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Archbishop of Canterbury's address at a Willebrands Symposium in Rome

Posted On : November 19, 2009 4:31 PM | Posted By : Webmaster
ACNS: http://www.aco.org/acns/news.cfm/2009/11/19/ACNS4668
Related Categories: Lambeth

The Archbishop of Canterbury today gave an address in Rome, as the guest
of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The address is
part of a symposium being held at the Gregorian University, to celebrate
the centenary of the birth of Cardinal Willebrands, the first president
of the Council.

> The Archbishop says in his introduction:

"Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Roman Catholic
Church has been involved in a number of dialogues with other churches -
including with the Anglican Communion - which have produced a very
considerable number of agreed statements. This legacy has been brought
together in a recent publication by the Vatican department to promote
Christian Unity, whose first President during and after Vatican II,
Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, is justly and happily celebrated in
today's centenary conference.

Let me give an outline of what I want to say in the half an hour or so
available. The strong convergence in these agreements about what the
Church of God really is, is very striking. The various agreed statements
of the churches stress that the Church is a community, in which human
beings are made sons and daughters of God, and reconciled both with God
and one another. The Church celebrates this through the sacraments of
Baptism and Holy Communion in which God acts upon us to transform us 'in
communion'. More detailed questions about ordained ministry and other
issues have been framed in this context.

Therefore the major question that remains is whether in the light of
that depth of agreement the issues that still divide us have the same
weight - issues about authority in the Church, about primacy (especially
the unique position of the pope), and the relations between the local
churches and the universal church in making decisions (about matters
like the ordination of women, for instance). Are they theological
questions in the same sense as the bigger issues on which there is
already clear agreement? And if they are, how exactly is it that they
make a difference to our basic understanding of salvation and communion?
But if they are not, why do they still stand in the way of fuller
visible unity? Can there, for example, be a model of unity as a
communion of churches which have different attitudes to how the papal
primacy is expressed?

The central question is whether and how we can properly tell the
difference between 'second order' and 'first order' issues. When so very
much agreement has been firmly established in first-order matters about
the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to
treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?"

> ENDS

> The full text of the lecture is below:

Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church
has been involved in a number of dialogues with other churches -
including with the Anglican Communion - which have produced a very
considerable number of agreed statements. This legacy has been brought
together in a recent publication by the Vatican department to promote
Christian Unity, whose first President during and after Vatican II,
Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, is justly and happily celebrated in
today's centenary conference.

Let me give an outline of what I want to say in the half an hour or so
available. The strong convergence in these agreements about what the
Church of God really is, is very striking. The various agreed statements
of the churches stress that the Church is a community, in which human
beings are made sons and daughters of God, and reconciled both with God
and one another. The Church celebrates this through the sacraments of
Baptism and Holy Communion in which God acts upon us to transform us 'in
communion'. More detailed questions about ordained ministry and other
issues have been framed in this context.

Therefore the major question that remains is whether in the light of
that depth of agreement the issues that still divide us have the same
weight - issues about authority in the Church, about primacy (especially
the unique position of the pope), and the relations between the local
churches and the universal church in making decisions (about matters
like the ordination of women, for instance). Are they theological
questions in the same sense as the bigger issues on which there is
already clear agreement? And if they are, how exactly is it that they
make a difference to our basic understanding of salvation and communion?
But if they are not, why do they still stand in the way of fuller
visible unity? Can there, for example, be a model of unity as a
communion of churches which have different attitudes to how the papal
primacy is expressed?

The central question is whether and how we can properly tell the
difference between 'second order' and 'first order' issues. When so very
much agreement has been firmly established in first-order matters about
the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to
treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?

> 1.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the journals written during the
Second Vatican Council by figures like Willebrands and Congar is the
record of a struggle for what I shall call a genuinely theological
doctrine of the Church. Part of what Vatican II turned away from is a
way of talking about the Church as primarily an institution existing
because of divine decree, governed by prescription from the Lord,
faithfully administering the sacraments ordained by him for the
salvation of souls - 'an external, visible society, whose members, under
a hierarchical authority headed by the pope, constitute with him one
visible body, tending to the same spiritual and supernatural end, i.e.,
sanctification of souls and their eternal happiness' (Pietro Palazzini,
s.v. 'Church (Society)' in the Dictionary of Moral Theology, ed. F.
Roberti and P. Palazzini, originally published in 1957). But what is
missing from this account is any real explication of how the nature and
character and even polity of the Church are grounded in and shaped by
the nature of God and of God's incarnation in history. A theological
understanding of the Church would be one that makes this connection.

A striking feature of the current Harvesting the Fruits document from
the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity under the
name of our greatly loved and respected friend Walter Kasper, is the
integral connection between what is said about the nature of God and
what is said about the Church, its mission and its ministry. All these
dialogues, it appears, have been deeply influenced by the new style in
ecclesiology rooted in Vatican II and the work of Willebrands and his
colleagues - and it is worth mentioning the way in which this new style
is paralleled in other ecumenical dialogues, notably the
Anglican-Orthodox document on The Church of the Triune God.

In broad outline, the picture is something like this. God is eternally a
life of threefold communion; and if human persons are to be reconciled
to God and restored to the capacity for which they were made, they must
be included in that life of communion. The incarnation of God the Son
recreates in human persons the possibility of filial relation with the
Father, standing in the place of Christ and praying his prayer; and only
the Holy Spirit, which animates and directs the entire human identity of
the Incarnate Word, can create that filial reality in us. To be restored
to life with God is to be incorporated into Jesus Christ by the Spirit;
but because the gift of the Spirit is what takes away mutual fear and
hostility and the shutting-up of human selves against each other, it is
inseparably and necessarily a gift of mutual human communion also. The
sacramental life and the communal disciplines of the Church exist to
serve and witness to this dual fact of communion, with the Father and
with all believers. To take only one of the countless formulations
referred to in the Harvesting document, in this case from the 1993
Lutheran-Catholic statement on Church and Justification (#6), 'According
to the witness of the New Testament, our salvation, the justification of
sinners and the existence of the church are indissolubly linked with the
triune God and are founded in him alone.'

So there is a clear line of connection between fundamental doctrinal
commitments (the doctrines of the creed concerning the Trinity and the
Incarnation) and issues around the shape and mission of the Church. The
former lead into the latter; the latter only make sense against the
background of the former. But what are the implications of this for our
continuing ecumenical engagement? In what follows, I shall suggest some
possible lines of further enquiry. But I also want to put a bit of a
challenge to some trends across the board in current thinking, trends
that might encourage us to adjust our expectations downwards in
ecumenical dialogue, given the apparent lack of progress towards
institutional or organisational unity. I do so in the hope that if we
can recognise the remarkable degree to which what we could call
Willebrands' legacy in ecclesiology has triumphed in the life of the
dialogues, this may yet stir us to new insights and possibilities.

> 2.

If the Harvesting document is to be taken seriously, the issues between
Christians in the historic churches are not about the essential shape of
our language concerning God and God's action in Christ. The common
centre is a twofold vision: filial relation with God the Father as the
realisation of the human vocation; and, as an immediate corollary of
this, communion with other believers, offered to the whole world as
promise and hope, a model for human life together in accord with the
creator's loving purpose. As the ecumenical statements in varying words
agree, the ongoing debate is not about these fundamentals, but about
where the fullest realisation of communion is to be found.

Even in discussion over sacramental forms and doctrines, a powerful
convergence is evident that takes us well beyond any tired polarities.
The links from trinitarian doctrine straight through to the meaning of
the Lord's Supper are strongly affirmed on all sides. The whole
discussion of sacramental life is centred upon how the believer is
established in filial communion through the act of the triune God; there
is little to suggest that outside the Roman fold there is any ambiguity
over this priority of the divine act, or any separation between the act
of God in salvation and a purely or predominantly human activity of
recalling or expressing that act through human practices.

And this is where the difficult questions begin to gather. If the
picture just sketched is true, what exactly are the points that still
divide us? Harvesting returns several times to a few key matters: I want
to pick out three for further reflection. There is an issue over
authority: in several places, continuing disagreement is noted over the
nature or indeed the very possibility of the magisterium. Is there a
mechanism in the Church that has the clear right to determine for all
where the limits of Christian identity might be found? Then there is an
issue, naturally connected with the first, about the nature of primacy.
Is the integrity of the Church ultimately dependent on a single
identifiable ministry of unity to which all local ministries are
accountable? And this relates immediately to a third set of questions
about the way in which we think of the universal Church itself. Is it an
entity from which local churches derive their life, or is it the perfect
mutuality of relationship between local churches - or indeed as the
mysterious presence of the whole in each specific community? I want to
propose that we now need urgent clarification of whether these
continuing points of tension or difference imply in any way that the
substantive theological convergence is less solid than it appears, so
that we must still hold back from fuller levels of recognition of
ministries or fuller sacramental fellowship.

> 3.

As to authority: the summary on pp.137-8 of Harvesting puts it very well
in describing convergence around the belief that 'the ministry and the
ministries in the Church are not an end in themselves'; the Church is
called to obedience, and thus to the discerning conservation of the
authentic gospel in its teaching and preaching. But is that obedience,
discernment and conservation in some sense the task of the entire body
of the baptised or essentially that of a group designated as having
binding power?

A properly theological answer to this would challenge the premise of the
question as expressed in those terms. It should rather come from a clear
sense that responsibility, the 'authority to become children of God' (Jn
1.12) given to all those who belong in the communion of the baptised, is
something allocated and distributed in the Church by the leading of the
Spirit. If we are not just going to reaffirm the language of rule and
hierarchy established by decree, with fixed divisions between teachers
and taught, rulers and ruled, then we must approach the question as one
that has to do with the way in which the gifts of the Spirit are
properly distributed. In the light of the ecumenical ecclesiology we
have been outlining, what is the status of differences over how
responsibilities are allocated in the Church? How practically deep and
non-negotiable are the divisions if what is at satke is not the basic
reality of filial holiness? If the issues are less basic than the
agreement over the Church's central character, then the future ought to
be one in which there is a search for practical convergence in
administrative responsibility and visible structures of governance,
while allowing a significant mutual recognition of sacramental
authenticity in the meantime - perhaps including some sacramental
fellowship, as hinted at in #8 of Unitatis Redintegratio).

The question becomes whether we can find ways of creating structures in
which ordained authority and conciliar collaboration are properly
accountable to each other and to the whole Body. It is about how we look
- at the very least - for joint means of decision-making between
churches differently ordered in their systems of authority, as several
ecumenical texts propose (not least the IARCCUM documents); and at most
for a means of making possible exchange of ministries and sacramental
provision (with all that this might entail in terms of requirements for
simple canonical recognition and incorporation).

> 4.

As to primacy: convergence is probably less clear here, but there is a
quite widespread recognition that, just as local ministry serves
coherence and mutual openness within a congregation, so there is a
powerful theological case for a ministry of universal focusing and
gathering cast in the same terms. To put it like this is, once again, to
see it in relation to the Church's purpose overall: this is a ministry
existing for the sake of filial and communal holiness held in a
universal pattern of mutual service - a point worth taking very
seriously in the context of a globalised culture.

The disagreement comes over whether existing forms of primacy are - on
the one hand - despite all their historic ups and downs, fundamentally
unavoidable embodiments of the agreed principle or - on the other - so
allied to juridical privilege and the patterns of rule and control I
have referred to earlier that they simply fail to do what they say they
are there for. This is to put the difference quite sharply, I know, in a
way that ignores the fluidity of recent debate and the remarkable
initiative represented by Ut Unum Sint and what has flowed from it. But
once again, the ecumenical issue for those outside the Roman Catholic
fold is whether the necessity of the existing form of primatial ministry
is so theologically crucial a matter that the Church's integrity, its
faithfulness to its essential purpose, is wholly compromised by a
diversity of understanding about primacy. Is there a level of mutual
recognition which allows a shared theological understanding of primacy
alongside a diversity of canonical or juridical arrangements? The
slightly sensitive discussion of the nature of papal jurisdiction
outside the historic Western Patriarchate might be a door-opener here.
But it is surprising to find support in another quarter, in the shape of
a bald statement (quoted in Harvesting) from the Lutheran-Catholic
Report of 1972 'that the question of altar fellowship and of mutual
recognition of ministerial offices should not be unconditionally
dependent on a consensus on the question of primacy' (#66).

To present the question in these terms is in fact to look back to
Cardinal Willebrands' celebrated sermon in Cambridge in 1970 which spoke
(using the language of Dom Emmanuel Lanne) of a diversity of types of
communion, each one defined not so much juridically or institutionally
as in terms of lasting loyalty, shared theological method and devotional
ethos. The underlying idea seems to be that a restored universal
communion would be genuinely a 'community of communities' and a
'communion of communions' - not necessarily a single juridically united
body - and therefore one which did indeed assume that, while there was a
recognition of a primatial ministry, this was not absolutely bound to a
view of primacy as a centralized juridical office.

It is of course impossible to open up these issues without some brief
reference to issues of very immediate interest in the lives of the
Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. The current proposals for a
Covenant between Anglican provinces represent an effort to create not a
centralised decision-making executive but a 'community of communities'
that can manage to sustain a mutually nourishing and mutually critical
life, with all consenting to certain protocols of decision-making
together. As Harvesting notes, Anglicans have been challenged to flesh
out their rhetoric about communion through the crises and controversies
of recent years, and this is simply part of a variegated response that
will, no doubt, continue for a good while yet to be refined and
formulated.

The recent announcement of an Apostolic Constitution making provision
for former Anglicans shows some marks of the recognition that diversity
of ethos does not in itself compromise the unity of the Catholic Church,
even within the bounds of the historic Western patriarchate. But it
should be obvious that it does not seek to do what we have been
sketching: it does not build in any formal recognition of existing
ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent
decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical
culture, as we might say. As such, it is an imaginative pastoral
response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh
ecclesiological ground. It remains to be seen whether the flexibility
suggested in the Constitution might ever lead to something less like a
'chaplaincy' and more like a church gathered around a bishop.

> 5.

As to the broad issue of local and universal Christian identity, much
that has emerged in discussion involving Roman Catholics, Anglican and
Orthodox has had the effect of challenging simplistic opposition between
the two poles, as if the choice were between a conglomerate of local and
almost randomly diverse communities vaguely federated together, and a
monolithic global corporation. The re-theologising of ecclesiology,
especially in dialogue with the Christian East, has meant that we are
now better able to see the local community gathered around the bishop or
his representative for eucharistic worship not as a portion of some
greater whole but as itself the whole, the qualitative presence, as we
might put it, of the Catholic reality of filial holiness and Trinitarian
mutuality here and now. In one sense, it needs no supplement or
validation from a wider institutional reality; in another sense, of
course, it is itself only as related with other communities doing the
same thing in all times and places. To quote from the Roman
Catholic-Reformed dialogue, 'It is only by participating in the local
community that we share in the life of the universal Church, but the
local community without universality...runs the risk of becoming a
ghetto or of being arbitrarily dominated by individuals' (The Presence
of Christ in Church and World, #62). Or, in the words of the ARCIC
statement on The Gift of Authority, 'No local church that participates
in the living Tradition can regard itself as self-sufficient' (#37).

So the question here becomes one about what criteria help us establish
that the same Catholic life is going on in diverse communities. The
facts of corporate reading of Scripture, obedience to the Lord's
commands to baptise and make eucharist, shared understanding of the
shape and the disciplines of what we have called filial holiness - can
these be utilised as they stand or do we need a further test - visible
communion, say, with a universal primate? And if that further step is
necessary, can it be shown to be theological in exactly the same sense
as the rest of the discourse? If not, once again, is it a ground for
maintaining the level of non-recognition currently in practice?

An answer to this would have to look at some of the complex and
neuralgic issues that arise around local decision-making. To take the
most obvious instance in the relations between the Roman Catholic and
Anglican churches at present, the local decision to ordain women as
priests - and as bishops in some contexts - is presented by Roman
Catholic theologians as one that in effect makes the Anglican Communion
simply less recognisably a body 'doing the same Catholic thing'.

Harvesting records the substance of the early consensus in ARCIC on the
nature of ordained ministry and also the acknowledgement that there had
as yet been no consideration of who could be ordained (the 1973 Ministry
and Ordination text, #17). Since then, this latter issue has been
defined by the highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church as one in
which the Church does not have the liberty or the competence to license
change as regards the historic prohibition against women in holy orders.
This is now presented as a clear obstacle to any further recognition of
Anglican orders.

I don't want here to rehearse the arguments for and against the
ordination of women, only to ask how recent determinations on the Roman
Catholic side fit with the general pattern of theological convergence
outlined. The claim of certain Anglican provinces is that the ordination
of women explicitly looks to an agreed historic theology of ordained
ministry as set out in the ARCIC report and other sources. Beyond that,
many Anglicans have been wary of accepting a determination of who can be
ordained that might appear to compromise the some of the agreed
principles about how ordination relates to the whole body of the
baptised. This, by the way, would hold for at least some who believe
that a decision within a divided Church about a matter affecting the
universal ministry should not be taken by a single province or group of
provinces. But for many Anglicans, not ordaining women has a possible
unwelcome implication about the difference between baptised men and
baptised women, which in their view threatens to undermine the coherence
of the ecclesiology in question.

And the challenge to recent Roman Catholic thinking on this would have
to be: in what way does the prohibition against ordaining women so
'enhance the life of communion', reinforcing the essential character of
filial and communal holiness as set out in Scripture and tradition and
ecumenical agreement, that its breach would compromise the purposes of
the Church as so defined? And do the arguments advanced about the
"essence" of male and female vocations and capacities stand on the same
level as a theology derived more directly from scripture and the common
theological heritage such as we find in these ecumenical texts?

Let us take this a stage further. All ordained ministers are ordained
into the shared richness of the apostolic ministerial order - or perhaps
we could say ministerial 'communion' yet again. None ministers as a
solitary individual. Thus if the ministerial collective is understood
strictly in terms of the ecclesiology we have been considering, as
serving the goal of filial and communal holiness as the character of
restored humanity, how much is that undermined if individuals within the
ministerial communion are of different genders? Even if there remains
uncertainty in the minds of some about the rightness of ordaining women,
is there a way of recognising that somehow the corporate exercise of a
Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is
dispute about the standing of female individuals? In terms of the
relation of local to universal, what we are saying here is that a degree
of recognizability of 'the same Catholic thing' has survived: Anglican
provinces ordaining women to some or all of the three orders have not
become so obviously diverse in their understanding of filial holiness
and sacramental transformation that they cannot act together, serve one
another and allow some real collaboration.

It is this sort of thinking that has allowed Anglicans until recently to
maintain a degree of undoubtedly impaired communion among themselves,
despite the sharpness of the division over this matter. It is part of
the rationale of supplementary episcopal oversight as practised in the
English provinces, and it may yet be of help in securing the place of
those who will not be able to accept the episcopal ministry of women.
There can be no doubt, though, that the situation of damaged communion
will become more acute with the inability of bishops within the same
college to recognise one another's ministry in the full sense. Yet, in
what is still formally acknowledged to be a time of discernment and
reception, is it nonsense to think that holding on to a limited but real
common life and mutual acknowledgement of integrity might be worth
working for within the Anglican family? And if it can be managed within
the Anglican family, is this a possible model for the wider ecumenical
scene? At least, by means of some of the carefully crafted institutional
ways of continuing to work together, there remains an embodied trust in
the possibility of discovering a shared ministry of the gospel; and who
knows what more, ultimately, in terms of restored communion?

> 6.

Once again, I am asking how far continuing disunion and non-recognition
are justified, theologically justified in the context of the overall
ecclesial vision, when there are signs that some degree of diversity in
practice need not, after all, prescribe an indefinite separation. I do
not pretend to be offering a new paradigm of ecumenical encounter, far
from it. But the very quality of the theological convergence recorded,
and very expertly and lucidly recorded, in Harvesting prompts the sort
of question I have been raising. At what point do we have to recognise
that surviving institutional and even canonical separations or
incompatibilities are overtaken by the authoritative direction of
genuinely theological consensus, so that they can survive only by
appealing to the ghost of ecclesiological positivism? The three issues I
have commented on may all seem, to the eyes of a non-Roman Catholic, to
belong in a somewhat different frame of reference from the governing
themes of the ecumenical ecclesiology expressed in the texts under
review. If the non-Roman Catholic is wrong about this, we need to have
spelled out exactly why; we need to understand either that there are
issues about the filial/communal calling clearly at stake in surviving
disagreements; or to be shown that another theological 'register' is the
right thing to use in certain areas, a different register which will
qualify in some ways the language that has so far shaped ecumenical
convergence.

Cardinal Willebrands would, I suspect, have been uncomfortable with the
latter option and would have wanted (if he had agreed that these issues
were critical, unresolved, and in need of resolution) to keep our
attention fixed on the former, so that our language and thinking about
the Church remained theological in a sense recognised by all involved in
the discussion. To say this is not to foreclose consideration of these
and other outstanding areas of diversity, let alone to say that they are
'political' matters and that there is no point in approaching them
theologically, or that they are 'second-order' questions. But it is
important to be clear about just how much convergence there is, as
witnessed in the survey offered in Harvesting.

All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is
genuinely half-full - and then to ask about the character of the
unfinished business between us. 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. And if it isn't, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged
to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological
assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that
has brought us thus far?

> (c) Rowan Williams 2009

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