel into action.

During his two-day visit to Rome on Sunday and Monday, the archbishop’s jam-packed itinerary certainly chimed with Pope Francis’ call for pastors to be familiar with the “smell of the sheep”.

This included going to a street shelter project run by the community of Sant’Egidio, meeting a victim of human trafficking and a trip to a refugee project at the Anglican church, St Paul’s-Within-the-Walls.

Combating human trafficking was a major theme of the visit and one of the first items on Archbishop Welby’s agenda was a meeting with the Global Freedom Network at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The initiative, founded by the Australian philanthropist Andrew Forrest, hopes to eradicate modern- day slavery by 2020.

But does this focus on joint action now take precedence over the two Churches seeking full, ecclesial unity by solving doctrinal disagreements?

“No,” the archbishop says when we meet at the “ceremoniale” in Rome’s Fiumicino airport, the executive lounge for visiting dignitaries, before he catches his plane back to London.

“I think we’re layering one thing on top of the other. There’s a very good theological foundation and there’s now joint action around what the Holy Father described as the three Ps: prayer, peace and poverty.”

He describes his meeting with the Pope, which included a 40-minute private discussion with just a translator present besides the two church leaders, as “a real engagement of love and not just a business connection”.

The archbishop is wearing the episcopal ring of Pope Paul VI given to Archbishop Michael Ramsey following their meeting in 1966 and which is now worn by Archbishops of Canterbury when they come to Rome. As someone who loves history, Archbishop Welby looks back and points to a “renewal in the relationship” between Catholics and Anglicans that started more than 50 years ago with the 1960 meeting between Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher and Pope, now Saint, John XXIII.

A few years later the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (Arcic) was established whose work Archbishop Welby enthusiastically describes as a “profound theological exploration” that has made “huge progress”. This dialogue has sought to overcome differences between the communions but hit the buffers due to the ordination of women bishops and different approaches to homosexuality. Relations were further strained by the creation of personal ordinariates for groups of Anglicans who wanted to become Roman Catholics, a move about which Lord Williams expressed concern to Pope Benedict XVI. Nevertheless, in 2011, a new phase of Arcic began. 

At a reception at the Anglican Centre in Rome on Sunday night, Archbishop Welby launched a new online resource for relations between the Churches, www.iarccum.org, which stands for the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (Iarccum, founded in 2000) that works alongside Arcic.

The impression, however, is that the archbishop’s passion is for action rather than theological dialogue. Like Pope Francis, and unlike his predecessor Lord Williams, Archbishop Welby is not a professional theologian. (He spent years working in the oil industry before becoming a late entrant to the priesthood; Pope Francis was the Jesuit provincial in Argentina before being appointed a bishop more than a decade later.) And at the launch of the website when speeches explaining the work of Arcic and Iarccum went on over their allotted time, the archbishop moved to wrap up proceedings pointing out to the gathering that it had been a very long day.

When it comes to resolving differences between Anglicans and Catholics, Archbishop Welby is realistic. Next month at the General Synod, the Church of England is likely to vote for legislation allowing women bishops, already permitted in other parts of the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Brian Farrell, the secretary at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said in an interview earlier this year that such a move “weakens” the special relationship that exists between Anglicans and Catholics. Archbishop Welby acknowledges the problem.

“I am very conscious that this is something we have to deal with,” the archbishop tells me. “This is a difficulty but a difficulty that we can handle in the context of a good relationship rather than a pit into which we [are likely to] fall.”
His meeting with the Pope on Monday was the second they have had within 18 months and was described by the archbishop as “very, very honest”.

“The discussion was much more transparent, real about the issues we face, honest about where we go with them.”




Read full article here: The Tablet - 21 June 2014

Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony, Aidan Nichols OP - Fr Mark Woodruff responds to Fr Peter Cornwell's Tablet Review

On 17 August 2013, Fr Peter Cornwell, a married Catholic priest and former vicar of the same church as Blessed John Henry Newman, The University Church of St Mary, Oxford, wrote a surprisingly mean review in The Tablet of Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham by the distinguished theologian, historian and thinker, Fr Aidan Nichols OP (Gracewing, Leominster, 2013). Fr Mark Woodruff's response in The Tablet for 24 August 2013 is below.

The book is an extended essay and arose from a remarkable lecture delivered under the auspices of the Ordinariate, as part of a conference on its place and purpose with the work of New Evangelisation. Fr Nichols revisited a familiar and resonant theme of his, that proclamation and evangelisation do not concern only the personal individual but groups and traditions of people, including entire cultures and histories. This understanding, incidentally, lay within Pope Benedict's presentation of evangelisation on his visit to Great Britain in 2010. Faith alone, he said, answers humanity's profoundest questions and longings; hence the need and benefit for the constant and public dialogue of faith and reason, between the Church of Christ and society, the state, politics, commerce and culture. With this in the background, Fr Nichols observed that Catholic society in England was made of four main components: the English recusants at the core of the history from the 16th century onwards, the influx of a large Irish Catholic population to cities from Victorian era onwards, a small but influential stream of English converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism of whom Newman and Manning are the most symbolic but which continues to the present day, and more recently the international diaspora of the last two decades, especially from India, Africa, the Far East and Eastern Europe (including Eastern Catholics) transforming the complexion of parishes especially in the larger population centres. The one culture that seems, however, not to find expression and belonging in the contemporary Catholic Church in England is England's indigenous religious culture for almost the last half-millennium. Thus he makes the argument for embracing the liturgical, pastoral, cultural, spiritual, apologetical, homiletical, operational-organisational and academic-theological traditions and patrimony of Church-of-England Christianity, to equip the Catholic Church in England to address, take seriously, resonate with and converse with English public life and culture, as well as its citizens' religious sensibility, by means of their familiar spiritual language and sensibility.

Where necessary, of course, for reasons of clear exposition of Catholic teaching these Anglican traditions and patrimony need to be duly adapted to meet the fullness of communion within the Catholic Church, but since all internal Anglican traditions, aspects of heritage and customs have been developed and continue in existence within a conversation between the different schools of theological thought and churchmanship, and thus find ways not only to co-exist in Anglicanism's internal ecumenism but also to find clearer expression over against each other, there is something intrinsically Anglican about the adaptation needed when embracing a new setting for being in communion within the Body of Christ. Fr Nichols' 1993 book, which looks at the interplay and relationship between the Catholic and Anglican in English religion, state and culture, The Panther & The Hind: A theological history of Anglicanism remains an essential account of Classic Anglican divinity, and the most sympathetic analysis of the now largely occluded Classic Anglicanism tradition ever made by a Catholic theologian.

It is a pity that Fr Cornwell did not acknowledge this in his endeavour to portray the Ordinariate as a mere refuge for Anglo-Catholics escaping a finally uncongenial Anglicanism. Thus he missed the point that, as the Catholic League can testify, its essential form has been proposed for 100 years at least and that his has influenced Anglican ecumenism for good, spread wide what is now shared by all Christians as "spiritual ecumenism", and placed the cause of Christian Unity, to which communion with the Apostolic See of Rome is integral, at the heart of the Church's purpose in proclaiming the Gospel to the world and its cultures. After all, it is Pope Benedict who organised efforts and structures for a New Evangelisation in the struggle for the soul of Old Europe, including the societies which have in part emerged from it across the world through the 19th and 20th centuries. The Ordinariates established under Anglicanorum Coetibus and Ad Gentes are part of this New Evangelisation and represent the Catholic Church's desire, learned from half a century of direct dialogue and ecumenism, to learn and receive for itself what the providential Anglican tradition and its patrimony has to offer. None of this is for an isolated group that looks in upon its own narrow concerns, any more than Benedictinism, Franciscanism or Jesuitism is - it is something borne by some but for the whole Church - and that includes its efforts to reconciliation and unity.

While some of Fr Cornwell's comments were legitimate debate and criticism in a book review, he made two misrepresentations as to fact, which made it clear that prejudice was the ground upon which he then went on to caricature the persons - the people and priests - of the Ordinariate. It is clear that he can have met few of them. What follows is the letter submitted to the Editor of The Tablet upon submission that Fr Cornwell's affront needed a riposte. it appeared in The Tablet publised on 24 August, 2013. The final paragraph was, however, not included owing to the need to make space for a subsequent letter from Mgr Andrew Burnham of the Ordinariate which addresses the same point more fully and better. (The term "lively conversation" reflects Archbishop Rowan Williams' attempt at a positive description of the adversarial nature of Anglican theological and constitutional decision-making in its Synods, and "treasure to be shared" is a quotation from Pope Benedict's Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.)

Fr Mark comments, "I do not lightly take issue with a brother priest in public, especially one for whom I have the highest admiration. But, since he first expressed these views in 2009 in my hearing and yet, despite eirenic argument to put his concerns to rest, persisted in disseminating them by way of attack on the true motivation and character of his fellow Catholics in the Ordinariate, it is important to say that the cause of Christian Unity is served by airing disagreement frankly towards better mutual understanding and rapprochement in a spirit of friendship, not by caricaturing people acting in good faith."

To the Editor, The Tablet, 20 August 2013

Fr Peter Cornwell says that Anglican patrimony “in truth has proved to be quite elusive”. Anglicanorum Coetibus III locates it in liturgical books, the Complementary Norms adding the tradition of married presbyters and the pastoral council for consulting the lay faithful formally. Article 10 refers to a larger hinterland of its aspects of particular value. In 2010 I collected a volume of over 30 pieces of comment and analysis, critical and supportive - Anglicans & Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity, Mission. A second volume is in preparation. A Customary containing the Divine Office and Calendar was published in 2012 and permission to celebrate an Order of Mass with elements of the Prayer Book rite was issued this summer. This is hardly elusive. 

Nor is it accurate to say that Anglicanorum Coetibus came “out of the blue”. Such provision was explored by prominent Catholic-Anglicans with designated Roman Catholic figures in England and Rome in the late 1980s. And around 2008, a sizeable group of Catholic-Anglican bishops visiting Rome with concerns about the Lambeth Conference and General Synod, even discussing possible corporate reunion, did not go behind Lambeth’s back. What changed was not a papal assault upon the ARCIC method, but Anglicanism’s decision for a fundamental change within the order of bishop. Nevertheless the additional layer of ecclesial incompatibility provides a re-set ecumenical starting point. In this, some have seen a positive opportunity to think through what Anglicans believe the patrimony they offer to the whole Church’s unity in diversity is, in a manner unaddressed before. 

Fr Aidan Nichols has pointed out that the prevailing religious tradition of England for nearly five centuries is a large gap in our consciousness of being the Catholic Church for this land and culture: internalising Anglican aspects of tradition through the Ordinariate offers one way of beginning to fill it, even if late in the day. At the same time it is far from the whole story of Anglican-Catholic reconciliation: for evangelisation to be convincing, Christian unity remains unfinished business. 

Fr Cornwell’s mocking tale of narrow sectaries escaping to a “granny flat” is an injustice to the real priests and people of the Ordinariate. He will indeed find some former Romanising Anglo-Catholics, but he will also find inner city pastors, middle-of-the-road “Prayer Book Catholics”, scholars, diverse origins and backgrounds, “Vatican II Evangelicals”, country parsons, overseas missionaries – people with an ecumenical instinct who did not live apart but took part in the “lively conversation” of the Church of England, and who are proving no less willing to engage in our diocesan parish life, as much as they want to see the Ordinariate’s “treasure to be shared” make its distinctive contribution. What binds them in the Catholic Church is not shallow preoccupation with liturgical tastes, but the faith that is none other than our own, and acting upon it generously. 

 

Fr Mark Woodruff

Coming into Communion

On the verge of the decree of Canonical Erection of the Ordinariate in the UK provided for in the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, it is worth looking back a year to the debates that followed shortly after it was announced. Here is the full text of an article by Fr Mark Woodruff published in The Tablet in October 2009, as he looked back across the previous 15 years to address concerns and fears about the motives and outlook of Anglicans becoming Catholics and, in view of many questions about what Anglican Patrimony might mean, the hopes and contribution they have wanted to offer, with a special emphasis on Unity and Mission.

Fourteen years ago, twelve priests were ordained by Cardinal Hume in Westminster Cathedral. They had been priests of the Church of England, invited to bring their Anglicanism with them. Outside there was a demonstration of Catholic supporters of the women’s ordination to whom the new priests were a sign of contradiction. For months the candidates had been described in the press as defectors, dissidents, traditionalists, disloyal. It is interesting that there are similar reservations about the kind of people, their motivation and baggage, who may join the ordinariates set up by Anglicanorum Coetibus. We turned out not to be Trojan horses in 1995 and I suspect there is no more cause for grievance today than then. The Apostolic Constitution is to be a fact of our Church’s life – our faith must be that all things work together for good to those who love God.

When I became a Catholic it was not to negate Anglicanism, but to be embraced by the Catholic Church. When I am asked why I became a Catholic, the only answer is, “Because I believe the Catholic faith is true”. I learned this faith in Anglican Sunday School, choirs and organ lofts, an Anglican university course, the cathedrals and my life-changing training for ordination with the remarkable religious order, the Community of the Resurrection. All this I treasure and brought with me. And in the prayer inserted into the rite of our ordination by the Holy See it was thankfully received and brought to fruition in the presbyterate of the Catholic Church. I did not become a Catholic in order to become an ex-Anglican.

Cardinal Hume instilled in us that the purposes of the Catholic Church are not served by hurting the Church of England, our vital ecumenical partner. Peter must strengthen his brethren. Somehow our ordinations had to be seen as ecumenical moments; we had to reconcile them to the Catholic Church’s promoting Christian Unity. I fear I handled the transition poorly and my journey felt to some Anglican friends like an act of schism. So I resolved to work as a Catholic for the unity of Christians.

By the same token, whatever misgivings some have about the Apostolic Constitution, we have to discern its purpose as an instrument of Christian Unity. We owe the Anglicans who may take up its provisions not to caricature them. Catholic Anglicans are of various schools and histories. Generalisations like “traditionalists”, “dissidents”, or “extreme Anglo-Catholics” may be handy, but they encourage prejudice and fail to do justice to a rich weave of traditions that soon we will be asked to welcome. There are High Anglicans of the mainstream “Catholic but Reformed” tradition. There are “middle of the road” Anglicans who can find themselves at home in a Catholic parish in France, feeling they naturally belong to the same western Catholic tradition. There are those who looked to Orthodoxy to support an Anglican non-papal Catholicism. There are Anglo-Papalists who, despite Apostolicae Curae, insisted after the 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference that true Christian Unity involves the whole Church, including Roman Catholics. Some worship only in the Roman rite, a tradition Roman Catholics find difficult to comprehend but which we could credit as the exchange of spiritual gifts commended in Unitatis Redintegratio. There are also “Prayer Book Catholics”, whose Catholicism is expressed in the historic and contemporary Anglican formularies.

From these backgrounds will come not theological or ritualist reactionaries, but fellow Christians who share the same faith as ours. Last year, the eminent Anglican ecumenist Mary Tanner observed that closing the period of reception on women’s ordination before it was resolved by the Church as a whole in the future meant that those who could not accept it no longer enjoyed an assured place within the Church of England. And Cardinal Kasper at the 2008 Lambeth Conference informed the Anglican bishops that “the ordination of women to the episcopate effectively and definitively blocks a possible recognition of Anglican Orders”. It is not surprising that those whose Anglican Christianity aspired for consummation in visible unity with the Roman Catholic Church have sought the corporate reunion they have prayed for over a century – or that Pope Benedict has responded - especially now that the restoration of complete communion envisaged by Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey has “receded” as a “realistic possibility”.

What patrimony will they bring? There are Anglican traditions of spirituality, preaching, mission and theology in which the Anglican and Catholic Churches both recognise the same faith. There is an Anglican approach to music and liturgy borne of 460 years using the vernacular that makes even their celebration of the Roman rite distinctive. There is the liturgy derived from the Book of Common Prayer that has been the mark of the Pastoral Provision for former Anglicans in the United States. I can still recite the Prayer Book services from memory. Perhaps the most distinctive form of Anglican patrimony is its hymnography. Often misunderstood by Catholic liturgists as out of place, this is a comprehensive body of doxological theology from the Greek, Latin, Reformation, Independent and Wesley traditions, as well as the Victorian and postwar “hymn explosions”. Its careful arrangement at services is a subtle science. For Anglicans it has been the most important means of teaching doctrine and fostering spirituality. As a gift to the wider Catholic Church it should not be underestimated.

Accommodating the “objective reality” of Anglican liturgical life is a signal that there is nothing distinctive of the Anglican tradition that cannot be encompassed in the contemporary Catholic Church. Perhaps the most hopeful development in ecumenical dialogue in recent times has been receptive ecumenism, which asks each tradition what with integrity it can receive from another to make its own as a step to unity. Through Anglicanorum Coetibus is not the Catholic Church receiving the gifts of another tradition? In the ecumenical long term, does this internal awareness of Anglican identity not provide Catholics with a greater disposition towards unity between them and all Anglicans?

Will many come? It will take courage, time and discernment. Some will discover that they remain convinced Anglicans. Others will be uncertain of how they will be understood. In the 1990s some people’s long sacramental life as Anglicans was disregarded; they were put in RCIA as though they were candidates for baptism or new to the notion of Catholicism. One priest told me they had to have a desert experience. Another said, “This is for the Forty Martyrs.” Hurt and repelled, some walked away. We do not thus treat Catholics coming from the other side of the world while they get acclimatised to UK Catholicism. There would be no question of withholding communion; nor should we set back Catholic Anglicans who come to share our faith. But we have come a long way. If we say that the Universal Church of Christ perfectly subsists in our Catholic Church, there should be no limit to our capacity to embrace diversity in our unity.

It is painfully obvious, however, that corporate reunion for some Anglicans leaves most out of the equation. No one joining the ordinariates can turn their backs and be glad of this. Becoming Catholics they make the teaching on the Church in Lumen Gentium and its inevitable orientation towards visible unity their own. Lest they be signs of contradiction to this, it must become their special duty to redouble the charity that binds all those with an Anglican patrimony and energetically assist the Catholic bishops in their concerted efforts with the Anglican Communion on mission to an ever more secularised society, that the world may believe.

Letter to The Tablet, 8th January 2011

Here is the full text of a letter from Fr Mark Woodruff to the Editor of the Tablet, published on 8 January 2011. Dr Phil McCarthy had complained on January 1st of the prospect of Anglicans leaving the Church of England, but bringing divisions with them and raised objections to the principle of establishing a special ecclesial structure for Catholics with an Anglican patrimony in full communion.

While Dr Phil McCarthy has taken offence at Pope Benedict’s decision to found special dioceses for Christians formerly of an Anglican background, he is not right to say that many Catholics have been shocked. In the late summer of 2010, several priests and lay people in London offered to put on a public meeting aimed at addressing questions that Catholics have about the Ordinariate. We invited four distinguished speakers reflecting a range of view points within the Catholic world - lay, episcopal, clerical, pastoral, conservative, progressive, academic and ecumenical. Despite reasonably wide promotion, only 7 people registered and so it was cancelled. It seemed to us that, after all, Catholics were either content or amenable to the development.

Clearly once the structure becomes a reality there will be opportunity for learning about how it will work in practice, both in relation to the other Catholic dioceses and to other Christian church communities, for the sake of the whole Church’s mission and service in the world. Some of this will be challenging, but even the Archbishop of Canterbury has discerned that there could be something prophetic for the forward course of Christian Unity about it. Dr McCarthy is surely mistaken when he mocks the Ordinariate concept as an unnecessary annex because, it seems to me, the Catholic Church has a genius for inventing the means of being the Church apt to those who desire to belong to it in a diversity of ways – from regular dioceses, to religious orders and abbots nullius; from parallel Byzantine Catholic and Latin Catholic jurisdictions in Ukraine and North America to personal prelatures and new ecclesial movements. I do not see that the Ordinariate will lack either precedent or comparably inventive structures already provided for - see Canon 372 on particular churches other than a diocese that can be founded in a territory “distinguished by the rite of the faithful or by some other quality” and Ad Gentes 20 which envisages groups of people “impeded from accepting the Catholic faith because they cannot adapt themselves to the particular guise in which the Church presents itself in that place” and that such a situation should be “specially catered for”.

In the case of Anglicans clergy and faithful desiring full communion at this point, their esprit de corps and the “real but imperfect communion” they already have with the Catholic Church is something to be conserved and built upon rather than dissipated. If we are not inclined, like Dr McCarthy, to allow the corporate dimension which Anglicanorum Coetibus is looking for, we continue to miss out on what another part of the Christian community wants to offer us in the exchange of gifts of which Unitatis Redintegratio spoke. We are also saying that the coming reintegrated Church is one in which we Catholics assume everyone will have to fit in individually with us, and our parishes, dioceses and worship as we already have them. Yet, when we are one, how will the rich distinctiveness of, for instance, the Methodist, Lutheran, Anglican, Byzantine and Latin traditions fit in with each other in full communion, unless we start now, as Pope Benedict has done, to think imaginatively about how the integrity of the Church’s apostolic faith and order can embrace diversity as an outward manifestation of its universality? Given the urgent evangelistic task before us, thankfully there are indeed many rooms in the Father’s house; whole floors of them are yet being built of living stones.