The Archbishop and the Pope affirmed the bonds of “friendship” and “love” between Roman Catholics and Anglicans when they met for the first time in Rome this morning

In their first meeting, Archbishop Justin and Pope Francis both spoke this morning of the bonds of “friendship” and “love” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.

The two leaders agreed that the fruits of this dialogue and relationship have the potential to empower Christians around the world to demonstrate the love of Christ.

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Pope Francis met on Friday with the new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, stressing the need to work and worship together in the search for reconciliation and unity between the Catholic and Anglican communities. Philippa Hitchen was on hand in the library of the Apostolic Palace to hear what the Pope and the Archbishop had to say….

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At the end of his first visit to the Vatican, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said he and Pope Francis shared ideas on economic justice, on the plight of Christians in the Middle East, but also on their deeply personal experiences of God’s calling in their daily lives.

Following their morning audience and joint prayer service, the leader of the Anglican Communion described the Pope as a man of “extraordinary humanity, on fire with the Spirit of Christ”. While admitting there are obstacles on the road to reconciliation between Anglicans and Catholics, he said he sensed a new vigour and common commitment “to prove the radicality” of the Christian Gospel.

Speaking to Philippa Hitchen in the garden of the Venerable English College at the end of the brief visit, the archbishop said he and the Pope also joked about the way they had inaugurated their ministries within two days of each other earlier this year”¦”¦

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Speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral this evening, Archbishop Justin said there will never be “perfect” banks, because “in the end no human being is of themselves perfectly good.”

But the Archbishop said we can have “potentially good banks”, which are motivated by virtue and not just financial bonuses and penalties.

Such a banking system would be “realistic” about human fallibility, but “optimistic” about human potential, he said.-

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The Most Rev. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, will pay a brief, informal visit to Pope Francis I in Rome on June 14. According to a Lambeth Palace statement, it will be a “personal and fraternal” visit.

It will be the first meeting between the two prelates since their inaugurations in March. The two church leaders share a commitment to global justice, ethical regulation of financial markets and conflict resolution.

“This visit is an opportunity for the Archbishop and Pope Francis to review the present state of relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion,” said a statement issued by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out in support of a campaign encouraging world leaders to tackle hunger, saving the millions of lives it claims each year.

Archbishop Justin spoke via video to thousands gathered in Hyde Park..[Saturday] to launch the IF campaign, of which the Church of England is a member. The IF campaign is made up of more than 200 charities, faith groups and organisations. The campaign is urging G8 leaders to take big steps that will tackle the global injustice of hunger.

He said: “We’ve come to celebrate the opportunity we have to end hunger in our lifetimes. The only way that’s going to happen is by mass movements of people, like yourselves, getting together”.

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During the testosterone-fuelled boom years, Christian faith was about surviving in the City, but since 2008 and the revelation that it was all built on sand, Christians have been saying unequivocally that the gospel is non-negotiable, that working in commerce isn’t about surviving as a Christian but about transforming the way we do business, that Christianity is disruptive of systemic greed and corruption: that, in short, their work serves their faith and not the other way round. They are converting markets, not just people. These are the new Power Christians.

Welby is their spiritual, as well as titular, leader. Born in 1956 into a privileged, if eccentric family, he has managed a tension between descent from a powerful Conservative dynasty (on his mother’s side, he is a scion of the Butler family, which gave us Rab Butler, the deputy prime minister to Harold Macmillan) and skeletons in the family cupboard (it was seen fit to conceal his paternal Jewish-immigrant lineage from him until he became an adult).

This background may have contributed to Welby the Outsider, part of the establishment but also a thorn in its side. It is no surprise that the relentlessly bourgeois HTB couldn’t contain him. Note that he considerably widened not only his social but his theological circle after he left the Knightsbridge church. Via Africa and the Middle East, he arrived as dean of Liverpool Cathedral, where he operated what he and Dr Williams have dubbed a “mixed economy” of traditions. Now add that eclecticism ”“ one might even call it a catholic taste in denominations ”“ to the can-do attitude of the City whizz-kid and you have someone who can tap effortlessly in to the energy of any kind of Christian witness….

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[Justin] Welby, the people’s primate, takes the bus to meetings, tweets about shoe shopping and admits he is tempted to nod off during particularly dull after-lunch synod debates. Only last month, he gave an interview in which he let slip that one of the greatest frustrations of moving to London is that takeaway delivery men get confused when he orders. They have never had to drop off a chicken tikka masala at Lambeth Palace before.

His love of pounding the streets has been welcomed by several followers, not least Graham Daniels, a former Cambridge United left back and now general director of Christians in Sport. “It proves he is fit for purpose, not just theological but physically, too. There are 150,000 sports clubs in the country with 10 million members, so it is great to see that he can relate to all those people.”

It should not be such a surprise that the Archbishop exercises. He is, to use the marvellous Victorian idiom, a “muscular Christian”, which has never been a wholly metaphorical turn of phrase.

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The Church of England has admonished one of its priests for calling the Archbishop of Canterbury a “w****r” on Facebook in a row over gay marriage. The Rev Marcus Ramshaw, who like Justin Welby trained for the priesthood at Cranmer Hall, Durham, also described him as a “massive mistake”.

After the Archbishop spoke against gay marriage in the House of Lords, Mr Ramshaw called for a petition to be set up urging him to resign….

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The newly-installed Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby will visit Pope Francis on 14 June, the Vatican has confirmed.

It will mark the first meeting between Pope Francis and the new head of the Church of England and spiritual head of the global Anglican Church.

The brief courtesy visit is expected to be “informal” but “important” according to a representative of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, whose president Cardinal Kurt Koch will meet and pray with Welby. The Archbishop of Canterbury is also expected to visit the tomb of Blessed John Paul II.

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We do not know what was prayed. Her Majesty knelt at the beginning of a path of demanding devotion and utter self-sacrifice, a path she did not choose, yet to which she was called by God. Today we celebrate sixty years since that moment, sixty years of commitment.

There was a trumpet fanfare as today as the Queen arrived with her supporters, but let us resist the splendour of the spectacle for a moment, and focus on what was meant: “Not my will, Lord, but yours be done.”

And following her giving of allegiance to God, others – especially, with such equal and dedicated commitment, the Duke of Edinburgh – pledged their allegiance to her.

And here, in the grace and providence of God, is the model of liberty and authority which our country enjoys. Liberty is only real when it exists under authority. Liberty under authority begins, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, with our duty to God, “whose service is perfect freedom”.

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Colin Hart, Campaign Director for the Coalition for Marriage, said that although the Government had won the vote today, the debate had revealed the strength of opposition to the bill.

He remained optimistic that better safeguards for those with a traditional understanding of marriage would be introduced to the bill.

He said: “We will continue to campaign to save traditional marriage and today’s vote and the concerns expressed by many peers mean we will be able to introduce safeguards that will protect teachers, registrars, chaplains and anyone who works in the public sector. And if the Government refuse to accept these changes, they risk losing the legislation at third reading.”

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Members of four Melanesian religious orders visited Archbishop Justin at Lambeth Palace on Thursday last week. Amid prayer, worship and song, the Brothers and Sisters pledged their desire to work for “peace and reconciliation in the Anglican Communion”.

rchbishop Justin welcomed a group of Brothers and Sisters from Melanesia to Lambeth Palace on Thursday night for an evening of prayer, conversation and Melanesian song.

The visit was part of the Melanesian Religious Orders’ mission to the UK, in which they visited five different diocese around the country. The theme of their mission was ”˜Simply Living’ in which they live the question ”˜How do we live the Gospel in relation to God, creation and one another?’

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It is …necessary to express, as has been done already, total rejection of homophobic language, which is wrong ”“ and more than that, sickening.

However, I and many of my colleagues remain with considerable hesitations about this Bill. My predecessor Lord Williams of Oystermouth showed clearly last summer, in evidence during the consultation period, that it has within it a series of category errors. It confuses marriage and weddings. It assumes that the rightful desire for equality ”“ to which I’ve referred supportively ”“ must mean uniformity, failing to understand that two things may be equal but different. And as a result it does not do what it sets out to do, my Lords. Schedule 4 distinguishes clearly between same gender and opposite gender marriage, thus not achieving true equality.

The result is confusion. Marriage is abolished, redefined and recreated, being different and unequal for different categories. The new marriage of the Bill is an awkward shape with same gender and different gender categories scrunched into it, neither fitting well. The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost. The idea of marriage as covenant is diminished. The family in its normal sense, predating the state and as our base community of society ”“ as we’ve already heard ”“ is weakened. These points will be expanded on by others in the debate, I’m sure, including those from these benches.

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The archbishop made clear he shared [Lord] Dear’s concerns about the bill. Welby told peers the bill had created confusion, adding: “Marriage is abolished, redefined and recreated ”“ being different and unequal for different categories. The new marriage of the bill is an awkward shape with same gender and different gender categories scrunched into it ”“ neither fitting well.

“The concept of marriage as a normative place for procreation is lost. The idea of marriage as covenant is diminished. The family in its normal sense predating the state and as our base community of society is weakened.

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Good relations between different Christian traditions are the “oxygen” that allows the Church to fulfil its mission and proclaim the Gospel, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today.

Speaking in Leicester to members of the Meissen Commission, an ecumenical programme between English and German churches, the Archbishop said: “Ecumenism is not an extra that one can fit in because it’s an interesting occupation. It is the oxygen of mission and evangelism.”

The Meissen Commission oversees relations between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD), who in 1991 signed an agreement to work towards “full, visible unity”.

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The laughter and standing ovation that the Archbishop of Cantebrury received in the Royal Albert Hall on Monday suggested that, despite his saying that the “deepest wounds” he had suffered had been at the hands of his fellow Christians, he does not lack support.

The Archbishop was the first speaker at the leadership conference organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), the Evangelical church in London. The event drew 5500 people from 86 different countries, all “united around Jesus”, the Vicar of Holy Trinity, the Revd Nicky Gumbel, declared.

Archbishop Welby’s appearance took the form of an interview, conducted by Mr Gumbel, which perhaps vindicated the headline in The Daily Telegraph that greeted his appointment ( “HTB lands its first Archbishop”).

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The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has added its voice to the call for peace in Korea. In a message read to the Second Worldwide Anglican Peace Conference held in Okinawa from 16 ”“ 22 April 2013 Archbishop Welby lauded the work of the Korean and Japanese churches to foster peace in Northeast Asia.

“Your gathering has come at the most needful time,” Archbishop Welby wrote, in a statement read by his representative to the conference Bishop John Holbrook of Brixworth in the diocese of Peterborough.

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One problem…[Justin Welby] faces is that God isn’t really very popular. According to one recent survey, God is less trusted than Google.

“I saw that. I was very grumpy about it. Google always gives me the wrong answer. They’re actually out to make money out of us. I’m not.”

Welby is trying to build trust in a way that has fallen out of fashion in the Church of England: through his own belief in God. When I ask point blank if he really and truly thinks that Mary was a virgin and that Christ actually rose from the dead, he puts down his fork and replies simply: “Yes.”

I must be looking doubtful as he goes on: “Is that clear? I can say the Creed without crossing my fingers.”

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It is about time the Church became serious about politics. The debacle over its opposition to the Government’s welfare reform programme offers the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, a God-given opportunity to totally reshape the role of bishops in the House of Lords.

A week before the House of Lords voted on key aspects of the Government’s welfare cuts [in March], 43 bishops issued a statement to the effect that this was the most vicious attack on children since Herod slaughtered the innocent. The welfare cuts are serious in the impact they will have on the living standards of some families, but let’s leave aside the judgment as to whether the cuts were almost of a criminal nature. What did the bishops do?

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The Archbishop of Canterbury will address thousands of international Christian leaders in London on Monday next week.

Archbishop Justin will speak on the opening morning of the annual HTB leadership conference, which returns to the Royal Albert Hall for the second year running.

The two-day event, which will be live streamed, will bring together 5,500 Christian leaders from 89 countries.

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Religion should be incorporated into “reality” television shows in order to increase understanding of other faiths, the Archbishop of Canterbury has claimed.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, who was enthroned in March, warned of “dangerous” consequences if religion disappeared from television schedules. Broadcasters who force religion to the margins are helping to “cultivate ignorance”, the Archbishop said.

He praised the ITV documentary series, Strictly Kosher, which featured an internet-dating Rabbi and a flamboyant fashion boutique owner based in Manchester’s orthodox Jewish community, for “stitching” religion into everyday life.

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The final report for the enquiry into the operation of the diocesan child protection policies in the Diocese of Chichester has today been published.

The report was written by Bishop John Gladwin and Chancellor Rupert Bursell QC who were appointed in 2011 as the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s commissaries to carry out the enquiry.

In responding to the final report, Archbishop Justin has made the following statement:

“I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to not only the Commissaries for their care and concern in the course of carrying out this Visitation, but also to the survivors of abuse who have been able to share their experiences. The hurt and damage that has been done to them is something the Church can never ignore and I can only repeat what I have said before – that they should never have been let down by the people who ought to have been a source of trust and comfort and I want to apologise on behalf of the Church for pain and hurt they have suffered. I remain deeply grateful for their cooperation in the work of the Visitation….

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It is a wearyingly obvious observation, but the Church of England remains crippled by the gay crisis. It is locked in disastrous self-opposition, alienated from its largely liberal nature. Maybe the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has a secret plan that will break the deadlock: there is no sign of it yet. The advent of gay marriage has made the situation look even more hopeless. It entrenches the church in its official conservatism, and it further radicalises the liberals. A few weeks ago the church issued a report clarifying its opposition to gay marriage, in which it ruled out the blessing of gay partnerships. This was not a hopeful move: it ought to be keeping these issues separate.

The ending of the turbulent Williams era is an opportunity to take stock, rethink, take a step back. What we see is that, for more than 20 years, the church has tried and failed to reform its line on homosexuality; and this failure has been amazingly costly. The church used to be good at gradual reform. Why did it fail so dismally this time?

I blame the liberals….

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Justin Welby, the new leader of nearly 80m Anglicans around the world, has won a respectful hearing for his ideas on banking and the British economy. Even if they disagree with the details, people have generally not reacted by saying “this man hasn’t a clue what he is talking about” or “he should go back to singing hymns.”

On April 21st, the archbishop of Canterbury suggested that big, unhealthy banks should be broken up into regional ones, as part of a “revolution in the aims” of banks designed to make sure that they served society as well as their own narrow interests. That sounded very like the proposal made last month by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, for local lenders modelled on the German system. It comes at a time when the government faces hard decisions about the future of the Royal Bank of Scotland after its rescue by the tax-payer. Given the immediacy of the issue, some people will accuse the archbishop (who lists his hobbies as French culture, sailing and politics) of making narrow political points rather than broad moral ones.

But he also had some longer-term ideas on the financial sector. Drawing on his experience as a member of a parliamentary Banking Standards Commission, he said senior positions in banking ought to form a regulated profession which required qualifications.

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Speaking on Radio 4… [on Saturday], the Archbishop of Canterbury stressed the implications of Christian ethics for the City of London

The Christian Gopsel has “always had strong social implications” and been concerned with “the common good”, the Archbishop of Canterbury said….

In an interview for Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, Archbishop Justin said his main mission wasn’t to inject morality back into British business. But he said that how the City of London – which “is so important and so full of very gifted people” ”“ behaves in relation to the common good is a major concern not just for the Church but for society generally.

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Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, laughs when it is suggested that he has a mission to raise moral standards in the City. “My key mission is to lead the Church in worshipping Jesus Christ,” he says.

He points out, however, that Christian teaching concerns the “common good”, and he is concerned about “how the City of London, which is so important and so full of very gifted people”, relates to this concept.

Dr Welby is in a unique position to do something about it. Outside the cathedral he enjoys two political pulpits from which to shape the debate: in the House of Lords and on the cross-party parliamentary banking commission.

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The City of London has been affected by a “culture of entitlement” at variance with what others think reasonable, the new Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

But the Most Reverend Justin Welby told the BBC business morality was in many ways much better than in the past.

He also defended his description of the UK’s economic situation as a depression rather than a recession.

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Since the very first days of the Syrian conflict in March 2011, we have prayed as we watched in horror and sorrow the escalating violence that has rent this country apart. We have grieved with all Syrians – with the families of each and every human life lost and with all communities whose neighbourhoods and livelihoods have suffered from escalating and pervasive violence.

And today, our prayers also go with the ancient communities of our Christian brothers and sisters in Syria. The kidnapping this week of two Metropolitan bishops of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim of the Syriac Orthodox Church and Paul Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, and the killing of their driver while they were carrying out a humanitarian mission, is another telling sign of the terrible circumstances that continue to engulf all Syrians.

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The daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury has called on the church to do more to eradicate the stigma of mental illness, revealing that she sometimes suffers from “unbearable” depression.

Katharine Welby, the 26-year old daughter of Archbishop Justin Welby who took up his new post last month, says she sometimes feels “very low”, with a “black veil of nothing hanging in front of me”….

Read it all (requires subscription) and please take the time to read Katharine Welby’s blog post also.