The Archbishop of Canterbury’s address at the Willebrands symposium in Rome on Nov. 19 has rightfully been read as a significant, and even bold, challenge, aimed first of all at policy makers at the Vatican, including presumably the pope himself. In this respect, the text offers a rare and unusually frank glimpse into the archbishop’s current thinking about the Anglican-Roman Catholic relationship that merits careful reading and reflection.
 
Archbishop Williams’s thinking about these matters has remained remarkably consistent throughout his career. At the same time, his Rome address apparently sought to lay out some conditions for a fruitful third round of ARCIC, soon to commence; and in this regard the archbishop structured his talk around an engagement and encouragement of what he takes to be the most helpful strand of ecumenical thought about the Church in the bilateral dialogues produced in the wake of Vatican II.
 
According to “the new style in ecclesiology rooted in Vatican II,” a commitment is made to always speak about the Church theologically — thus explicating the “nature and character and even polity” of the Church in terms of a grounding in “the nature of God and of God’s incarnation in history.” This yields what Archbishop Williams calls the “twofold vision” at the center of the dialogues: “filial relation with God the Father as the realization of the human vocation; and, as an immediate corollary of this, communion with other believers, offered to the whole world as promise and hope.” By placing these matters at the center of our doctrine of the Church — thus “re-theologizing ecclesiology,” as he says—we have all together affirmed that remaining differences between divided Christian communities can only be addressed with reference to this center; and so must be shown to be similarly theological, or otherwise classified as “second-order” matters.
 
So far so good. And on this basis Archbishop Williams goes on to sketch an approach to three remaining nests of thorny questions among divided Christians: general questions about authority, including “the very possibility” of a Roman Catholic magisterium; particular questions about primacy, especially the papacy as “a single identifiable ministry of unity to which all local ministries are accountable”; and questions about the universal Church itself, particularly in the necessary balancing of local and universal responsibilities.
 
This is where the archbishop’s essay heats up; and where his searching questions for his Roman Catholic interlocutors beget still more, and different, questions. On all counts, the archbishop’s approach presumes the givenness of a plurality of churches — Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, and beyond—and seeks to imagine how this plurality, and concomitant diversity, may be received as a gift without, as he says, “adjust[ing] our expectations downward in ecumenical dialogue,” that is, without surrendering our commitment to full, visible unity. This makes sense to a point — along the lines of a “communion of communions” (here retrieved from Cardinal Willebrands), whereby families of churches would be united “not so much juridically or institutionally as in terms of lasting loyalty, shared theological method and devotional ethos.” In this way we may hope “at the very least for joint means of decision-making between churches differently ordered in their systems of authority,” and at most for an exchange of ministries and sharing of sacraments.
 
If we are to hope for a reconciled future for (several, or most of the) communions of churches, however, we must remember to speak not only positively about Christian plurality but penitentially. Precisely in and through our “independence” from one another, after all, have arisen countless sins — not least, in many cases, the very fact of institutional division — that have crippled our ecclesial and communal witness. In this case, it seems problematic and dishonest to speak about “the local community gathered around the bishop ... as itself the whole” of Catholicism if we do not in the same breath wrestle with the contradiction of love represented by overlapping jurisdictions, thence a push and pull, and competition, between “churches” in a given place. Likewise, in a context of impaired (and so forth) communion, even among Anglicans, a simple “mutual acknowledgement of integrity” is not the most obvious or best complement to our “limited but real common life.”
 
We do, even now, share a “real but imperfect” communion, Roman Catholic authorities have affirmed: the communion of baptism into Christ’s death. But this should properly serve as a goad to deeper communion still, and reconciliation, which requires something rather more costly than mutual recognition, primarily because we are committed to a thoroughly theological view of the Church. It requires repentance; and, indeed, confession of our incompleteness in division. Only in this way can our wholeness be restored, and healed— in Christ, incarnate and crucified.
 
Christopher Wells
 
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