The British media had billed the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Nov. 21 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI as a showdown, but the reality was quite different and resulted in a firm reaffirmation and consolidation of the official dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.
 
“I was very happy with the outcome of the meeting; it was as good as I could have hoped,” Archbishop Rowan Williams told journalists at the Anglican Centre in Rome after his audience with the pope. “I was very glad to hear the pope repeat his commitment to the continuing process of official dialogue between our two churches as churches.”
 
He revealed, moreover, that Pope Benedict was “extremely enthusiastic” about Phase III of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). Archbishop Williams was pleased too because he had been able to talk frankly with the pope about Anglicanorum Coetibus, the Apostolic Constitution that the Vatican previewed on Oct. 20 and released on Nov. 9. He said their conversation lasted “just over half an hour.”
 
In a statement issued after the two leaders’ private conversation in the pope’s library, the Vatican said their discussions had focused on “recent events affecting relations” between the two communions and noted “the shared will to continue and consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Anglicans.”
 
The Vatican statement added that they had also talked about “how, over the coming days, the commission entrusted with preparing the third phase of the international theological dialogue between the parties (ARCIC) is due to meet.”
 
Speaking to reporters at the Anglican Centre, and in an earlier interview with Vatican Radio (tinyurl.com/ABCVaticanRadio), Archbishop Williams revealed much about what they had discussed.
 
Pope Benedict had welcomed him as he arrived at the spacious library on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace. The two theologians and primatial leaders shook hands warmly, and then the pope led him to the table at which he speaks with heads of state and other distinguished visitors. They sat facing each other across the table—on which there was a cross and a clock, as well as pen and paper—and talked together in English.
 
Speaking to Vatican Radio shortly after meeting the pope, Archbishop Williams gave his account of what transpired.
 
“Naturally, I wanted to express some of the concerns about the way in which the announcement of the constitution had been handled and received, because many Anglicans, myself included, felt that it put us in an awkward position for a time—not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out,” he said. “I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns, and I think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit.”
 
Asked at the Anglican Centre whether the pope appeared to think any differently about the importance of consulting the archbishop, Archbishop Williams said, “I think that’s private, really.”
 
“We were disappointed, of course, that there hadn’t been more consultation, but I think that is partly a function of the way the Vatican works,” he said. “We accept that.”
 
The “main message” coming out of his conversation with the pope, he told Vatican Radio, was that “the constitution does not represent any change in the Vatican’s attitude to the Anglican Communion.”
 
“Indeed, the presentation of the constitution as some kind of dawn raid on the Anglican Communion misunderstands the process that happened and the actual nature of the constitution,” he said.
 
He reiterated that concept to the BBC. “There was nothing about the constitution that Anglicans could interpret as a kind of dawn raid,” he said. “We talked that through very thoroughly.”
 
“People become Roman Catholics because they want to become Roman Catholics and because their conscience is formed in a certain way and they believe this is the will of God for them and I wish them every blessing,” the archbishop told Vatican Radio. “I don’t think [the constitution] is a question of the Roman Catholic Church trying to attract by advertising or by special offers.”
 
At the Anglican Centre, he rejected a suggestion that the constitution had damaged ecumenical dialogue between the churches. “I think this is not true,” he said. He described the constitution as “a pastoral measure for certain peoples and groups. It’s not a new ecumenism as some people are saying; it’s not a new departure replacing the continuing process of dialogue between the two churches as churches.”
 
Archbishop Williams said his conversation with the pope “reassured me that the course we are already on is without interruption…there isn’t a new style of ecumenism, there isn’t a new agenda.”
 
He disagreed with some colleagues who believed he should not have visited the pope at all: “I think one has to take a long view. Friendships are valuable, and Christian friendships are immensely valuable. We have a long-term experience of mutual understanding and cooperation and ultimately, of course, we hope and pray for visible unity, whenever that will come.”
 
After he and the pope had thoroughly discussed the question of the constitution, “we moved on from there to talk about more positive matters of cooperation.”
 
He said one of the issues was Phase III of the formal dialogue between the two churches. That dialogue began in 1967 with the establishment of ARCIC. The first phase ended in 1981, while Phase II lasted from 1983 to 2004. The archbishop said that “informal talks” between Anglican and Roman Catholic representatives would “set the agenda” for the commission’s long-term work.
 
“Everyone I have spoken to here is quite committed to carrying on with the ARCIC process of the international commission as before.
 
Two days later, representatives of the two sides met at the Anglican Centre in Rome and agreed that Phase III of the dialogue would focus on “The Church as Communion: Universal and Local.” In particular, the commission will look at how the local church relates to the universal Church.
 
The Vatican’s statement said the two leaders also discussed “the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges.”
 
Archbishop Williams said at the Anglican Centre that he and the pope talked “a little bit about practical matters” and “the ecumenical situation,” and “some general themes around ethics and economics in our modern world, and how different Churches were reacting to that.”
 
He said they talked too about the pope’s “proposed visit to the U.K.” sometime in 2010 (probably September). Later, I learned that in his conversation with the pope, Archbishop Williams emphasized presenting John Henry Newman as a very important figure for Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics. Sources in Rome expect the pope to beatify Newman, a theologian he greatly admires, during his visit to England.
 
After they concluded their private discussions, the archbishop presented his entourage to the pope, including the Rt. Rev. Christopher Hill, Bishop of Guildford. Walter Cardinal Kasper joined them too, together with Msgr. Mark Langham, who is the Vatican’s desk officer for relations with the Anglican Communion. Then, in what many interpreted as a significant and highly symbolic gesture, Pope Benedict gave the Archbishop of Canterbury a gold pectoral cross. Afterward, Archbishop Williams had a private lunch with the Father General of the Jesuits, Adolfo Nicolas, before returning to London.
 
Meeting the pope was the culminating moment of the archbishop’s three-day visit to Rome. The archbishop’s original purpose was to participate in a one-day symposium on Nov. 19 at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University to celebrate the centenary of Dutch-born Jan Cardinal Willebrands (1909-2006), one of the great pioneers of ecumenism. The symposium was a fitting tribute to Willebrands, who was one of the most influential figures in the Vatican’s Office for the Promotion of Christian Unity for almost 40 years, and served as its president from 1969 to 1989.
 
While the lectures at the symposium’s morning session were very interesting, particularly one by Father James Puglisi on “Cardinal Willebrands and Ecumenical Relations with Churches and Ecclesial Communities of the West,” the best wine was kept for the afternoon session, when the archbishop and Walter Cardinal Kasper were the keynote speakers. Before the conference, Cardinal Kasper’s only substantial comments on the constitution had come in an article, based on a conversation with him, published in the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano.
 
Hundreds of people flocked to the afternoon session, including professors from Roman universities, ambassadors, priests and students from various colleges, an assortment of lay people and Ivan Cardinal Dias, the Indian-born prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, who had spoken at the Lambeth Conference in 2008.
 
In a highly challenging lecture (archbishopofcanterbury.org/2616), particularly at a time when identity politics has weighed heavily in the Roman Catholic Church, Archbishop Williams suggested reframing the ecumenical dialogue. He advocated placing greater weight on what the different Christian churches already agree on rather than on questions that still divide them. His suggestion seemed to echo the approach preferred by Pope John XXIII when he called the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
 
Since Vatican II, Archbishop Williams recalled, the Roman Catholic Church has engaged in dialogues with other churches, including the Anglican Communion, and has reached “a considerable number of agreed statements” about what the Church of God really is. He noted that these “striking” agreements have been made available in a recent book, Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue, prepared by the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity.
 
That book, he said, shows that “the issues between Christians in the historic churches are not about the essential shape of our language concerning God and God’s action in Christ.” Rather, “as the ecumenical statements in varying words agree, the ongoing debate is not about these fundamentals, but about where the fullest realization of communion is to be found.”
 
If this is true, he said, then “what exactly are the points that divide us?” Drawing on Harvesting the Fruits, he focused on authority, the nature of primacy, and “the way we think of the universal Church itself.” He suggested that there is an urgent need today to clarify “whether these continuing points of tension or difference imply in any way that the substantive theological convergence is less solid than it appears, so that we must still hold back from fuller levels of recognition of ministries or fuller sacramental fellowship.” He not only reaffirmed the Anglican position on the ordination of women, but also spoke about the constitution —“the elephant in the room.”
 
The papal provision for Anglicans, he said, “shows some marks of the recognition that diversity of ethos does not in itself compromise the unity of the Catholic Church, even within the bounds of the historic Western patriarchate.”
 
But, he added, “it 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, he said, the constitution “is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground.”
 
He said “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.”
 
Archbishop Williams summed up his lecture with these words: “All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full, and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us.”
 
He added: “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. And if it isn’t, can we allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?”
 
The archbishop’s lecture was carried in full, in Italian, in L’Osservatore Romano. Pope Benedict would certainly have read it before they met.
 
Cardinal Kasper was the last to speak at the symposium, and in his impressive lecture on “The Legacy of Cardinal Willebrands and the Future of Ecumenism,” also carried in the Vatican daily, he too addressed the question of the constitution. It is but “one fruit” of the ecumenical dialogue that has been going on between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion since 1967, he said.
 
He presented it as a response by Pope Benedict to those Anglicans “who by the grace of God and reasons of conscience want to join the Catholic Church while preserving the legitimate elements of their liturgical and spiritual tradition.”
 
He said this provision neither constitutes “a new ecumenism” nor marks “the end of the old,” 42-year ecumenical dialogue between Anglicans and Catholics. On the contrary, he said, it should be seen as happening “exactly in conformity with [the Second Vatican Council’s] Decree on Ecumenism (n.4), which clearly distinguishes between conversion of individual persons or groups of persons on the one hand and, on the other, ecumenism as dialogue with other Churches with the goal of full communion.”
 
The German theologian-cardinal emphasized that both “individual or corporative conversion and ecumenical dialogue should be undertaken in the greatest possible transparency, tactfulness and mutual esteem in order not to entail meaningless tensions with our ecumenical partners.”
 
After the lecture, he acknowledged that the drafting and publication of the constitution had not exactly been marked by the transparency he had advocated in his lecture.
 
“I can only speak for myself,” he said. “I insisted from the very beginning that the Archbishop of Canterbury be informed.”
 
This did not happen, he added, “partly because the Anglican side too insisted very much on secrecy” but also “because we cannot go public too early because of the sensitivities of the discussion.”
 
“But,” he added, “there should be transparency in the process, and I think we have to learn this.”
 
On Nov. 20, Cardinal Kasper and Archbishop Williams jointly led an Evening Prayer service at the Oratory of Saint Francis Xavier del Caravita, not far from the Anglican Centre and the Gregorian University, in the heart of Rome. The city’s English-speaking Roman Catholic community founded the oratory in 2000, with an intentional ecumenical outreach. Several hundred people attended the service. The archbishop preached the sermon. The service concluded with the cardinal and archbishop jointly imparting the blessing.
 
Gerard O’Connell reports from Rome on Vatican affairs for UCA News (Asia), The Universe (U.K.), Our Sunday Visitor and other news organizations.
 
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