America: Bridge Over The River Tiber

“Papal Gambit Stuns Church” was how The Times of London headlined its front page Oct. 21. Inside, an editorial thundered that Rome’s newly announced legal structure allowing Anglicans to join the Catholic Church without giving up their rites and traditions had “dangerously weakened” Anglicanism. The editors said that Pope Benedict XVI stands accused of damaging church unity and ecumenical cooperation.

It was gloriously retro, as if out of an 1850 Punch cartoon showing a sinister pope and cardinal trying to force their way through a door over the caption: “Daring attempt to break into a church.” The Times’s metaphors””Rome was “annexing” parts of the Church of England, parking its tanks on Lambeth’s lawns, fishing in troubled Anglican water””glossed over important facts. The move was announced by the archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster together; the pope was responding to insistent requests from disaffected Anglicans who had decided in conscience they could no longer remain in the Church of England; he had not done so before out of fear of undermining Anglican unity; and he was doing so now with an imaginative piece of canonical engineering that could do more to thaw relations between the Catholic and Anglican churches than anything since their official unity talks began in the 1970s.

Still, the sense of violation was real””not least because the papal bombshell had dropped out of a clear blue sky with little warning. The former archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, was outraged that his successor, Rowan Williams, learned of the move only two weeks previously and had been notified formally only when the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal William Levada, visited London the weekend before. But even Lord Carey admitted that the proposal had vast potential. “Straightforward ecumenism at the theological level is going nowhere,” he said. “This fresh initiative could have surprising consequences.”

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