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Category Archives: Christianity
Pope and archbishop of Canterbury find common ground at talks in Rome
Justin Welby says he and Pope Francis agree on gay marriage and financial reforms after ‘very personal’ conversation
On the menu – a five-course affair, surprisingly plentiful perhaps for the era of the “poor church” – were sliced swordfish, pasta with prawns, tuna steak, semifreddo, fresh fruit and coffee.
But, as the pope met the archbishop of Canterbury for the first time on Friday – a meeting of two pragmatists creaking under the weight of centuries of fraught history – the real order of the day, at least in theory, was unity.
After visits to the tombs of both St Peter and John Paul II, Justin Welby – installed just days after the election of Pope Francis – held a “very personal” conversation with the former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. It was clear, he said afterwards, that co-operation between the churches, despite the serious issues which divide them, was “an absolute necessity”. The pope, he said, seemed to him “an extraordinary humanity on fire with the spirit of Christ”.
On gay marriage, Welby declared he and Francis had proved to be “absolutely at one on the issues”. In a press briefing at the Venerable English College of Rome, Welby added that the pair were “equally at one on our condemnation of homophobic behaviour”. The pope, for his part, said in an address that he wanted to co-operate on the “importance of the institution of the family built on marriage”.
On ethical reforms of the financial system, too, the men were onside. Welby, a former oil executive citing the influences of Catholic social teaching and the need for the banking system to find “new values”, said the church’s leaders had “got to find a way to make that happen”. Francis, earlier, had spoken of efforts to achieve social justice, “to build an economic system that is at the service of man and promotes the common good”.
They also raised the role that Christianity could play in international matters, such as the ongoing conflict in Syria, and human trafficking, said the archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who joined Welby on his inaugural visit to Rome.
Such were the apparent points of commonality that, when it was announced that the archbishop would be making a more official return visit to the Vatican in December, Welby felt moved to clarify: “We’re not planning on spending Christmas together. I do have a day job in England.”
On this occasion, then, the deep differences that divide the Church of England and Anglican communion from the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics were not the emphasis. “In terms of values and principles, there was a really strong commitment to working together … and recognising that there are major issues around that but recognising that this is an absolute necessity,” said Welby.
The ordination of women was mentioned “in passing” but not dwelled on, said the archbishop, an ardent advocate for female bishops in the Church of England. In his address, Francis said he was grateful for efforts made by Anglicans to understand why his predecessor, Benedict XVI, had introduced a structure – the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham – to allow disaffected members of the C of E to convert. They did not, Welby said, discuss it any further.
“The conversation,” he explained, “was about how you feel when you get up in the morning and you’ve got these extraordinary days, and where do you go in prayer?” Asked if the by-now-famously-maverick pontiff had given the archbishop any tips on his style, Welby, ever a quip to hand, replied: “We naturally discussed the colour of cassocks.”
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Posted in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Christianity, Europe, Features, Italy, Justin Welby, News, Pope Francis, Religion, The Guardian, The papacy, UK news, Vatican, World news
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Shift in style as outsiders Justin Welby and Pope Francis get together
The archbishop of Canterbury and the pope want to find a different way of working together from their predecessors
Justin Welby’s meeting with Pope Francis this week is a routine way to get to know someone he must work with and is little different from his meetings with media tycoons and politicians, but it marks a distinct shift in style and emphasis from that of his predecessor, Rowan Williams, and Pope Benedict.
Welby and Francis came to their jobs as outsiders. Both have close links with fairly independent and powerful organisations within their respective churches – Francis is the first Jesuit pope and Welby is the first archbishop of Canterbury from the charismatic evangelical organisation HTB.
The Jesuits are older, more accomplished and more likely to survive the century. The same goes for their churches.
Neither has a reputation for flamboyance but Francis has done more to capture the public’s imagination with gestures of humility and common humanity, perhaps because he had more pomp to shed.
By travelling on foot and paying his hotel bill, the pope appears to have made a more dramatic renunciation of privilege than the archbishop, though Welby has turned up for a newspaper interview with holes in his shoes and wearing clothes bought from Oxfam.
But Welby has made a much clearer and more decisive start at clearing up the problem his predecessors left him: the ordination of women as bishops. Although he talks sincerely of trust and reconciliation, the measures he has proposed leave far fewer institutional safeguards to their opponents than had been available earlier. To some extent this reflects the mood of the wider church, which is overwhelmingly in favour of female bishops. But it also shows a willingness to reach and stick to decisions – something Williams never managed.
Francis is still feeling his way towards reforming the Vatican bureaucracy. The Vatileaks scandals, which led to the jailing of the former pope’s butler for passing stolen papers to Italian journalists, exposed a nest of backbiting and financial corruption. The subsequent investigation, whose secret conclusions are said to have prompted Pope Benedict’s decision to retire, added accounts of homosexual networks to the mix.
Both share a conviction that the Christian world’s centre of gravity is moving southwards. Francis is Argentinian and Welby has been an oil executive and a priest in Nigeria.
Yet Francis is committed to holding together as a disciplined body a global church spanning both north and south. Welby has already resigned himself to the fact that the important-sounding Anglican Communion is not a church like the Roman Catholic – and cannot become one – but a federation whose strength lies in links between parishes and bishops.
The fact his spiritual director is a Catholic Benedictine is probably a good sign of how he sees the churches working together: locally, spiritually and personally, not as organisations.
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John Sentamu and the Church of England’s slow retreat on gay marriage | Andrew Brown
The archbishop of York’s anti-gay marriage speech articulates the view of a church that drowned out liberal voices 20 years ago
The archbishop of York’s speech against equal marriage in the House of Lords on Monday represents another step in the Church of England’s stumbling retreat on the issue, and does a lot to illuminate the reasons that it was defeated. I wrote “equal marriage” because the church has now accepted that gay marriage is coming, and that lasting gay relationships can be godly. It just wants to call them something other than marriages, and still feels this matters.
The archbishop, John Sentamu, asked: “What do you do with people in same-sex relationships that are committed, loving and Christian? Would you rather bless a sheep and a tree, and not them? However, that is a big question, to which we are going to come. I am afraid that now is not the moment.”
No. It isn’t. That moment passed years ago, when civil partnerships were first brought in, and the archbishop’s was one of the loudest voices demanding that the Church of England have nothing to do with them. The bishops still don’t realise what damage they did then.
Even the supposedly liberal Rowan Williams said the other week, while lecturing on the fifth anniversary of his sharia speech, that “I am not wholly clear to what problem same-sex marriage is the answer” – at which my neighbour whispered: “He’s an idiot if he doesn’t know the problem is not listening to gay people.”
So Williams is an idiot on this subject. And so is his colleague in York, and both for the same reason, very damning to Christians: they failed to listen to the weak because they thought the noisy bullies mattered more.
When civil partnerships came in, the two archbishops fought hard, along with the rest of the Church of England, to ensure that they had no religious or spiritual content at all. This was a monumentally stupid position for an established church to take, and the nation duly went ahead and injected its own spiritual contents, leaving the church looking like a whitewashed tomb.
Of course, it looks like frightful bad taste to say this now, flogging a dead horse and all of that. Yet I have a particular reason for doing so, and this is that the Cambridge college dean who married me and my wife, 25 years ago, was also the first Christian I knew to point out that the church should be marrying gay people as well as divorced ones, like me. “What we have to ask,” he said, “is whether a gay couple can be a means of grace to one another.”
In the late 80s this was still a startling question. The only out gay media person I then knew was Peter Ackroyd at the Spectator, and one of our colleagues there was a Sloaney woman who trilled “Have you heard about the miracle of Aids? It turns fruits into vegetables!” The Independent’s sports desk had a bonding ritual involving elaborate homophobic abuse: “Sausage jockey? He’s the Lester Piggott of the chipolata circuit,” one man used to say who later became a celebrated liberal commentator.
Yet here was the dean of Trinity College, a figure at the heart of the established church and one of the very few Christian intellectuals I have known who kept his acts and his beliefs in harmony, telling me that equality was a Christian imperative. That was how the dons who then ran the church thought, and quietly acted.
But they never understood that power was passing from the dons, within the church as well as outside it. When the great evangelical backlash against gay people came in the 90s – culminating in 1998, when opposition to gay rights became one of the tests of orthodoxy within the Anglican communion and the main cause of its subsequent schism – the dons were all swept away. Williams, than whom no one could be more donnish, was also completely powerless in these matters, partly as a result of his own disastrous choices.
Retreating from the actual condition of the Church of England full of gay and tolerant people into a fantasy of an Anglican communion that had neither but would be “a global significant player” as George Carey once told the United Nations, the evangelical party made a church which could neither lead the nation morally nor even move with it and made instead a virtue of being out of touch. Looking at their church now, I remember Kipling’s brutal epigram on a soldier shot for cowardice: “I could not face my death. This being known, / men led me to him, blindfold and alone.”
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