According to the official Vatican communiqué, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, had a private audience with Pope Benedict last Friday to discuss the following:
In the course of the cordial discussions attention turned to the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and to the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges.
The discussions also focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, reiterating the shared will to continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Anglicans, and recalling how, over coming days, the commission entrusted with preparing the third phase of international theological dialogue between the parties (ARCIC) is due to meet.
And, of course, it took them only twenty minutes to clear all that off the agenda.
Sure. Even more than other press offices, the Vatican’s knows perfectly well that twenty minutes barely suffices for protocol and pleasantries on such an occasion. Damien Thompson of the Telegraph makes the point explicit:
You have to deduct from the 20 minutes the time spent discussing “the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and to the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges.” That might take, what, five minutes? More likely eight, I’m guessing.
So that gives the Primate of All England about 12 minutes’ “face time” with the Supreme Pontiff to discuss the ecumenical earthquake of the Personal Ordinariates—but, in fact, it looks as if they devoted much of it to ARCIC, the official dialogue between the Communions which I thought had been wound down years ago. There’s going to be a “third phase” of this waffle? To discuss what? Tips on where to buy the tastiest organic biscuits to serve after Sunday morning services?
As Thompson says, “they both know it’s all over,” if by “it” one means the prospects for corporate reunion. We are left with Rome’s newly decreed Anglican Ordinariates, for Anglicans who are serious about the Catholic in Anglo-Catholic, and Canterbury’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain a communion riven by ever-widening doctrinal chasms.
November 23rd, 2009 | 9:26 pm
Bishop John Broadhurst of Forward in Faith is now coordinating Anglo-Catholics’ entrance into the Church in England and Wales. He has said that the “Anglican experiment is over.” There have already been unfortunate expressions of protest over Anglicanorum Coetibus and its consequences (defacement, anonymous threats). It is hard to imagine what ARCIC and its American counterpart have left to say. The only alternative and possibility for reunion has been offered to those who can accept it. Many of us, converts past and present from Anglicanism, feel a sadness in departure. But it is as Bishop Broadhurst said, “over.” He will lose his mitre, if not his holy orders. There is loss, even sacrifice. Over the weekend, I was approached in a parking lot by a middle-aged man carrying the literature of the Jehovah Witnesses (Watchtower etc.). I told him no thank you, “I’m Catholic.” He persisted. With a force suprising to a man only 8 months from his difficult confirmation, I replied, “I’m a Catholic. Please respect that.” Something is gained as well. The most important thing. But I do now feel less alone in my journey. And I have the Church to thank for that as well.
November 24th, 2009 | 9:56 pm
A friend recently asked, given the bizarre turns the Episcopal Church has taken in America, how we can possibly make ecumenical progress with that happening. My reply was that, if a Christian church takes such pains to abandon all semblance of Christian orthodoxy, it solves the problem itself in a generation or so, by becoming in steps irrelevant, fatally reduced in numbers, and ultimately extinct.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact