VATICAN CITY (CNS): While some pundits have sounded the death knell for ecumenical relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, the Anglican spiritual leader, pledged to move forward.
The Pope and archbishop met privately at the Vatican for about 20 minutes on November 21.
A Vatican statement said the two leaders reiterated “the shared will to continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Cath-olics and Anglicans”.
And, it said, they discussed the work their representatives were to begin on November 23 preparing for a third round of study by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, the body for official theological dialogue.
The statement said the two leaders discussed “recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion”, a reference to Pope Benedict’s apostolic constitution establishing “personal ordinariates” – structures similar to dioceses – for Anglicans who wanted to enter full communion with the Roman Catholic Church while maintaining some of their Anglican heritage.
The announcement appeared to cause some tension, mainly because Archbishop Williams was not informed about the papal provision until shortly before it was announced publicly in late October.
Despite the Vatican’s clear statements that the move was a pastoral response to people who contacted the Vatican seeking to become Catholic, many headlines treated it as the Vatican taking unfair advantage of tensions within the Anglican Communion over the ordination of women as priests and bishops.
In an interview on November 21 with Vatican Radio, Archbishop Williams said he told the Pope that the way the announcement was handled “put us in an awkward position”, but he also said media presentations of the announcement as a “dawn raid on the Anglican Communion” were simply wrong.
“People become Roman Catholics because they want to become Roman Catholics, because their consciences are formed in a certain way and they believe this is the will of God for them. And I wish them every blessing in that,” the archbishop said.
“But I don’t think it’s a question of the Roman Catholic Church as it were trying to attract by advertising or by special offers,” he said, adding that for that reason “I don’t particularly worry about it.”
Asked for the Pope’s reaction, the archbishop said, “the main message was that the constitution did not represent any change in the Vatican’s attitude toward the Anglican Communion as such”.
As for the issue of ordaining openly gay men and blessing gay marriages, which a few Anglican provinces have done, Archbishop Williams told Vatican Radio the official policy of the Anglican Communion remained opposed to such practices.
“We have to keep considering this, praying about it (and) reflecting without creating too many facts on the ground that pretend the debate is settled,” he told the radio.
“At the same time, he said, it must be done in a way that showed how much “we value and appreciate the contribution made already by many faithful gay and lesbian people who serve as clergy and laity in the Church”.
