Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday morning met privately with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. During the talks, the two men elaborated on the challenges face by all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and the need to encourage forms of collaboration and common witness when addressing them. They also spoke about recent events which have affected relations between the Catholic Church and Anglican Communion, and reaffirmed their common will to continue and strengthen ecumenical relations between Catholics and Anglicans. After his meeting with the Pope, Archbishop Williams spoke to Vatican Radio (about 11 1/2 minutes).

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Pope Benedict XVI and the Anglican Primate Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, have agreed to maintain momentum in the ecumenical dialogue between the two churches despite the fact that the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus will imply the reception of some half a million Anglicans into the Catholic Church.

The Pope received Williams this Saturday morning, and according to a Vatican press release, “in the course of the cordial discussions attention turned to the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and to the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges.”

The private meeting also “focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, reiterating the shared will to continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Anglicans,” the press release said.

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In a visit to Rome, Dr Rowan Williams expressed his concerns to the Pope over the Vatican’s recent offer to welcome disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic fold.

The two religious leaders held a private meeting in the Pope’ study, after which the Vatican released a statement saying the discussions had been “cordial”.

A statement released by the Vatican said they “turned to the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and to the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges”.

It added that the discussions “focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion”.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury met privately with the Pope today in an effort to ease tensions over the Vatican’s move to ‘poach’ Anglican clergy.

Dr Rowan Williams held talks with Benedict XVI, in Rome, in what the Vatican called, “cordial discussions” to consolidate relations between the two churches.

It it was the first time the two have met since the Pope approved an unprecedented decree to accept Anglicans into the Catholic fold.

After the 20-minute meeting the Vatican issued a brief statement saying that the two leaders “turned to the challenges facing all Christian communities; and the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges.”

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The meeting between Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had been billed as something of a showdown.

After all, it was the first since the Pope’s invitation to disgruntled Anglicans to convert to Catholicism.

Many Anglicans had spoken openly of their concern not only that the invitation was being made, but also about the way it was handled.

It came, earlier this month, just as the Church of England was trying to find ways of keeping those traditionalists on its Catholic wing inside the fold.

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Pope Benedict XVI will today greet Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, for the first time since the Vatican announced the creation of a canonical structure to receive groups of Anglican converts en masse.

The pair will hold a private meeting at the Vatican at a delicate time for relations between the churches. Last month, Pope Benedict unveiled a special structure to allow traditionalist Anglican ministers, including married ones, and lay people to join the Catholic Church. The decree, for the first time in history, allows the creation of “personal ordinariates” in which Anglo-Catholics can preserve their traditions but in communion with the Pope. Anglo-Catholic leaders have generally welcomed the move as an act of generosity. But it has caused unease within parts of the Church of England because some clergy fear it could further undermine the worldwide Anglican Communion.

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Somehow our son Nathaniel made the crew team at Boston University. The whole family has come to see his event this morning beginning at 8 a.m.–woo hoo! KSH.

The Rev. Michael Joseph Hanley was elected Nov. 20 to be the 10th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon, pending the required consents.

Hanley, 54, rector of St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Roseville, Minnesota, was elected on the second ballot out of a field of three candidates. He received 146 votes of 198 cast in the lay order and 104 of 132 cast in the clergy order. An election on the second ballot required 100 in the lay order and 67 in the clergy order. The results of all the ballots are available here.

Hanley served churches in Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere in Minnesota before being calling to Roseville in 1998. He is a three-time alternate deputy to General Convention. Hanley holds a doctor of ministry degree from Virginia Theological Seminary and a master of divinity degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. He was ordained deacon in June 1981 and priest in April 1982. Hanley is married to Marla Martin Hanley, associate academic dean at St. Catherine University in the Twin Cities.

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The rift between the Churches is not as wide as the Vatican makes out, the Archbishop of Canterbury argued this week.

Dr Williams was speaking in Rome on Thursday, before a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI. In a lecture at a symposium to honour Cardinal Willebrands, the first ever president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, he challenged the view that the ordination of women was the stumbling block is has been made out to be.

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[Rowan] Williams’ mood is unlikely to be as upbeat when he meets with Pope Benedict on Saturday, just a month after the Vatican’s surprise announcement outlining historic new procedures designed to help disaffected conservative Anglicans enter the Roman Catholic fold. Both Anglicans and Catholics are now awaiting the first details of exactly how the Vatican will bring in would-be Anglican converts, groups or parishes. “This announcement from Rome is incredibly messy,” says Rev. Jo Bailey Wells, who heads the Anglican Studies department at Duke University Divinity School. “It’s confused and confusing.”

Depending on who you ask, the two faiths are either closer than ever to bridging their differences or are renewing the kind of mistrust and incomprehension that has marked the relationship since the Anglican Church was formed after King Henry VIII’s split from Rome in the 16th century. For those in the 77-million-strong Anglican Church (which includes the Episcopal Church in the U.S.) who are angry at its policy of allowing women and gay priests and bishops, and perhaps attracted by the liturgical and historical links with Catholicism, Benedict’s official door-opening is an unexpected godsend that might just allow for the best of both worlds: hanging onto their Anglican culture and parish life while moving under the doctrinally rigid umbrella of Roman orthodoxy.

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The only Episcopal church in Galion closed last month, after being a place of worship for more than 130 years.

During the past decade, the congregation at 130 W. Walnut St., stayed at less than 10, mostly seniors citizens. The handful of members asked the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio to allow the parish to close.

The Rev. Brad Purdom said an Episcopal church is created or closed by a vote at the annual convention. At this year’s convention in Cleveland, the Diocese voted Saturday to allow Grace Episcopal to close.

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As the University of California’s Board of Regents met Thursday at U.C.L.A. and approved a plan to raise undergraduate fees ”” the equivalent of tuition ”” 32 percent next fall, hundreds of students from campuses across the state demonstrated outside, beating drums and chanting slogans against the increase….

After Thursday’s vote, as news trickled out to students rallying outside, the chants grew louder and students linked arms to block regents from leaving the building. The police intervened, and as one regent left, about 100 students clustered around him, yelling “Shame on you!”

Mark Yudof, the university president, said the state budget cuts had left the university no choice but to raise fees, and noted that the system received only half as much, per student, from the state as it did in 1990.

“My biggest fear,” Mr. Yudof said, “is an exodus of faculty.”

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A new study by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School Leo Gottlieb professor of law, and Deborah Thorne, Ohio University associate professor of sociology, finds that personal bankruptcy has become a largely middle-class phenomenon led by filers who are college-educated and owners of homes. According to the study, “The Vulnerable Middle Class: Bankruptcy and Class Status,” the shift occurred even before the Great Recession.

More than 100,000 middle-class families filed for personal bankruptcy every month in 2007, says the report, which was provided to USA TODAY but will be released in a book next year. Those who filed in 2007 were in worse financial shape than those who had filed in 2001.

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An advertisement focusing on the welcoming nature of the Episcopal Church that ran in the Nov. 20 edition of USA Today is being made available to dioceses and congregations for local media use.

The church’s core beliefs and practices, including those related to Christ, the Bible, women’s ordination and relationships, are featured in the ad on page 9A of the newspaper and on the Episcopal Church’s website, Anne Rudig, director of communication, said in a Nov. 20 news release.

“We want to herald and share our welcoming message,” she said.

“In the past few weeks, news about various religions has focused more about who’s excluded from certain practices than who is included,” Rudig noted. “We follow Christ and believe that he’s very clear that all are welcome. We strive to ‘love our neighbors as ourselves.'”

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Reformer and forefather of much Puritan theology, Martin Luther, in his doctrine of vocation, taught that God gave each individual an occupational “calling.” Man’s vocation was not seen as impersonal and random, but as from a loving and personal God who bestowed each individual with natural talents and desires for a particular occupation. This thought further deepened the Puritan’s sense of purposefulness, fortifying him in difficult times.

Much like modern work is separated into white and blue collar, 17th-century tradition held that sacred occupations (like priest or monk) trumped secular ones (like farming or blacksmithing). The Puritans, however, rejected such a distinction. Holding to “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10), the Puritans sanctified the common, believing that all work, however lowly, if done for the glory of God, was good. Christ Himself “was not ashamed to labor; yea, and to use so simple an occupation,” said Puritan Hugh Latimer. The farmer’s plow became his altar, his tilling an act of service to God every bit as holy and valuable as the priest’s, reminding the unemployed that temporarily taking a step down in pay or status does not equate to failure.
Long before the days of therapists and career coaches, the Puritans learned how to cope with depression. They scorned idleness, believing it was indeed the devil’s workshop, bogging down the body in inertia, and leading to brooding. Luther had promoted the opposite, a life of diligence, saying “God . . . does not want me to sit at home, to loaf, to commit matters to God, and to wait till a fried chicken flies into my mouth.” Long before endorphins were discovered, the Puritans knew that moving and tiring the body in manual labor (even if that labor is the unpaid kind that paints the house and organizes the garage) proved a talisman against a host of mental ills.

Contrary to the misconstrued Victorian concept of ‘Puritanism,’ an idea C.S. Lewis calls “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” the original Puritans, serious as they were, embraced not only hard work, but the pursuit of joy.

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Take the time to watch it all–he is one of the real heroes of our time.

Conservative Lutherans have been distressed since the ELCA’s Churchwide Assembly voted in August to allow gays and lesbians in committed, same-sex relationships to be ordained as clergy. The assembly also voted to allow congregations to recognize and support such relationships.

“The vote on sexuality opened the eyes of many to how far the ELCA has moved from biblical teaching,” the Rev. Paull Spring, CORE’s chair, said in a statement Wednesday.

ELCA spokesman John Brooks said CORE’s announcement was expected. “We are staying focused on our clear priorities and clear mission. More than 10,000 congregations that want to be part of that mission.”

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A move to severely restrict the number of people whose details are held on the national DNA database has been supported by the Anglican Bishop of Lincoln.

Bishop John Saxbee said the move could help to end a “culture of growing mistrust”.

Tory and Liberal Democrat peers made an attempt in the House of Lords to cut down on the number of innocent people whose profiles are kept on the database. The Government is currently considering its position after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that keeping samples from all suspects, whether charged or not, was “blanket and indiscriminate”.

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[Rowan] Williams downplayed the significance of the Vatican plan, which he called an “imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some” that “does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground.”

A new Catholic diocese for former Anglicans, he suggested, is more likely to resemble a mere “chaplaincy” than a full-fledged “church gathered around a bishop.”

Williams will meet with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican on Saturday (Nov. 21), on the second-to-last day of a five-day visit to Rome, which has included meetings with various Vatican officials.

Apart from Thursday’s lecture, the archbishop’s only scheduled public appearance here will be at an interdenominational prayer service at a Rome church on Friday (Nov. 20), at which Williams will be the designated preacher.

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The country’s spiraling unemployment rate is taking a particular toll on men as the recession continues to roil male-dominated industries, such as manufacturing and construction.

This “he-cession,” as it’s sometimes called, has hit African-American men especially hard, increasing their unemployment rate to more than 17 percent last month.

One of those unemployed black men searching for work is Randolph Smith. When Smith, 53, is working, he manages logistics, inventory and supplies for large companies. He’s been trying to find that type of work since he was laid off a year ago ”” but so far, he’s had no success.

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Watch it all–those of us in parish ministry need to be sensitive to these dynamics and to seek to allow these sentiments to be channeled in constructive and creative ways–KSH.

Speaking to the Register Nov. 10, Father Christopher Phillips, pastor of the first Pastoral Provision parish, Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio, said he is waiting to see what might happen when the Church establishes the first ordinariate. “It seems as though the Pastoral Provision has done its job,” he said, adding that it “wouldn’t seem logical for the Pastoral Provision to continue” within these new international structures.

He said everyone in his parish was “very excited” about the papal decree, and that they had been “working for this and waiting for this for an awfully long time.” But he stressed his parish has had a very good relationship with the diocesan bishop and that relationship will go on once his parish becomes part of an ordinariate. “We want to make sure it goes on,” he said. “It’s written into the constitution that there has to be constant cooperation.”

Our Lady of the Atonement has grown rapidly since its humble beginnings in the early 1980s. Starting with just 18 worshippers, it now has 500 families and a thriving school.

Father Phillips sees even more promise with the ordinariates because they won’t be left to the whim of a local bishop, as Anglican-use parishes are currently.

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According to Nichols, there was not much consultation at all by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith about its plans for the Anglicans. “It is a difficult thing to do and opening it up to public consultation would have made it public, ” he said. He and Williams had known about the initiative for a couple of weeks before the announcement in October. “He very quickly agreed that he would announce it with me. We talked about the way the announcement would be used to create divisions and so we should do it together.”

But could the Anglicans wanting to become Catholics not be received in the usual way, as individuals? Nichols is clear that they will have to be received as individuals, even if an entire church congregation crosses over to Rome together. “It’s not ”˜all put your hands up and you’re in’. Faith is both an individual experience and a corporate experience. Each individual will have to go through a process of formation and reception. People who come in are Catholics ”“ full stop.”

But it seems that the Archbishop is struggling, like so many others, with what exactly this overture means. “The Pope wants to give expression and space to the fruit and character of Anglican patrimony. It is quite difficult to know what that means, especially in this country ”“ perhaps it is clearer elsewhere. But Anglican patrimony is an historical inheritance.”

The press conference that Nichols held did not just involve the Archbishop of Canterbury in his capacity in the Church of England; Williams is also the primate of the worldwide Anglican Communion. So the situation in England and Wales is more complicated isn’t it, with Williams kept out of the loop?

“The leader of the Anglican Communion is here and that is a difficulty. While approaches had been made to the Holy See, I don’t think that had been conveyed to the Archbishop of Canterbury,” he said, intimating that it was the Anglicans interested in crossing to Rome who should have kept Canterbury informed.

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The archbishop of Canterbury today pleaded with Roman Catholics to set aside their differences with Anglicans over the issue of female bishops, insisting there was more uniting the denominations than dividing them.

Rowan Williams was giving a lecture in Rome before Saturday’s meeting with the pope, their first encounter since the Vatican’s surprise announcement of a special institution for traditionalist Anglicans wanting to convert to Catholicism.

In his address at the Gregorian University, Williams said the Anglican communion was proof that churches could stay together in spite of their differences.

The communion has teetered on the edge of schism for nearly a decade over the issue of gay clergy but has retained a sliver of fellowship. Williams urged Roman Catholics to continue their 35-year dialogue with Anglicans in spite of theological and ideological divisions.

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Calling Pope Benedict XVI’s arrangement for Anglicans wanting to become Roman Catholics “the elephant in the room,” the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion said the pope’s move was nothing groundbreaking from an ecumenical viewpoint.

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury spoke Nov. 19 at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University at a conference marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism.

While the archbishop’s address focused on efforts over the last 40 years by the Roman Catholic Church and Anglican Communion to promote full unity, he said he obviously had to mention Pope Benedict’s apostolic constitution establishing “personal ordinariates” — structures similar to dioceses — for Anglicans wanting to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury asked on Thursday whether the differences between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are sufficient to prevent Rome’s deeper recognition of Anglican orders.

The Most Rev. Rowan Williams spoke at the Gregorian University at a conference in honor of the late ecumenical leader Johannes Cardinal Willebrands. The archbishop’s office has released a text of his remarks.

The “ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full,” the archbishop said. “For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain.”

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Roman Catholics should look beyond the divisive issue of ordaining women to see how much they share with the world’s Anglicans and work toward greater Christian unity, the head of the Anglican Communion said on Thursday.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, whose own church is split over female priests and bishops, said the Vatican’s ban on ordaining women was not as solidly grounded theologically as the core Christian doctrines the two denominations agree on.

His speech at a pontifical university in Rome came a month after Pope Benedict invited alienated Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, a move some Anglicans criticized as a bid to woo away those opposed to women bishops.

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Listen to it all (Hat tip: Ruth Gledhill).

Forty seven parishes and missions of the diocese have filed a Plea in Intervention in the lawsuit against the diocese that is currently before the 141st District Court. Collectively, the 47 churches are termed the “Intervening Congregations.”

The plea asks the court to acknowledge through a declaratory judgment that, “in accordance with the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, the title to the real property being occupied and subject to the control of Intervening Congregations is held by the Corporation of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth in trust for the use and benefit of each Intervening Congregation” and that this trust relationship is superior to any other claims.

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