The Archbishop of Canterbury asked on Thursday whether the differences between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are sufficient to prevent Rome’s deeper recognition of Anglican orders.
 
The Most Rev. Rowan Williams spoke at the Gregorian University at a conference in honor of the late ecumenical leader Johannes Cardinal Willebrands. The archbishop’s office has released a text of his remarks.
 
The “ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full,” the archbishop said. “For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain.”
 
Archbishop Williams quoted ten times from a newly published book, Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue, by Walter Cardinal Kasper, whom he called “our greatly loved and respected friend.”
 
When announcing the book in late October, Cardinal Kasper called it “the result of two years of intense efforts I undertook with officials of my pontifical council, in collaboration with our … ecumenical partners.”
 
Archbishop Williams described Roman Catholics and their ecumenical partners as essentially united in their understanding of basic Christian faith.
 
“The links from trinitarian doctrine straight through to the meaning of the Lord’s Supper are strongly affirmed on all sides,” he said. “The whole discussion of sacramental life is centered upon how the believer is established in filial communion through the act of the triune God; there is little to suggest that outside the Roman fold there is any ambiguity over this priority of the divine act, or any separation between the act of God in salvation and a purely or predominantly human activity of recalling or expressing that act through human practices.”
 
Instead, he said, there is continuing disagreement about the nature of authority (specifically Roman Catholicism’s magisterium), about papal primacy and about the nature of the universal Church itself.
 
Is the universal Church, Archbishop Williams asked, “an entity from which local churches derive their life, or is it the perfect mutuality of relationship between local churches — or indeed as the mysterious presence of the whole in each specific community?”
 
Citing a sermon that Cardinal Willebrands delivered in Cambridge in 1970, the archbishop described a theory of primacy as a “community of communities” and a “communion of communions.” He cited the Anglican Communion’s proposed covenant as an example.
 
“The current proposals for a covenant between Anglican provinces represent an effort to create not a centralized decision-making executive but a ‘community of communities’ that can manage to sustain a mutually nourishing and mutually critical life, with all consenting to certain protocols of decision-making together,” he said.
 
He also offered a brief critique of the Vatican’s apostolic constitution that will allow sojourning Anglicans to become Roman Catholics while retaining aspects of their Anglican heritage.
 
The constitution, he said, “does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture, as we might say. As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground. It remains to be seen whether the flexibility suggested in the Constitution might ever lead to something less like a ‘chaplaincy’ and more like a church gathered around a bishop.”
 
The archbishop devoted nearly a quarter of his address to women’s ordination.
 
“Even if there remains uncertainty in the minds of some about the rightness of ordaining women, is there a way of recognizing that somehow the corporate exercise of a Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is dispute about the standing of female individuals?” Archbishop Williams said. “In terms of the relation of local to universal, what we are saying here is that a degree of recognizability of ‘the same Catholic thing’ has survived: Anglican provinces ordaining women to some or all of the three orders have not become so obviously diverse in their understanding of filial holiness and sacramental transformation that they cannot act together, serve one another and allow some real collaboration.”
 
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