The Pope at Lambeth Palace

On Friday afternoon Benedict XVI payed a courtesy visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Rowan Williams.Philippa Hitchen filed this report :

LAMBETH

It’s been a year of strained relations between the Anglican communion and the Catholic Church. The surprise announcement last autumn of a new Ordinariate for disaffected Anglicans seeking unity with Rome, the Church of England synod this spring voting to push ahead with the ordination of women bishops, despite strong internal opposition and the ordination of an openly gay woman bishop in the United States have all raised tensions and made the prospect of any significant progress towards unity recede further than at any other time over the past 40 years.
Perhaps that’s why Pope Benedict decided not to speak about any of these issues in his encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury on Friday but to focus on the trust and friendships that have been built up between church leaders and the theological progress that’s been made in overcoming the divisions of past centuries..
"It is not my intention today to speak of the difficulties that the ecumenical path has encountered and continues to encounter. Those difficulties are well known to everyone here. Rather, I wish to join you in giving thanks for the deep friendship that has grown between us and for the remarkable progress that has been made in so many areas of dialogue during the forty years that have elapsed since the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission began its work. Let us entrust the fruits of that work to the Lord of the harvest, confident that he will bless our friendship with further significant growth."

The Pope recalled the many meetings between leaders of their two Churches that have taken place over the past fifty years since Pope John XXIII met privately with Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher before the Second Vatican Council. And he stressed the urgent need for ever closer ecumenical cooperation to proclaim the Christian gospel in an increasingly multifaith society like Britain today.

" On the one hand, the surrounding culture is growing ever more distant from its Christian roots, despite a deep and widespread hunger for spiritual nourishment. On the other hand, the increasingly multicultural dimension of society, particularly marked in this country, brings with it the opportunity to encounter other religions. For us Christians this opens up the possibility of exploring, together with members of other religious traditions, ways of bearing witness to the transcendent dimension of the human person and the universal call to holiness, leading to the practice of virtue in our personal and social lives."

Welcoming the Pope to Lambeth Palace for this historic visit, Archbishop Rowan Williams also spoke of the essential task of presenting the Christian faith as a positive contribution to society, against those who see it as both an obstacle to human freedom and a scandal to human intellect.

"Your consistent and penetrating analysis of the state of European society in general has been a major contribution to public debate on the relations between Church and culture, and we gratefully acknowledge our debt in this respect....As you said in your Inaugural Mass in 2005, recalling your predecessor’s first words as pope, Christ takes away nothing “that pertains to human freedom or dignity or to the building of a just society. … If we let Christ into our lives we lose absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. Only in his friendship is the great potential of human existence revealed.”


Turning to the great Anglican theologian turned Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman, whom the Pope will beatify on Sunday, Archbishop Williams noted the words of his close friend Edward Pusey on hearing of Newman’s conversion to Catholicism….

"In 1845, when John Henry Newman finally decided that he must follow his conscience and seek his future in serving God in communion with the See of Rome, one of his most intimate Anglican friends and allies, the priest Edward Bouverie Pusey, whose memory the Church of England marked in its liturgical calendar yesterday, wrote a moving meditation on this “parting of friends” in which he said of the separation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics: “it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart”.

Perhaps it’s that spirit of holiness and humility that’s been in short supply on the ecumenical agenda of late, as bishops, theologians and ordinary Christians struggle with what seem like insurmountable problems on one side or the other. Yet only by conversion to a true longing to grow closer to God in our own daily lives, will we ever find the way forward to the unity that Christ himself willed for his Church.

With Pope Benedict in the United Kingdom , I'm Philippa Hitchen