The biggest unanswered question is how exactly Catholics and Anglicans propose to move towards unity after years of progressive mutual alienation. While the leadership of the Anglican church has embraced women’s ordination and, in the US, gay priests, the Vatican under Benedict has become increasingly proud of its conservatism on these and other issues.
In a lecture last Thursday evening at the pontifical Gregorian university, Williams made an impassioned plea for the Catholic side to recognise they had made giant steps towards reconciling their theological positions. All that stood between them were “second order” questions of ecclesiastical organisation, he claimed. But it is hard to believe Benedict’s Vatican will see things in that light, any more than traditionalist Anglicans do.
This has been one of the archbishop’s most delicate and testing encounters. On Friday he held talks with Vatican officials in which, according to a source in Rome, he repeated his disappointment at the way he had been kept in the dark about the pope’s initiative until a late stage.
“a dislike of women priests was not grounds for conversion”
True. But the lack of theology that accompanies such might be, in the eyes of those opposed to such.