The Flea to the Elephant

From The Times (UK) via TitusOneNine:

November 20, 2009

Archbishop tells Pope: there will be no turning back on women priests

Ruth Gledhill and Richard Owen in Rome

The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday made his most outspoken challenge to the Roman Catholic Church since the Pope invited disaffected Anglicans to switch to Rome.

Speaking before he meets Benedict XVI tomorrow, Dr Rowan Williams told a conference in Rome that the Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women was a bar to Christian unity.

“For many Anglicans, not ordaining women has a possible unwelcome implication about the difference between baptised men and baptised women,” he said.

The Anglican provinces that ordain women had retained rather than lost their Catholic holiness and sacramentalism, he said.

Addressing an ecumenical conference at the Gregorian Pontifical University, the Archbishop said that the way Anglican leaders dealt with internal arguments offered lessons for senior Catholics.

“Is it nonsense to think that holding on to a limited but real common life might be worth working for within the Anglican family? And if it can be managed within the Anglican family, is this a possible model for the wider ecumenical scene?”

The ordination of women priests — and the prospect of women bishops — is one of the main reasons why disaffected Anglicans may take up the Pope’s offer of a “Church within a Church” that would enable them to retain traditional Anglican practices within the Catholic faith.

But yesterday the Archbishop made clear that there would be no turning back the clock on women priests in order to appease critics. He dismissed the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans as barely more than a “pastoral response”, which broke little new ground in relations between the two Churches.

Dr Williams said: “It does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or methods of independent decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture.

“As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground,” he told the meeting of senior priests, bishops and cardinals.

Dr Williams put the row over the apostolic constitution, as the Pope’s plan is known, into the context of a centuries-old debate about reuniting the Christian Churches. He questioned whether unity talks should even continue if disagreements over issues such as papal primacy had no hope ever of being resolved.

“I want to propose that we now need urgent clarification of whether these continuing points of tension imply in any way that the substantive theological convergence is less solid than it appears, so that we must still hold back from fuller levels of recognition of ministries or fuller sacramental fellowship,” he said.

But he went on to argue that if there was hope that such issues could be resolved, the Churches could begin to talk about converging their structures of administration and governance, and seeking “sacramental” fellowship.

The speech laid the ground for a frank encounter behind closed doors with the Pope, the highlight of Dr Williams’s Rome trip.

With tensions surfacing behind the scenes at the Holy See, Dr Williams is expected to discuss the Pope’s visit to Britain next autumn, including whether it should be accorded the status of a pastoral or State visit. If it were the latter, it would be the first state visit by a Pope to Britain and he would be the guest of the Queen, who is Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

The Archbishop’s private audience today will be preceded by meetings with the senior Vatican officials Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, and Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue. He will also attend a dinner in his honour given by Francis Campbell, the British Ambassador to the Holy See.

Dr Williams will preside at vespers this evening at the Oratory of St Frances Xavier, known as the Caravita church, in the centre of Rome.

Cardinal Kasper was not involved in the formulation of the Pope’s opening to disaffected Anglicans, which was drawn up by the more hardline Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and some of his staff have been dismayed by its impact on ecumenical dialogue.