December 2015 - Unitas Newsletter - Priest Director's Message

The continuing assaults on Christians in Nigeria, Central African Republic, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria reveal both the basic solidarity of all the baptised in a time of crisis, as well as our urgent need of the visible, organic unity of Christ’s Church. Towards the end of 2014, Pope Francis went to Istanbul to say to the Ecumenical Patriarch that, above all ecumenical objectives, he seeks communion with the Orthodox Church. The corporate reunion of East and West in communion with the Successor of Peter at Rome has been an objective of the League since its inception. In the mind of its leading founder, Father Henry Fynes-Clinton, reunion with the East forms the context for his immediate concern about the West: to end the detachment of the two provinces of York and Canterbury, and the Church of England’s reintegration as an entity in its own right with the Roman Catholic Church – “united, not absorbed”, as Dom Lambert Beauduin observed at the Malines Conversations. 

During the year that has followed the papal pilgrimage to Constantinople, the necessity of the voice and leadership of Peter for all the Churches has been obvious. Ecumenists are accustomed to cast the role of the Pope as a “Petrine ministry”: a focus of unity in such remnants of the faith that Christians hold in common; an exhorter and encourager; an indispensable servant of communion and its most persuasive advocate of the binding nature of the truth; an authority to appeal to, rather than one to take action. These tasks are already part of the Pope’s role; but Catholics also have a lively sense of the local immediacy of the Universal Church of which he is pastor “with a care for all the churches.”  It is not just because their bishop is in communion with him, or even across Church divisions a common faith identifies them: it is because the office of Pope, together with the teaching and acts of each successive Bishop of Rome, is part of our life and identity as Catholic Christians, when we articulate the faith of the Church in witness to the truth of Christ. Our Catholic straining for unity in one Body in Him, is not for streamlined administration, central control, or corporate take-over. It is “so that the world may believe”, when the Church speaks with one voice, credibly giving a single account of the hope that lies within us and the bearing of our Faith on the world of humanity. Thus we, and other Christians too, rely on the Pope to speak when others are not heeded – to speak “not as the scribes, but with authority”.

We are all one to those who hate Jesus

So, when Coptic migrant workers were murdered on the shore of the Libyan Mediterranean Pope Francis called the Coptic Pope Tawadros to say, “Your martyrs are our martyrs too”. Again, when last April the Armenian Catholicos at Holy Etchmiadzin canonised saints for the first time in 500 years – the 1.5 million Armenian Christians killed with many Greeks and Assyrians under the dying Ottoman Empire in 1915 - the Holy Father’s message was that, when the persecutor comes, he does not ask if you are Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, Armenian or Syrian, or Anglican, Evangelical, or Protestant. He just wants to know that you are a follower of Jesus.

He has spoken vividly of an “ecumenism of blood”, because martyrdom unites us completely with the Lord in His sacrifice on the Cross. In England, we have come to see the martyrs of our different traditions as part of each other’s stories. They are signs no longer of bloody division, but of the pains taken to reach our hoped for reconciliation in Christ. Yet Pope Francis is not merely talking about our mutual coming to terms. He is describing how the Church is “all one” to those who hate it, and yet our solidarity together in all kinds of ways stands as a massive response to those who hate the words of the Beatitudes, those who long for nothing more than that the Kingdom will not come on earth as it is in heaven.

In his autumn visit to Africa, Pope Francis visited the Catholic Shrine of the Ugandan Martyrs of 1885-1887.At the pilgrimage basilica, he honoured the 22 Roman Catholic martyrs; but he also went with Archbishop Stanley Ntagali of the Anglican Church to the museum and shrine of the 23 Anglican martyrs, in the footsteps of Blessed Paul VI and St John Paul before him. “The blood of the martyrs makes us one,” he said. He knelt at the “torture tree”, where Catholic and Anglican Christians had been made to suffer without discrimination.

In his address to the Pope, Archbishop Stanley re-worked a local proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The principle of the Catholic League throughout has been to insist on unity in Catholic faith in communion with Peter not as the last piece of the jigsaw, but as the driving, prime objective from the outset. Thus keeping to the path towards Catholic unity has been no fast track. In recent times it has become drawn out, delayed, and even halted. The League’s founders and active members have “gone alone”, but not fast, in seeking unity with integrity – not just by holding to orthodox Catholic faith and order but by making the point, in season and out of season, that there can be no reunion, Christian unity, or ecumenism in the meantime, unless the reality is squarely faced that, for the Church to be completely the Church, it needs the pastoral care, spiritual authority and dogmatic teaching of Peter.

One Church’s one faith in the one Lord

No Church organisation is an end in itself. No tradition that is really Christian can rely on a separate Church to preserve it, if it cannot survive and actually flourish by finding its fulfilment in the communion of the Universal Church. Even the Catholic Church teaches that “the divisions among Christians prevent the Church from attaining the fullness of catholicity proper to her … Furthermore, the Church herself finds it more difficult to express in actual life her full catholicity in all her bearings.” (Decree on Ecumenism 4, Vatican II, 1964). More or less the same wording would fit all the other Churches in their separation from one another too. Hence the need not only for unity of spirit - starkly emphasised by the experience of our ecumenism of blood; not only for unity of body, in which we may share our distinctive religious traditions, organisations and patrimonies, in the common life of one Church; but also for a unity of mind - a single-minded conviction of the Truth of Christ and declaring in many ways our one faith.

In October, Rachel Treweek, the new Anglican bishop of Gloucester, declared that she would not refer to God as “he” or “she”. She went on to object to the writ of summons to the House of Lords for referring to her as a “right reverend father in God” and also to the suggestion that it be amended to “mother”. She believes that both terms indicate dependency and hierarchy, rather than the true pattern of Christian leadership, which is to be “among you as one who serves” (see The Guardian, 24 October 2015). Of course, the ordained ministry and hierarchy in the Church are always to be understood in the context of Christ’s sacrificial service as the self-giving Good Shepherd;  and, to quote the Westminster Confession, God is “a most pure spirit … without body, parts, or passions”. But Mrs Treweek seems to be dispensing with a fundamental insight from the revelation of Christ, and our faith in Him that holds Christians in one: God is made known in Jesus Christ, who reveals unequivocally and repeatedly that He is Son to a Father. Thus to behold this Father-Son relationship, revealed at critical events in our salvation, like the Annunciation, the Baptism, the Prayer in Gethsemane, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension, is the given way to approach the mystery of God and embrace the Faith of the Trinity. It is not enough to say, “Creator, Redeemer, Guide”. Nor is it other than crude to present God as “a male”. But the idea of Father-Son in relation says something that no other analogy can; and each of the Three are those made known to us in the Old Testament as “The Lord”. Into the life of this Trinity, Mary is drawn, filled with “the Holy Spirit  the Lord” and becomes Mother of God. She is not a model of dependency, but the first realisation of theosis, the process by which we too, following after her, share the life of God as the grace of Christ’s salvation fills our entire being, in return for His sharing our life and taking away its sin.

Roman Catholics together with orthodox Anglican believers have been dismayed at the Bishop of Gloucester’s reflections. This is not because of being “against women” or reinforcing a “defunct” patriarchal view of the Church and humanity that oppresses women, but because her thinking shifts Christian religion away from its central focus – the Son of God. Christ is the incarnation of the eternal Son of the eternal Father. He did take human flesh in general, but as a person who is a man; He does not cease to be this man after His Ascension, or else He would have ceased to be human. The incarnation would have dissolved and our union with God like His with us along with it. He was not a man by coincidence, but so He could make God known as His and “Our Father”. As the beloved and holy Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to put it, “God is Christlike, and in Him is no unChristlikeness at all”. Like Father, like Son – on the Throne of heaven, in the manger, on the Cross, on the Altar, the Lord.

When I served at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in the late 1980s, I once preached on Romans 10.9, observing that those who were so vigorously promoting the ordination of women to the presbyterate were finding themselves unable to refer to God as Father and Jesus as “Lord”, and that this seemed to me risk their salvation because they could not assert one of the Church’s earliest credal formulae: “If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” I was firmly rebuked for this, while the canons supporting the new theology of ministry were left unrestricted. It confirmed my conviction from that day to this, that there can be no unity in the Church and among Christians without an unequivocal declaration of faith in Jesus as Lord, who reveals the faith of the Trinity as Son to the Father; and that this Truth is not only believed by the Church, but manifested in its life, liturgy, ministry, hierarchy, pastoral care, proclamation and sacramental living “on earth as it is in heaven”. This declaration the Bishop of Gloucester seems unable to make her own. Without a unity of mind on this, from where and when will come our unity of body and spirit?

Taking up the Cross together

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been scorned in the press for “having doubts” after the terrorist attacks in Paris. What he actually said was that, in his prayers, he had asked God where He was in all this, and received the answer, “In the middle of it”. He recalled Psalm 56’s words, “He stores up our tears in a bottle, none of our sufferings are lost”. It is at moments like this that, whatever our differences and persistent disunity, Christian leaders give the world the hint that Christ truly is one and that He is nowhere other than in the world that is His: Paris, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Middle East all the same. Cardinal Nichols of Westminster added to Archbishop Justin’s words, “We really should be solid in our commitment to each other - to stand in the face of this evil”. So, after all, we are “going together”, not going alone, and prepared to “go far” because, when the persecutor comes, it is one faith in the one Lord that we declare. He asked us not to take up separate crosses, but “the Cross” telling us it would be “your Cross”. Whether we prefer it is like this or not, we press forward on His way together.

Peter said to Jesus, “To Whom else shall we go? It is You that have the words of eternal life”. So it was significant that on the Sunday evening after the Paris attacks, it was to Christ that the most prominent representatives of the secularist, anti-Catholic French Republic turned. Standing before Christ’s Altar at the special Mass in Notre Dame, were the Mayor of Paris, the President of the Senate, the President of the National Assembly, the delegate of the President of the Republic and the past President Giscard d’Estaing, because in that moment of horror only the Prince of Peace will do, only the Sacrifice of his flesh and blood for the life of the world. This is why the cause of Christian unity and the fullness of communion in one Church with the successor of Peter, who realised there was no other way to go, remains urgent: our priority as much as it that of the office of Pope.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2016

As we approach the observance of the 108^th Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, it is clear that we to “go together”, we have had to go far. It is our duty, as members of the League and as Catholic-believing Christians all together, to convince others that going far must not involve going far away – away from Catholic faith, away from Catholic order, away from the splintering life of human society that is entitled to look to the Church to be one more than any other body, the force above all that unites humanity in justice and peace, in goodness, and the reign of blessedness extolled in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

So, I invite you to use the usual leaflet accompanying this Newsletter (see sidebar for link) to pray more urgently than ever, however impossible and unrealistic it seems, for the unity of all the Christians, so that, in the heartfelt words of Father Paul Couturier, all humanity may seek to tread the path that Christ trod, grow with an ever greater holiness, and find union in God through the love and truth about humanity that is Christ Himself. We are sending you three copies of the leaflet. Please share the prayer by giving one to a friend, and pass the other to your priest. If you are a priest, please share it with your congregation at church.

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.

Could the Archbishop and the Pope really reunify the Church? - Paul Vallely in The Independent

Paul Vallely in The Independent, 21st June 2014

Something significant happened in Rome this week [15th June 2014] when the Archbishop of Canterbury met the Pope for the second time since the two men took office, within days of one another, just over a year ago.

They have agreed a joint project to use the worldwide reach of their churches to combat the global trade in human trafficking. They discussed how to pressurise 50 top multi-national companies to render their supply chains free of forced labour by 2020 – and ensure they “slavery proof” the investments and purchasing of their own churches. There were other areas of practical co-operation, including peace-building in areas like South Sudan. As he left Rome, Archbishop Justin Welby hinted that other new initiatives had been discussed.

But what was also striking was the renewed commitment the two men made to the idea that their two churches should merge. Pope Francis said that “the goal of full unity… remains the aim which should direct our every step along the way”.

This is a process which many assumed had stalled. The decision by the Church of England to ordain women in 1992 caused a theological rift between Canterbury and Rome. The ordination in the wider Anglican communion of openly gay bishops, like Gene Robinson in 2003, created another obstacle. And next month the General Synod is likely to vote for women bishops – something Rome sees as a greater theological problem even than female priests.

Yet in the background heavyweight theological discussions, on what unites rather than divides the two churches, have been continuing. One of the purposes of Archbishop Welby’s visit to Rome was to launch a new website (www.iarccum.org) dedicated to implementing better ecumenical relations.
Such a small step is a far cry from the early heady days of ecumenism when it was widely assumed that unity was just a few years away.

Things had moved swiftly after the meeting by Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher and Pope John XXIII in 1960 – the first time an Archbishop of Canterbury had visited to the Vatican for 600 years. Pope John asked when the Anglicans would return to the Catholic fold. Archbishop Fisher replied: “It is not a question of returning, but going forward together.” His words became the model for a new relationship which was affirmed when John XXIII’s revolutionary Second Vatican Council (1962-65) recognised the validity of baptism by other Christian denominations.

In a gesture of massive significance, in 1966, Pope Paul VI gave an episcopal ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey – which Archbishop Welby wore this week on his visit to Rome. A year later an Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) began unity talks. By clarifying old misunderstandings and embracing new scholarship it resolved many of the divisions which had bedevilled the two churches since the Reformation.

Much of ARCIC’s work is safely banked. When Rome’s top ecumenist, Cardinal Walter Kasper, called a meeting of Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and Reformed churches in 2010 it found, one insider said, “not one single area of theology in which we do not have some measure of agreement”. This was not just a clever repackaging of old disputes. It is a real growth in understanding.

But until recently ARCIC had hit the buffers. When Rome took an extraordinary 10 years to respond to one key ARCIC agreement many Anglicans lost patience and went ahead with the ordination of women and more liberal attitudes to gays.

In response the Vatican pulled the plug on the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission (IARCCUM). Pope Benedict XVI’s unilateral decision in 2009 to set up an Anglican Ordinariate to poach dissident Anglicans to Rome caused further resentment.

Yet things have clearly begun to change. Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby have similar visions. Both are no-nonsense characters with a “sleeves rolled up” approach to making change happen. Yet both see theological union as crucial. They have no patience with the “let’s agree to disagree on theology and just open a food bank together” approach.

In Rome Archbishop Welby – who despite his evangelical background, has a Benedictine spiritual director and has invited a French Catholic religious community, Chemin Neuf, to live in his home in Lambeth Palace – said that Anglicans and Catholics had to “get away from being quite comfortable with the fact we live separately”. Without theology, he said, the churches will become “just another NGO with a lot of old buildings”.

The renewed talk of unity is more than a pious aspiration. A third round of ARCIC talks has had meetings so far in Bose, Hong Kong, Rio and Durban. They have shifted the focus away from what divides the two churches to “receptive ecumenism” – what each side has to learn from the other.

At the heart of their discussions is how the two Communions go about making decisions. There are huge contrasts: Catholicism is heavily centralised whereas in Anglicanism authority is dispersed between many churches in many nations. Division is part of the Protestant DNA. And Anglicans are more divided among themselves now than ever before.

But Pope Francis clearly wants to change the governance of the Catholic Church so it is less like a mediaeval monarchy and more open to the wisdom and insights of all its members.
Given the practical difficulties posed by issues of gender and sexuality it is hard to see what unity between Catholics and Anglicans might look like – certainly not uniformity. But if the intellectual difficulties are greater now than 50 years ago, emotionally the two churches are closer than at any time since the reign of Henry VIII.

Archbishop Welby this week presented Pope Francis with a cutting from the giant fig tree planted in Lambeth Palace by the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole (1500-1558). What fruit it will bear, and when, is hard to predict. But hope is a theological virtue. For the past five decades the two churches have been moving on parallel lines. It feels as though, at last, those lines may be once more converging.

Paul Vallely is the author of ‘Pope Francis – ‘Untying the Knots’ 21/6/14

© The Independent Photo - Osservatore Romano

Source: Anglican Centre in Rome

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

Pope to Anglican Primate: Our division is nothing less than a scandal and burden

2014-06-16 - Rome Reports


"It's always good to see you.”
For the second time, Pope Francis welcomed the head of the Anglican Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, at the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.

"It's an exceptional pleasure to see you again.”
The archbishop was in Rome on a three-day tour. It included a review of the progress made by the Global Freedom Network, a joint Catholic-Anglican project to counter human trafficking. It's been one of the areas of greatest cooperation between the two Churches. Archbishop Welby introduced his delegation, which included two female priests.


In his address to the Pope (see below), the Anglican leader expressed his desire to achieve full communion between the two Churches. He also praised their cooperation to promote peace and reconciliation.

MOST REV. JUSTIN WELBY, Archbishop of Canterbury: "I marvel at the way God guides frail human vessels to be bearers of the message of salvation, leaving us a legacy across hundreds of years, to which we in our time are called to be faithful. We also know that from the start, as for so many at this time, this has been a witness unto death.”

For his part, during his speech (at the foot of this post), Pope Francis asked the archbishop not to forget the three P's: prayer, peace and poverty, for which they must walk together, he added. The Pope also talked about their shared history, which includes not only, cooperation, but also division.

POPE FRANCIS: "We cannot claim that our division is anything less than a scandal and an obstacle to our proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the world. Our vision is often blurred by the cumulative burden of our divisions and our will is not always free of that human ambition which can accompany even our desire to preach the Gospel as the Lord commanded.”

They followed their speeches with the traditional gift exchange. The archbishop's gifts were loaded with meaning. The first was a branch from a fig tree with historic roots.

"It comes from a fig tree planted by Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury in 1556, which is inside Lambeth Palace. That tree came from the Holy Land.”

PF: Let's hope that they're sweet.
JW: Oh they are. They're very good. They need sunshine.

His second gift was the copy of a register belonging to Card. Pole, as well as a book on the Lambeth Palace Library. Meanwhile, Pope Francis also gave the archbishop a book, but in a much larger scale.

"This is the book with all the papal medallions from all of the buildings in the Vatican.”

After they exchanged gifts, the two leaders walked by side, inside a chapel at the Apostolic Palace. They prayed in silence for a few minutes before an image of Baby Jesus.

Source: Pope to Anglican Primate: Our division is nothing less than a scandal and burden


Address of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to Pope Francis at their 16 June 2014 meeting at the Vatican

Your Holiness, Dear Friends,

My heart is full of gratitude to God, that I have the privilege and pleasure of addressing you once again in this city of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul. I marvel at the way God guides frail human vessels to be bearers of the message of salvation, leaving us a legacy across hundreds of years, to which we in our time are called to be faithful. We also know that from the start, as for so many at this time, this has been a witness unto death. I was moved to be in Santa Bartolomeo where amongst many recent martyrs, the seven members of the Anglican religious order the Melanesian brotherhood are commemorated.

Your Holiness much has happened in the year since I first received your gracious hospitality here. I am grateful for the progress that has been made through the generous support of many, to draw to the attention of the world to the evils of Modern Slavery and Human trafficking. The Global Freedom Network can achieve much practically to dismantle what you have so often rightly said is a grave crime against humanity. It is a crime that we all need to overcome as a matter of urgency, as a matter of human dignity, freedom and wholeness of life. May God give us the resolve and cooperation we need together.

With so many around the world I am profoundly grateful for your remarkable witness of care for the poor and suffering of the world, for your passion for reconciliation, as witnessed so recently in your visit to the Holy Land. 

Calling the faithful to pray for peace and reconciliation and doing that publicly is a witness to the power of prayer, one that I have sought to imitate. Such prayers are urgent and vital in so many countries. I especially hope and pray that our collaboration may lead to effective challenge to the unspeakable disaster of wars and civil conflict. In recent months I have travelled with my wife to many of them, into the heart of the areas of war, and the memory of the dead lying unburied and the suffering of the survivors is imprinted on our hearts. What more could be done by our churches together to challenge the resort to war and offer the dream of peace?

Your Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium was inspirational for all Christians. The task of making disciples is of compelling urgency so that the light of Christ may shine into every corner of the world. I have personal reasons for gratitude for the work of the Alpha Course of evangelism, so it is significant for me that it has found a place in the Catholic Church, especially in Latin America. We continue to develop many other means of evangelism, most recently in the Pilgrim Course, pray that we may continue to learn from one another about the joyful task of leading people to know Jesus Christ.

As we remember the precious spiritual heritage that is common to us both. I pray for the continuing work of the members of the official groups who conduct our ecumenical conversations.


Remembering always the desire of Our Lord that “all may be one”, we remain deeply committed to this work. I realise that that there are matters of deep significance that separate us. Yet looking back, we see that the Grace of God has led so much to happen. In November this year be it will be 50 years since the decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintigradio, was promulged by your predecessor Blessed Pope Paul VI, and it is right that I should pay tribute to the work of the Holy See through the PCPCU through these fifty years towards the goal of full visible unity. In 2016 we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Archbishop Ramsey's historic visit, commemorated in the ring given him by Pope Paul VI.

Your Holiness when we first met, I expressed the hope that we might find ways to strengthen what we share, and that we might seek opportunities as pastors of the Christian family to pray, act and speak together. I am glad that there have been opportunities as well for me and His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols to do just that. I have found much encouragement in this. A further sign of this joyful intention is the establishment of the Chemin Neuf Community at Lambeth Palace. This religious Order with an ecumenical charism founded by Fr Laurent Fabre, is a daily sign of hope to us in our spiritual life of what we can share spiritually. Last Wednesday I saw again Jean Vanier, and we prayed together. What a gift he is to the whole of the poor of the earth.

Please be assured, Your Holiness, of the continuing respect and affection of the Anglican Communion, and the assurance of our prayers as we seek with you to serve the call of Christ to maturity in faith, and to do so full of joy in service.

I’d like to end with a prayer for the Global Freedom Network in its struggle to persevere against modern slavery and human trafficking: that the Church has the freedom and courage to witness to and to serve the cause for peace, together, globally. Amen.





Pope's Address to Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby

"The goal of full unity may seem distant indeed, yet it remains the aim which should direct our every step along the way"
The Vatican translation of the Pope's address to Archbishop Justin Welby of the Anglican Community 16 June 2014 at the Vatican:

Your Grace,
Cardinal Nichols,
Cardinal Koch,
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

 "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!" (Ps 133:1). Once again we meet, Your Grace, as co-workers in the Lord’s vineyard and fellow pilgrims on the path to his Kingdom. I welcome you and the distinguished members of your delegation, and I pray that today’s meeting will serve to strengthen further our bonds of friendship and our commitment to the great cause of reconciliation and communion between Christian believers.

The Lord’s question – "What were you arguing about on the way?" (Mk 9:33) – might also apply to us. When Jesus put this question to his disciples they were silent; they were ashamed, for they had been arguing about who was the greatest among them. We too feel ashamed when we ponder the distance between the Lord’s call and our meagre response. Beneath his merciful gaze, we cannot claim that our division is anything less than a scandal and an obstacle to our proclaiming the Gospel of salvation to the world. Our vision is often blurred by the cumulative burden of our divisions and our will is not always free of that human ambition which can accompany even our desire to preach the Gospel as the Lord commanded (cf. Mt 28:19).

The goal of full unity may seem distant indeed, yet it remains the aim which should direct our every step along the way. I find a source of encouragement in the plea of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism that we should advance in our relationship and cooperation by placing no obstacle to the ways of divine providence and by not prejudicing future promptings of the Holy Spirit (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 24). Our progress towards full communion will not be the fruit of human actions alone, but a free gift of God. The Holy Spirit gives us the strength not to grow disheartened and he invites us to trust fully in the power of his works.

As disciples who strive to follow the Lord, we realize that the faith has come to us through many witnesses. We are indebted to great saints, teachers and communities; they have handed down the faith over the ages and they bear witness to our common roots. Yesterday, on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Your Grace celebrated Vespers in the Church of San Gregorio al Celio, from which Pope Gregory the Great sent forth Augustine and his monastic companions to evangelize the peoples of England, thus inaugurating a history of faith and holiness which in turn enriched many other European peoples. This glorious history has profoundly shaped institutions and ecclesial traditions which we share and which serve as a solid basis for our fraternal relations.

On this basis, then, let us look with confidence to the future. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission and the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission represent especially significant forums for examining, in a constructive spirit, older and newer challenges to our ecumenical engagement.

At our first meeting, Your Grace and I discussed our shared concerns and our pain before a number of grave evils afflicting our human family. In particular, we shared our horror in the face of the scourge of human trafficking and forms of modern-day slavery. I thank you for the leadership you have shown in opposing these intolerable crimes against human dignity.

In attempting to respond to this urgent need, notable collaborative efforts have been initiated on the ecumenical level and in cooperation with civil authorities and international organizations. Many charitable initiatives have been undertaken by our communities, and they are operating with generosity and courage in various parts of the world. I think in particular of the action network against the trafficking in women set up by a number of women’s religious institutes. Let us persevere in our commitment to combat new forms of enslavement, in the hope that we can help provide relief to victims and oppose this deplorable trade. I thank God that, as disciples sent to heal a wounded world, we stand together, with perseverance and determination, in opposing this grave evil.

(Pope Francesco): Don’t forget the three p's:
(H.G. Welby): Three p's?…
(Pope Francesco): Prayer, peace and poverty. We must walk together.
(H.G. Welby): We must walk together.

Your Grace, I thank you once more for your visit. I ask the Lord to shower his blessings on your ministry and to sustain you and your loved ones in joy and peace. Amen.

Anglican leader comes to Vatican, launches IARCCUM website Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio, 14 June 2014) The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby arrives in Rome on Saturday for a two day visit that will culminate on Monday in a meeting with Pope Francis in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. On Sunday the Anglican leader will preach at Vespers at the church of St Gregory on the Caelian Hill, visit the two Anglican churches here in Rome and take part in a prayer service with the St Egidio community at St Bartholomew’s on the Tiber Island. During his packed programme, the Archbishop will also launch a new website for the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), showcasing ways in which members of the two communions are increasingly worshipping, working and witnessing side by side.

To find out more, Philippa Hitchen spoke with Canadian bishop Donald Bolen, co-chair of IARCCUM and Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, director of Unity, Faith and Order at the Anglican Communion office in London and co-secretary of IARCCUM…

Listen:





Bolen: The website is meant to be a resource centre on-line for anyone interested in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, from parishes looking for best practises, to researchers looking into the archives of Anglican-Catholic dialogue, to anyone following the news who might be interested in more information – for example about the visit of the ABC to Pope Francis.

Q: It’s a real scholars’ paradise of documents relating back to the beginning of the dialogue in the 1960s?

Yes, the coordinators of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations passed the guidelines that once material is over 30 years old it could be made available to the public, so there’s a wide range of archive materials up to the early 1980s, but there’s also newer material that will be of interest to many people…..

It’s also got a small photo galley that we hope can become much bigger – our hope is that people working on Anglican-Roman Catholic relations in different part so the world will send in resources, best practises, covenants, photographs, videos, which will give other people encouragement and ideas about how to foster relations in their area.

Q: IARCCUM itself is all about encouraging best practises, isn’t it?

Yes indeed, IARCCUM is really called to address the gap between what we could do and share together in terms of common witness, common mission, common prayer, common study, and what we actually do – which is very little. So the idea of best practises, which are all fully acceptable to our churches but which would give inspiration or ideas to others, is one of the purposes of the website….

In New Zealand the local Anglican and Catholic bishops have come up with joint liturgies for Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Advent, that’s a practise which would be quite easy to emulate.

Q: There’s also the question of covenants you mentioned?

I was involved in the preparation of one of those covenants in southern Saskatchewan in western Canada, so that will be on the website and I think would be a good model for other diocese who would be interested in entering into a deeper relationship with their Anglican counterparts…..it identifies many of the things which are held in common and have been worked through in our dialogues, it identifies common concerns and then sets out some practical steps…. for instance from praying in each other’s cathedral together once a year, working together with First Nation people or some other justice issues, to joint formation on everything from altar servers, to sharing of ideas about stewardship and a wide range of ideas where it’s responsible for us to work together.

Alyson Barnett-Cowan, what can you do to spread this kind of work?

Barnett-Cowan: One of the strategies we have is to try and identify pairs of Anglican and Catholic bishops in every country of the world who’ll be champions for the work of putting Anglican-Roman Catholic initiatives together – they’ll be the lead people in promoting this, but we hope that word about the website will spread, that the stories on our Communion news services and the work of Vatican Radio will all penetrate to parts of the world which don’t have perhaps have formally established dialogues.

Q: How does IARCCUM hope to move forward when there are still theological issues still causing obstacles?

The theological stumbling blocks are still there but that’s no reason for us to stop trying to do as much as we possibly can together. Often when you’re trying to solve a theological dilemma, it looms large as the only thing to think about, but the shared faith we have is far larger than the few things that divide us.

Q: You were meeting most recently with ARCIC in South Africa – what can you share from that encounter?

It was a very exciting venue to be in – we met in a leadership development centre where Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists are together working on leadership development with young south Africans, often in situations of poverty. Then we went to a number of projects, an HIV-AIDS cooperative, a women’s collective and places where the churches in Diakonia are equipping the people to be self-supporting – it’s really important for ARCIC to be aware that the Diakonia work of the church is, in many ways, more important than the theological conversations, since it actually changes lives of people directly.

Anglican leader comes to Vatican, launches IARCCUM website Vatican Radio

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S VISIT TO ROME, June 2014

From the Anglican Centre in Rome, 11 June, 2014 When Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and the Pope meet on June 16th, they will be following the pattern of the past fifty years. Pray for them, and for all the meetings Archbishop Justin will be having during his stay in Rome.   Draft itinerary - Sunday 15th June 8.45 am: Meeting with Cardinals Tauran, Turkson, Pell & Bishop Sanchez Sorondo re: Modern Slavery/Human Trafficking 10.00 am: Meet St Peter's Cricket Team in preparation for match in September 11.00 am: Eucharist at All Saints - preside and preach 2.30 pm: Visit Refugee Centre at St Paul's within the Walls. Meet with survivors of human trafficking & exploitation 5.00 pm: Ecumenical Vespers San Gregorio - preach. 6.30 pm: Reception at the Anglican Centre in Rome. 8.30 pm: Attend and preach at St'Egidio Vespers at Santa Maria de Trastevere Monday 16th June 9.00 am: Meet with Fr Adolfo Nicolas SJ, Superior General Society of Jesus 11.00 am: Meet with Pope Francis 12.00 pm: Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity 1.00 pm: Lunch at Santa Marta with Pope Francis 3.15 pm: Meet with St'Egidio community mission and poverty projects 4.30 pm: Meet with Rome-based Chemin Neuf community The Anglican Centre's Mission The Anglican Centre in Rome promotes Christian unity in a divided world. It is a permanent Anglican Communion presence in Rome. Its Director is the Archbishop of Canterbury's Representative to the Holy See. It exercises a ministry of hospitality and prayer, and provides educational opportunities and resources. UK Charity No 1003666 Company No 2604444

Winter-Spring 2014 Newsletter - from the Priest Director

In July 2013, the Catholic League reached its hundredth anniversary. Founded shortly after the beginnings of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 1908 at Moreton-in-the-Marsh (and New York), as well as the modern Ecumenical Movement at Edinburgh in 1910, its voice has not always been welcome. It has stood out against mere amalgamation between ecclesial institutions; it has been impatient with mere, good inter-church relations; it has resisted being a pressure group for Catholicity only within and upon the Anglican world. Each of these purposes is beneficial, but they are never enough on their own.

Ecumenism is not enough

As history has shown, without something more, each of those approaches tends to leave us where we are. In England, the merger of the Congregationalist Federation and the Presbyterian Churches of England in 1972 created the generously ecumenical United Reformed Church; but other denominations opposed to the union spun off from it, ironically meaning more institutional disunity than before; and we are still waiting for the Methodist Church and the Church of England to join it in full communion. Sadly in recent years, this noble representative of the post-Reformation “Old Dissent”, ejected from the English Establishment with the triumph of High Anglicanism following the Restoration Act of Uniformity in 1662, has been the most declining of all the traditional denominations. In the same period, despite its enduring sense of common belonging rooted in the establishment and thus the coherence of the Church of England, the international Anglican Communion has been developing into three distinct groupings at various degrees of mutual non-communion. This demonstrates how the institutions of Churches that arose out of Western Latin Christendom, following the Protestant Reformation movements in the 16^th century, have not been able to summon from within themselves the forces that compel towards the Church’s Catholic unity - even when they have recovered the episcopal ministry in the Church’s threefold order, embraced renewal in liturgical and sacramental life, especially the Eucharist, and wholeheartedly undertaken close relations and ecumenical collaborations at local, national and international levels.

Settling for less

The latest report from the World Council of Churches on the shape of future unity is based on the mutual theological dialogues of the last 50 years, as well as sustained pastoral and evangelistic co-ordination, notably in the many instances of sharing church buildings, resources and ministers. The Church: Towards a Common Vision is the result of 30 years of thinking about the nature and purpose of “the Church and the Churches”, and also about where Baptism, the Eucharist and the Ministry fit in the Church overall, as well as in the personal discipleship and Church membership of individual Christians. Thus it asks how the Church as a whole brings unity and justice to all humanity, in the service and realisation of the Kingdom of God. It marks a considerable degree of mutual sympathy and theological convergence through the Faith & Order Commission (a joint endeavour between the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches, to which the Reformed, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Anglican and Orthodox Churches belong). It is the latest drive for mutual recognition of baptism in each other’s churches, in the hope of mutual recognition of each other’s churches as churches. The objective is that each church’s ordained ministry can become mutually recognised for the purpose of achieving eucharistic fellowship, so that, in united sacramental life, the churches can bear a common witness to the societies in which they live that is convincing. For, as the Lord himself prayed, “may they all be one, so that the world may believe that it was You that sent Me.”  But it somehow seems to be another instance of that “settling for less” on which we have often commented  – good relations, occasional eucharistic and liturgical sharing, even close collaborations; but yet without visible fullness of communion in life, faith and body, the Body of Christ.

Unchurching the Church

Meanwhile in England, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, whose tactical prophecy has intervened unbidden in the leadership of now two of his successors, has opined that within one generation the Church of England will effectively have collapsed as a national institution. Those of us who remember his own archiepiscopate a generation ago have reason to reflect that the theological relativisation, in which there is more than one truth and several integrities; the polarisation and divisiveness that has prevented what Archbishop John Habgood of York once lovingly called “the Soul of the Nation” from cohering as a strong and still centre in England’s shared sense of values and spirituality; and the resulting secularisation of a decreasingly interested society, can each be laid squarely at his door. The Catholic League, as a fellowship of long-time friends, keeps some of this memory. Most members have roots in our Catholic life and pilgrimage together in the remarkable movement in the Church of England that inspired generations to seek above all - for the sake of the salvation of the world - the restoration of the Church’s visible unity reconciled within one, organic Body. It was with an urgent appeal not to harm the reconciliation of the Anglican Communion with the Catholic Church and its apostolic ministry that, out of love for their own church, classic Anglicans, led by the then Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, left at the end of a rally at Wembley in summer 1992 to go straight to Lambeth Palace. There Dr Carey told Dr Leonard and the other bishops who accompanied him that, as each was to retire before long, their influence was passing. The following year, hundreds of Anglican Catholic priests gathered at St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, for a direct debate with Dr Carey, pleading a truly Catholic loyalty to the Anglican Church they belonged to, but reminding him of the urgency of Catholic unity and the consequence of not pursuing it: hundreds of missionary-minded pastoral clergy, he was told, would in conscience consider themselves ejected (the Shades of 1662) and compelled to resign. His response was to say - asked the likely number - that a thousand clergy could easily be replaced by newly ordained women priests. Thus having urged the departure of hundreds of loyal pastors, Archbishop Carey set a tone for the church of which he was chief pastor, characterised not by ever greater cohesion through common participation in the Truth, that once famed “Anglican comprehensiveness”, but exclusivity, making the Church less than the Church, and unchurching people from it, alien to the spirit of the classic Anglicanism so magnificently exemplified in his two great predecessors, William Temple and Michael Ramsey.

Since those days, over 700 Anglican priests and untold numbers of lay faithful have looked for the fullness of the Church’s communion in their apostolic faith through being received into the Roman Catholic Church, nonetheless still hopeful of the greater unity of Christ’s people that they had always believed in. Most recently, well over a thousand people with their priests have become Roman Catholics in the special provision of the Ordinariate, which offers one way of bearing witness to the ecumenical vision - held by the Catholic Church since Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism - that it is somehow not completely itself unless it makes space for the authentic tradition of others, so that they may belong as well. Thus a space has been cleared for a manifestation of the Anglican Tradition alongside the Latin Roman Catholic Tradition. Alongside the Byzantine and other Eastern traditions, all our Christian traditions of the one apostolic faith are needed together in concerted harmony, if the “coming Great Church” is truly to embrace, reconcile and integrate all the people of whom it makes disciples for Jesus Christ. The Ordinariate is not the whole story of Anglican Tradition, of course; but it is an attempt on the part of the Catholic Church to make sense of the indigenous English-speaking religious and liturgical tradition, and to find the authentic and fruitful points of unity with it. There are many orthodox Anglicans who in good conscience persist in their witness to Catholic faith and unity within the Church of England, even in the midst of great adversity. Their faithfulness to the apostolic faith and tradition, to which Pope Benedict recalled all English Christians on his unforgettable visit to these shores, recalls Cardinal Walter Kasper’s appeal, as President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, for Catholic-minded Anglicans to start a New Oxford Movement. People’s articulation of adherence to this historic Anglican tradition makes uneasy listening to their fellow Anglicans who oppose them, as if it were so objectionable in the contemporary Anglican Church as to justify calls for their departure, ejection or canonical inhibition. How those who say they believe in Christian unity, and who follow the Christ who said, “Let the children come to me; let no one hinder them, for to such as these belongs the Kingdom of heaven“, can call on people to “leave the Church”, or any church that constitutes it, is beyond us. The League has constantly stated its support for its members from all churches who believe the Catholic faith and thereby seek the communion of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome. We ask no one to leave; only, as Pope Benedict once said, to enter deep into the mystery of the Church where they are can discover that it is but one.

The Spirit of Communion; the spirit of schism

In all this, what is missing? The sole principle for which the Catholic League came into existence. This was not to promote the Catholicity of the Church of England; nor to be an apologist for the Anglican position; nor to promote interest in and closer relations with the Orthodox and Catholic Churches; nor to inculcate particularly Catholic forms of devotion or ways of life; nor even to work for Church unity as a manifestly good cause in general. These have all formed important aspects of the Catholic League’s work and witness. But the main principle is that the ultimate object of unity in the Catholic faith must always and inescapably be its first step - not the last piece of the jigsaw, but the only aim from the outset - union, or reunion, or fullness of communion (whichever you want to call it) in the Catholic faith with the successor of Peter as Bishop of Rome.

It was this witness that made the League the first body in England to promote observance of the Church Unity Octave, when it was seen as a dangerous Romish ruse. Now it is observed in every part of Christendom as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It was this witness that brought Fr Paul Couturier to England to see those in the Church of England, led by our co-founder Fr Henry Joy Fynes-Clinton, who lived a Catholic life and ministry in it. Couturier and Fynes-Clinton both saw the urgent missionary and pastoral need for the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches somehow to achieve at last the corporate reunion that had eluded various attempts at reconciliation in the past. It was the same witness that influenced the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic movements so thoroughly that Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher - no High Churchman - could say that the Church he led had no faith of its own but only that of the Catholic Church, before in due course becoming the first Anglican leader to be able to visit Rome and see the Pope. It was witness to the same truth that enabled Archbishop Michael Ramsey to be the first to make an official visit to the Pope and establish the Anglican Centre in Rome, in order to speed the reunion of the two Churches. It was this witness that ensured that the representative fielded by the Anglican episcopate as its chief observer at the Second Vatican Council was a convinced Anglo-Papalist, the great Franciscan scholar and Bishop of Ripon, Dr John Moorman. It was this witness that helped to win over the Catholic movement in the Church of England to embrace the renewal of the Catholic continuous tradition, as it reached out to other Christians and a rapidly changing world in the aftermath of Vatican II. It was this witness that made us all think, when Blessed Pope John Paul visited in 1982, that unity was merely “one more step” away. It was this witness that has continued to fire the 50-year-old Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission on its dialogue towards our re-convergence in the one faith we have in fact shared from our origins before our separateness.

Sadly, in the last few years, there have been those who mar this vision. A tiny but vocal section of the Ordinariate has denounced the Anglicanism which formed it and its own Catholic vocation, calling for the Catholic Church – and the League – to abandon its determination to achieve institutional communion - demanded by the Lord - between the two communities that are the Catholic Church and the churches of the Anglican Communion as “futile”. Turning the back on fellow Christians because of doubting their good faith, however, or making the Catholic Church exclusive of others, or unchurching those who are fellow members of the one Church through sharing the sacrament of Baptism, is not faithful to Catholic teaching; nor is it being faithful to the Petrine ministry of Pope Francis with a care for all the churches - still less his great predecessor Pope Benedict. Furthermore, by the same token, certain Anglican-Catholic voices, regardless of their deep concerns over the reshaping of the nature and purpose of the Church and its ordained ministry within their own Anglican Communion, have been arguing for the perpetuated separation of the Anglican Church over against Roman Catholicism – specifically separation from the person and office of the Holy Father - as preferable to Catholic unity, despite their beliefs in the Universal Church and the primacy of the Bishop of Rome in relation to it. It has been ironic to hear some Anglo-Catholics, who otherwise sense a close affinity with the Roman Catholic Church, espouse markedly anti-Catholic sentiments. It is part of the same temptation to unchurch the other. It serves no useful purpose in promoting the Catholic faith or the Catholic spiritual life, or in serving the ministry of reconciliation, of which St Paul speaks, that is laid upon all those who desire union with God in Christ. Moreover, we have encountered a small constituency of Anglicans who are not participating in their own Church’s mainstream ecumenism in England, and yet who want something different from Anglicanism’s mainstream engagement with the Catholic Church through ARCIC. They reject the offer made by Pope Benedict (which had, after all, been made in response to Anglican requests over many years) to take part in a project – the Personal Ordinariates – that could serve to unite significant elements of the Anglican religious tradition with the Catholic Church on a basis that genuinely respects its integrity. Instead they call for a Catholic-Anglican unity that excludes “former Anglicans”, a unity of their own, on their own terms; not the Church’s, whether Catholic or Anglican, but something different. Seemingly all of us in our different Church bodies are tempted to something that is exclusive; something that views reunion as the prevailing of one viewpoint or interest ahead of another; something that prefers guarded ecumenical relations in separation; something that recoils from the call to repentance of the pain-inflicting spirit of division, a spirit that truly has nothing to do with the principles of faith that each rightly holds dear, that keep us apart and yet we seek to resolve. Our dialogue towards reconciliation cannot honour principles that we use as reasons to perpetuate division.

Fortunately, in the face of this, in our hundredth year, the members of the Catholic League, Anglicans and Catholics together, rooted in old friendships and the communion of shared origins of which Pope Paul VI once spoke, are united in witness to the only principle that matters: communion of all churches and all Christians in the single binding truth of the Catholic and apostolic faith with - from beginning to end - the successor of Peter. For this truth is the force from the Holy Spirit within the Body of Christ that compels the Church to complete unity and that bestows on it everything that is indispensable and necessary for it to be the Catholic Church in and for this land and its people.

The 106^th Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2014 brings with it the 106^th year of united Anglican-Catholic prayer for Christian unity, corporate reunion, institutional communion. The path is not the sweeping avenue we once hoped for, but leads through a narrow gate. We should have expected nothing less; and go to and through it all we must, because we believe, like Mary, that what the Lord has prayed for is a promise that He will fulfil. Thus we in the Catholic League, with its Apostolate of Prayer, re-commit ourselves to this true “Common Vision” of the Church, of full, visible and organic communion. Our annual leaflet of prayer for unity, based on the work of Fr Paul Couturier, an apostle and pioneer of unity that Fr Fynes-Clinton brought over to England to further the cause of Catholic-Anglican reunion, can be downloaded from our website, www.unitas.org.uk . At the forefront of our minds in the Week of Prayer is the apparent sheer impossibility of the task of achieving Catholic-Anglican unity in such an utterly changed situation. We will be thinking, “How can what we are praying for come about?” We will also be thinking of Pope Francis who is determined to make common cause with Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury, a man of profound spirituality, an Evangelical influenced by Catholic piety and devotion to the Eucharist, who wants to share with the Catholic Church a common approach to the problems of society - in England and around the world - where there is injustice and no peace. Surely all Christians are united in the face of the intense sufferings endured by the Church in the Middle East, parts of Africa, India and the far east. Given the exceptional persecution of the People of God by those of other religions and secularists alike, we will also be recalling that the Lord prayed for us to be one, “so that the world may believe”. More than Christian solidarity, the need for the Church’s organic and visible unity – the institutional communion between all the Churches of Christ – has never been more urgent. Those charged by you, the members, with responsibility for the League urge all our members to take this particular Week of Prayer to heart, in the confidence that, whatever appearances there are in this world and between our respective churches, nonetheless unity is a thing to be prayed for because it will inevitably happen, for no other reason than that the Lord has determined it. It is He who has said it will come. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

We know that it is not enough to say, “Of course, we are one in spirit”, or “We are of one mind”. The hymn boasts, “We are not divided; All one Body we; one in faith and doctrine, one in charity”. Nevertheless, we know that its untruth makes us ashamed and causes scandal before the world. How can we make truth-tellers of ourselves and bring about the institutional communion that has eluded us for centuries, that is far more than the mere merger of organisations, and that integrates our many Christianities in the one Body of Christ that is His Church? The League’s answer is always first to pray, and second to bear unswerving witness to the belief that there can be no unity that does not involve our reconciliation together in communion with the Bishop of Rome as successor of Peter - the depths of the Church’s one faith that comes to us from the apostles.

Centenary Publications

In 2014 you will receive several long delayed editions of our journal, The Messenger. One issue will look at reconciliation and the healing of memories, what Pope Francis has recently termed our ecumenism of blood. Another will complement our major contribution to understanding Anglicanorum Coetibus and will seek to assess the significance of the various Ordinariates in the three years since their establishment and their relation to the Church’s cause of Catholic-Anglican unity. A third will collect the splendid addresses and lectures that attended our July 2013 celebrations to mark the Centenary of the League’s history and service to principled Catholic corporate reunion, an almost solitary witness for much of its lifetime. A fourth will enable us to share with you the beautiful devotions led by Archdeacon Luke Miller in March 2013 at Walsingham, drawing on the spirituality of the Roman Catholic St Thérèse of Lisieux and the Anglican Fr George Congreve SSJE, and his Stations of the Cross.

Later in 2014 we hope to see the publication of the League’s 100-year history by the distinguished papal historian, Dr Michael Walsh. The year will further be marked by an invitation from the Third International Receptive Ecumenism Conference to address it on the League’s witness to what ecumenists now call “institutional communion”. We can be grateful to God that our century-long insistence on the integrity of the whole Church as seen together - not the piecemeal amalgamations or temporary acts of personal eucharistic sharing that have attempted and not achieved the solution to our divisions - is what draws once more the hearts and minds who long for that for which Christ prayed.

Centenary at Corringham: Address by Bishop Norman Banks

At St Mary's in Corringham, Essex, on 5 July 2013, the first members subscribed. It was the patronal festival and those who had formally founded the League at St Mark's Bush Hill Park on the 2nd, together with others who had planned the movement with Henry Joy Fynes Clinton at an earlier meeting, arrived from London to take part in the celebrations and to image how the League could transform the thinking of the entire Established Church - be a church within a church - and lead it into corporate reunion with the See of Peter once more.

Fr Mark Woodruff, priest director, and Mr David Chapman, general secretary, by generous invitation of the rector, Fr David Rollins, visited the parish on 14th July 2013, 100 years after the inauguration in the same building, if not quite to the day. David had been present as crucifer on the 60th anniversary and brought the pictures to show it. Fr Philip Gray, vicar of Mendlesham and past priest director, had been the thurifer. Also in the company were Fr Milburn from Brighton and Fr Dominic Pyle Bridges. At least one member of the present congregation at St Mary's had also been there for the 60th.

Presiding at the celebration was Bishop Norman Banks of Richborough, a past member of the Council of the Catholic League and vicar of Walsingham. Here follows his address at the beginning of the mass.

It is wonderful to be here with you in Corringham. I have heard so much about this Church and it is indeed beautiful. I can see it has the Laurence King touch, which make me feel I have something in common with you, because one of my Churches in Walsingham, St Mary’s, like so many much loved beacons in the Anglican Catholic world, was restored by Laurence King too (although I hope yours, unlike many of the rest, suffer from roofs with a tendency to leak whatever you do to keep them repaired).

Another reason I am so pleased to be with you is because it was 100 years ago this very month that the Catholic League was founded here. This was the result of conversations within the Catholic movement in the Church of England to bring about the unity of the whole Church, so that Christianity could once more live and worship as one and speak to the world with one voice. Those conversations have continued ever since the Catholic League’s first members were enrolled here at Corringham, and the repercussions have gone on throughout the Church, as we have prayed and hoped for unity ever since.

One little known fact about the League is that, when Fr Hope Patten established the Shrine at Walsingham, with his vision of bringing the Catholic Faith to convert the hears of the people of this land once more, it was the League that was the first to raise and send funds to support him and it was the first body to organise a pilgrimage to England’s Nazareth restored. The work not only continues to this day, but its witness flourishes.

We are so pleased the Fr Mark Woodruff and Mr David Chapman, respectively Priest Director and General Secretary of the League, are with us for our parish celebration today. They are Roman Catholics who have been dedicated to the work and cause of Christian Unity for decades and it shows that the League continues to hold people together in hope that the Church can overcome its divisions and be true to its One Lord.

There have been setbacks and even new obstacles have emerged. Part of these are due to our personal and corporate prejudices and in a moment we will confess our sins and our part in the Church’s divisions and rivalries as we seek his forgiveness and the power of his reconciliation.

But I want to tell you about last week at General Synod, when I had lunch with Archbishop Justin. He was not long back from Rome and full of excitement after meeting Pope Francis. Something wonderful had happened. He and the Holy Father were discussing the many values from the Gospel that they share about the needs of the poor, and the way in which the priests and the people of God ought to follow Christ. As they were discussing how the Churches can stand together in witnessing to the Gospel for the sake of the poor, the Holy Father took hold of his pectoral cross and said it was something on which “We bishops…. We bishops…” could give the lead. This moved Archbishop Justin, but he did not want to read too much into it; yet it happened again. He was immensely moved, but also encouraged and inspired by this warm gesture of fraternity and ecumenical closeness.

Francis and Justin are going to take risks for unity. They are going to be bold in order that they can work and stand together, for the sake of the world. For this, they will both rely heavily on our prayers. And the prayers of parishes like Corringham are going to be vital because, in the Anglican Catholic movement, it is parishes like yours that get it, that understand what is being prayed for. You understand that the Catholic Faith is essential to the proclaiming of the Gospel, and for that to be convincing it needs the Church not just to act as one, but to be one and to be seen to be one, if it is going to capture the hearts and minds of people and convert them to the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Hope and prayer for reunion between Catholics and Anglicans in one Church began 100 years ago in this very building and they remain driving forces at work among us to this day. So you know that prayer works and bring about new life and new possibilities. So pray for Archbishop Justin and Pope Francis, and the risks they will take to break down whatever stands in the way of the Church serving and proclaiming Christ in the world; pray too for their concerted efforts to answer the prayer of Christ, “that they all may be one, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.”

 

Centenary of the Catholic League's Foundation: Homily by Fr Michael Rear

When Fr Mark suggested I should preach this evening I realised, rather to my horror, that I’ve been a member of the League for somewhat more than half of its history. There is a temptation for me to go back down Memory Lane, thinking about what the League has meant to me, and recalling the great men who taught me the Catholic Faith in the Church of England. If I yield to the temptation of nostalgia it is to illustrate how different times are now, and what a lot there is to thank God for on our Centenary. To recall that human efforts are futile, and that like Our Lady we must trust God. Fr Frazer, who baptised me in Christ Church, Doncaster, was under the bishop’s ban for 40 years. For those too young to remember such things it meant that the bishop never set foot in the church because it was too catholic. Then there was Fr Roger Pilkington, who prepared me for Confirmation. He had just moved into the vicarage with his elderly mother and had invited the Bishop for Supper on the evening of his Induction. Without warning after coffee the bishop produced a declaration which he forced Fr Pilkington to sign, if he wanted to be inducted. The Declaration was never to give Benediction. Struggles between Anglo-Catholic priests and unsympathetic bishops lent new meaning to the words Church Militant! Yet the persecution was rooted in fear.

 

Fifty years ago the Catholic League was perceived as a deeply suspect and sinister outfit. Jesuits in disguise plotting the overthrow of the country and its Established Church by their allegiance to a foreign power. I didn’t know it was such an exciting organisation when I joined in 1961. Later that same year when I began my studies for the priesthood at Lichfield Theological College, where a few years earlier the Principal, Dr Hann, had gone over to Rome I discovered there had been a Stalinist purge. Students were compelled to resign from the League or face expulsion. I was strongly advised to do the same.

 

What of those holy priests who taught me the Faith? And what of the holy martyrs of Russia who were being sent to Gulags rather than deny their faith, would they have resigned from the League? Neither would this arrogant young would-be martyr. Hurtful as it often was it has to be admitted we did thrive on the thrill of persecution and enjoyed every minute of it. And behind the idealism of those Anglo-Catholic priests there was a spirituality of faithful priestly service, rather than preferment or treading carefully for one’s own advantage. Our crime was to pray and passionately believe in Christian unity, and the necessity for all Churches to be in communion with the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter.

 

One lesson we learn about the working of the Holy Spirit is how quickly and suddenly events can change. From age to age God raises up men and women to be outstanding witnesses of his love and power. Blessed John Paul II shook the rotten tree of communism and it all but collapsed. And in 1962, the year after I went to Lichfield, Blessed John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council. Suddenly, everyone was talking about unity with Rome. League members were no longer third columnists but prophets. Anglican observers rushed to the Council.

 

From Lichfield I went to study in Rome before my ordination and saw Archbishop Ramsey when he visited Pope Paul VI. Who could have predicted, who could have believed, the transformation that was taking place? ‘We have been like two quarrelsome sisters’, Pope Paul VI said. And the ARCIC dialogue began. We were so optimistic that the principal observer at the Vatican Council, Bishop John Moorman, said unity needed just ‘one step more’. We are now rather less sanguine, new obstacles have arisen, but we still believe ‘the Lord founded one church and one church only’[i], and the League will always witness to that. We shall never give up. ‘How is it possible to remain divided, if we have been ‘buried’ through Baptism in the Lord’s death’ appealed Blessed John Paul in an encyclical which took the League’s motto as its title, UT UNUM SINT.

 

There have been disappointments before, human efforts ending in failure. Some of you have seen, in St. Peter’s Rome, Bernini’s spectacular tribute to Pope Alexander VII, near the top of the left aisle? Deep in prayer, the Pope floats on flamboyant drapery of porphyry, while the allegorical figures of Justice, Prudence, Charity and Truth skip around him, as they did during his life. Charity cradles a child, and Truth – if you have seen the monument have you noticed what Truth is doing? – her left foot stands on a globe of the world. She is stamping on England.

 

What crime had England committed to be immortalised in marble? The Church of England had rejected thirty years of dialogue initiated by Archbishop Laud of Canterbury supported by the Bishop of Chichester. The plan was to end the schism between the Catholic Church and the Church of England by a scheme that would have allowed the Church of England to keep an English Liturgy, married priests and other patrimony. Familiar? The seeds of the Ordinariate were sown three centuries ago.

 

When the League was founded in 1913 it was heir to much prayer and belief that God wills all his followers to be united in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, which Jesus built on St Peter. Prayer and belief that intensified during the nineteenth century as an effect of the Oxford Movement. And now, at our Centenary, we can give thanks for the triumph of love over fear, and dwell on that. For, although we are hugely disappointed that ARCIC’s vision of full organic unity has not yet  been fulfilled, the foundation of the Ordinariates, as the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster both acknowledged, would not have been possible without the ARCIC dialogues of the past forty years. It is, as they both declared, a ‘consequence of ecumenical dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion’[ii].

 

It seemed at first as though the ordination of women had ended the ARCIC dialogue. I suggested to Cardinal Hume when I met him at Walsingham, that Pope John Paul II must have been disappointed when the Church of England’s decided to ordain women. ‘He was angry’, the Cardinal told me. The Catholic Church had invested great hopes and expectations in the Catholic-Anglican dialogue.   Cardinal Kasper famously declared that the ordination of women bishops will lead not only to a short-lived cold, but to a serious and long-lasting chill. But this is proving to be very far from the case. The work of the Holy Spirit goes on. Unity is an imperative part of the prayer of Christ for his people.

 

So, where do we go from here? Can the Catholic League be prophetic again? Vatican II, in the Constitution of the Church, spoke of the Holy Spirit ‘bestowing upon her varied hierarchic and charismatic gifts’.[iii] Many homilies this last weekend have been preached suggesting that Peter, the rock and leader, represents the hierarchic gifts of the Church, and Paul, its outstanding preacher, the charismatic. The ARCIC discussions have dealt almost exclusively with the hierarchic gifts, with doctrine, ministry, sacraments, the Petrine ministry, authority. And remarkable agreement and consensus has been achieved as a permanent legacy. The Catholic League has played her honourable part in promoting and explaining ARCIC’s Agreed Statements.

 

But the Council spoke of ‘charismatic’ gifts as well as ‘hierarchic’. It put new emphasis on the Priesthood of the Faithful. And since the Council we have witnessed the formation and flourishing of new ecclesial movements, over 200 of them in the Catholic Church, and some in the Anglican Church too. Preaching to 280,000 members, gathered in St Peter’s Square on Pentecost 2000, Pope John Paul II said, ‘The movements and new communities, providential expressions of the new springtime brought forth by the Spirit with the Second Vatican Council, announce the power of God’s love which in overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind, renews the face of the earth to build the civilization of love’. They are at the heart of the new evangelisation. I think the future growing into unity between our Churches will increasingly focus on the charismatic gifts, ‘overcoming divisions and barriers of every kind’.

 

Now, following all these new movements we even have an ‘evangelical pope’, a pope who shows that you can be both catholic and evangelical, a good friend of fellow-Argentinian Luis Palau, the successor to Billy Graham, who relates, ‘Whenever we pray together he says “lay your hands on me and pray for me, that God will keep me as servant”… He’s really centred on Jesus and the Gospel, the pure Gospel’. At his Wednesday audience a fortnight ago Francis told the crowd that he had spent 40 minutes that morning praying with an evangelical pastor. Pope Francis has spoken of preaching the Gospel of grace, warning that ‘when we leave grace a little to one side in our proclamation, the Gospel is not effective... Evangelical preaching flows from gratuitousness, from the wonder of the salvation that comes; and that which I have freely received I must freely give’.

 

In recent years Anglican evangelicals have become notably less hostile to the Catholic Church, which once they regarded as the scarlet woman.  Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the Papal preacher, is a welcome preacher at Holy Trinity Brompton, and Cardinal Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, spent time there. Nicky Gumbel went to the Synod of New Evangelisation in Rome last year at which Archbishop Rowan Williams was invited to speak, and Alpha is spreading widely in the Catholic Church. Archbishop Welby and his wife are deeply involved with the new Catholic Movements, and spent a weekend before his enthronement with the Chemin Neuf Community in Switzerland. And when he met the Pope Francis they spent time praying and speaking of what God had done in their lives.

 

This is a new dialogue, a new ecumenical development, typical of the way in which the Holy Spirit surprises us. Pope John Paul II went so far as to say, ‘certain features of the Christian mystery have at times been more effectively emphasized’[iv] by those with whom we are not yet in union. There has never really been a spiritual dialogue between Anglican Evangelicals and Anglican Catholics, but now the opportunity is arising.  A spiritual dialogue, a dialogue of prayer; for the deepening the spiritual life is one of the objects of the League. And Jesus showed us in his prayer to the Father that prayer, not human effort, is the way to unity, and prayer for unity has always been at the heart of the League. The new movements in the Catholic Church illuminate this way and give us confidence, and my hope is that just as the Catholic League has for a century pioneered and continues to  lead the Anglican Church into a deeper understanding of the hierarchic nature of the Church, and the necessity of unity with the See of Peter, so it will now help the Church to grow into an ever-deepening appreciation of the charismatic gifts the Holy Spirit bestows upon us all, ‘building bridges from all sides towards reconciliation through the Catholic faith’[v]

 

Michael Rear, President

Catholic Church of the Assumption & St Gregory, Warwick Street, LONDON

July 2nd, 2013

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[i] Vatican II Unitatis Redintegratio, para. 1.

[ii] Joint Statement by the Archbishop of Westminster and the Archbishop of Canterbury, 20 October 2009.

[iii] Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, para. 4.

[iv] John Paul II, Ut unum sint, para. 14.

[v] Catholic League, Our Work, Catholic Ecumenism, para. 1.