The Catholic League was formed to promote reunion. Many do not know this, but the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity began in 1908 as an Anglican initiative to promote unity between Anglicans and Catholics; only from 1936 was it decided, under the influence of a French priest, Abb\u00c3\u00a9 Paul Couturier, to widen its scope to embrace all Christians.<\/p>\n
After the Appeal for Christian Unity at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium and Lord Halifax gathered a group of theologians into what became known as the Malines Conversations, producing a plan for a Uniate Church similar to that proposed in the reign of Charles II. The talks ended when the Archbishop of York visited the Pope, the first Anglican archbishop to visit the Pope, and explained that Lord Halifax had no official standing.<\/p>\n
It was not until the Second Vatican Council that the time became more auspicious, and through the visit of Archbishop Michael Ramsey to Pope Paul VI in 1996, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC)_was created “to work for the restoration of complete communion of faith and sacramental life”. Archbishop Ramsey had already indicated what form he thought it might take.<\/p>\n
Building on the plans of past centuries he suggested: “Unity could take the form of the Anglican Communion being in communion with Rome, having sufficient dogmatic agreement with Rome, accepting the Pope as the presiding bishop of all Christians, but being allowed to have their own liturgy and married clergy and a great deal of existing Anglican customs….”<\/p>\n