ROME (CNS): Remembering the common roots of the Christianity they share, Roman Catholics and Anglicans should renew their commitments to praying and working for Christian unity, Pope Benedict XVI said.
The Pope and spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury held an evening prayer service on March 10 at Rome’s Church of St Gregory on the Caelian Hill, the church from which Pope Gregory the Great sent St Augustine of Canterbury and his fellow monks to evangelise England in 597.
The service was part of celebrations marking the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the Camaldolese branch of the Benedictine order.
Camaldoli monks and nuns live and pray at the Church of St Gregory and have an active program of ecumenical contacts.
“We hope that the sign of our presence here together in front of the holy altar, where Gregory himself celebrated the eucharistic sacrifice, will remain not only as a reminder of our fraternal encounter, but also as a stimulus for all the faithful – both Catholic and Anglican – encouraging them … to renew their commitment to pray constantly and to work for unity, and to live fully in accordance with the ‘ut unum sint’ (that all may be one) that Jesus addressed to the Father,” Pope Benedict said during the evening prayer service.
Faith was a gift of God, but it required a response, the Pope said.
“It requires the commitment to be reclothed in Christ’s sentiments: tenderness, goodness, humility, meekness, magnanimity, mutual forgiveness and, above all, as a synthesis and a crown, ‘agape’ – the love that God has given us through Jesus, the love that the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts,” he said.
Camaldoli monks and nuns – wearing hooded white robes – were joined by cardinals, Anglican and Catholic faithful and representatives of other Christian communities in Rome for the prayer service.
As the Pope and archbishop arrived at St Gregory, they also were greeted by dozens of members of the Missionaries of Charity, who have a convent and a shelter for the homeless next door.
The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury held private talks in the morning of March 10 at the Vatican.
Archbishop Williams told Vatican Radio he and the Pope spoke about the situation of Christians in the Middle East “and about our shared sense of deep anxiety and frustration and uncertainty about what the future holds there”.
He said they also spoke about Pope Benedict’s invitation to Archbishop Williams to address October’s world Synod of Bishops on the new evangelisation.
“I’m being invited to give some theological reflections on the nature of mission, the nature of evangelisation, and I’m extremely honoured to be invited to do this,” he told Vatican Radio.
“I hope that it’s a sign that we can work together on evangelisation in Europe,” the archbishop said.
“It’s disastrous if any one Church tries to go it alone here and tries to assume that it and it alone has the key”, because reviving the Christian faith in Europe requires as many and “as deep resources as we can find”.
Archbishop Williams’ homily at the evening prayer service with the Pope focused on how the Camaldolese efforts to balance solitude and community life teach the virtues individual Christians and Christian communities need to accept each other, work together and witness the Gospel to all.
Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, he said, both were committed to “a vision of the restoration of full sacramental communion, of a eucharistic life that is fully visible, and thus a witness that is fully credible, so that a confused and tormented world may enter into the welcome and transforming light of Christ”.
But Catholic-Anglican unity was imperfect, at least in part because Catholics and Anglicans had an “unstable and incomplete” recognition of one another as the body of Christ, Archbishop Williams said.
