Washington, November 21: Pope Benedict XVI was to meet his Anglican counterpart, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, today amid tensions between their two churches.
The strictly private meeting comes just two weeks after a Vatican overture to disgruntled Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, a move that caught Williams off-guard, saying he had been informed of it “at a very late stage”.
The British press has painted Archbishop Williams’ visit, though scheduled long before the controversy, as a “showdown” between the two churches, but observers expect a show of unity.
“Both leaders were committed to having this ecumenical journey together,” said Reverend Doctor R William Franklin, associate director of the American Academy in Rome.
“People are saying they are not being prevented from going forward,” he added in an interview.
The two church leaders will “want to demonstrate good will and show that ecumenism is going forward on other issues”, agreed veteran Vatican watcher Bruno Bartoloni, referring to theological questions and the issue of papal primacy.
“What has happened in reality is that both sides have recognised that ecumenism has failed,” Mr Bartoloni said. “The Catholic Church has made clear that they will never agree on the question of women priests and bishops.”
As a result, he said: “The Anglican reactionaries (opposed to the ordination of women as well as openly gay clergy) will go over to the Catholic Church. It actually suits both sides.”
A conference at Rome’s Gregorian University on Thursday – at which Archbishop Williams spoke of the “ecumenical glass (being) genuinely half-full” while acknowledging they had “unfinished business” to resolve – “did a lot to help defuse the situation,” said Reverend Franklin, who is also an academic fellow at the Anglican Centre in Rome.
While appearing conciliatory, Archbishop Williams also laid down what he called a “challenge to recent Roman Catholic thinking” on women priests.
The archbishop, noting the “sharpness of division” among Anglicans on the question of the ordination of women, said they had managed to “maintain a degree of undoubtedly impaired communion among themselves” by taking a broader view.
So he asked: “Is there a way of recognising that somehow the corporate exercise of a Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is dispute about the standing of female individuals?”
Ironically, the meeting comes during long-planned events to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Johannes Willebrands, a Dutch cardinal who was a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism.
—Agencies