The Archbishop of Canterbury sought Thursday to downplay the implications of the Vatican’s unprecedented invitation for Anglicans to join the Catholic Church as he arrived in Rome for his first talks with the pope on the new policy.
Archbishop Rowan Williams’ three-day visit, which began Thursday with a lecture and ends Saturday with a papal audience, was scheduled before the Vatican announced it was making it easier for traditional Anglicans upset over the ordination of women and gay bishops to become Catholic.
The Vatican has said it was merely responding to the many Anglican requests to join the Catholic Church and has denied it was poaching for converts in the Anglican pond.
But the move has already strained Catholic-Anglican relations and is sure to affect Williams’ 77-million worldwide Anglican Communion, which was already on the verge of schism over homosexuality and women’s ordination issues before the Vatican intervened.
In a speech at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Williams was gracious in referring to the Vatican’s new policy, which he called the “elephant in the room.” The policy was an “imaginative pastoral response” to requests by some Anglicans but broke no new doctrinal ground, Williams said.
He spent the bulk of his speech describing the progress that had been achieved so far in decades of Vatican-Anglican ecumenical talks and questioning whether the outstanding issues were really all that great.
“The ecumenical glass is genuinely half full,” the archbishop said.
In Related News: 4,000 Anglican priests to join Catholics
OVER 4,000 Anglican priests all over the world, including married ones, are expected to join the Catholic Church, Bishop Matthias Ssekamanya announced on Friday.
Ssekamanya, who doubles as the chancellor of Uganda Martyrs University, said this does not mean that the Catholic Church is removing the requirement for priests to remain unmarried.
“We are not becoming soft on celibacy for Catholic priests. We shall also not tolerate homosexuals and polygamous marriages in the Catholic Church,” he added.
He was officiating at the 15th graduation ceremony of the Nkozi-based university.
Vatican officials announced that married Anglican priests would be allowed to remain in the priesthood on a case-by-case basis as they join the Roman Catholic fold.
The Vatican’s decision to allow Anglicans to keep some aspects of their liturgy had raised questions over whether the Catholic requirement for celibacy might change.
The Vatican this month released rules and guidelines, known as the Apostolic Constitution, as part of efforts to make it easier for disillusioned, traditionalist Anglicans to cross over to the Roman Catholic Church.
Under the Vatican’s initiative, Anglicans, turned off by their own church’s embrace of gay clerics, women priests and blessing of same-sex unions, can join new parishes, called ‘personal ordinariates’, that are headed by former Anglican prelates.
“There is no change in the Church’s discipline of clerical celibacy,” Bishop Ssekamanya re-affirmed. He praised celibacy as “a sign and a stimulus for pastoral charity”.
The ceremony had 236 students graduating with masters, 522 with bachelors, 13 with advanced diplomas, 212 with diplomas and 10 with certificates.
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