Nothing Much to Talk About

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.