In recent years, the movement towards Christian unity, which had quickened after the Second Vatican Council, seemed to have become mired in a quagmire of insurmountable difficulties. The synodal process launched by Pope Francis has changed all that. The extraordinary synodal journey is not one that the Catholic Church is embarking on alone. The recently published Instrumentum Laboris – working document – for the forthcoming October assembly in Rome devotes a whole section to Christian unity and how the Catholic Church can learn from other traditions. This was the theme of a recent meeting that brought Church leaders and theologians from the Catholic Church and six other Christian denominations to Durham, in the northeast of England.
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A leading Asian theologian says Pope Francis’ decision to include non-ordained women and men as voting members of October’s synod assembly is a “giant step” that will irreversibly change the Church’s decision-making processes.

Last month, the synod secretariat announced the Pope had authorised a reform to allow at least 70 non-bishops to be members of the 4-29 October synod assembly in the Vatican. This move will see women given a vote in a synod for the first time.
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The Patriarchate of Alexandria has become the latest to recognise Ukraine’s new independent Orthodox church, prompting angry reactions from Russian leaders who bitterly opposed its establishment by the Ecumenical Patriarchate a year ago.

In a brief statement during a Cairo service, Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and All-Africa said the recognition had been conferred after “many prayers and consultations” among his senior clergy. Meanwhile, in a second message to his bishops, published by Greece’s Orthodox Romfea news agency, Theodore confirmed the move, adding that it had followed “mature reflection” and many personal talks, and been taken out of “concern for peace and the Orthodox churches’ unity and wellbeing”.
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It is not uncommon to read optimistic appraisals of how the cause of Christian unity is progressing. There are in fact undeniable signs of continuing progress in relations between the divided churches as set out, for example, in the study document From Conflict to Communion, describing the substantial advance of relations between Catholics and Lutherans in fifty years of dialogue.

But not all is plain sailing. To the careful observer there are also signs of frustration and even retrenchment. To not a few, the traditional ways of doing ecumenism seem no longer capable of meeting new challenges coming from developments both within the Catholic Church and within the other Churches, our ecumenical partners.
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The magazine, which launched today, started as a monthly section in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

The Church has ignored the female contribution to Catholic culture in recent years, according to an editorial in a new women’s magazine published by the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper.

Lucetta Scaraffia, the co-ordinator of Women-Church-World, the new monthly magazine published by L’Osservatore Romano, said that a “hidden revolution” had taken place during the last century with women making an increasingly important contribution to the intellectual life of Catholicism.

But this, she explained, had been “almost ignored” by the Church even though it had intensified in the years following the Second Vatican Council when more and more women started to study theology.
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Pope Francis has given his blessing to the Vatican’s international cricket team as it prepares to take on the Church of England. The side of Catholic priests are preparing for their first tour to England, which will include a match with the Church of England XI in Canterbury. Pope Francis, who is a supporter of Buenos Aires football side San Lorenzo, put on a cricket cap and signed a bat that the team will take with them during their tour of England, which begins on Friday. After the tour the bat will be auctioned in order to raise money for a joint Catholic and Anglican campaign against modern-day slavery and indentured labour, the Global Freedom Network, the Vatican said. The papal XI will play matches against chaplains of the British armed forces at Aldershot and the Royal Household Cricket Club at Windsor Castle, as well as two other games. Then in Canterbury on September 19 the team will take on the Anglican XI.
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There are many reasons to be hopeful about the direction of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue but it is threatened by tensions emerging within the Orthodox Church. As the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity gets under way today, a leading ecumenist gives his assessment.

In 1923, a schoolteacher priest of Lyons started devoting his spare time to helping the 10,000 refugees from Bolshevism camped and lodged around the city and its suburbs. It was his first encounter with a Christianity that was not Roman Catholic. Thus he learned the friendship of receiving as well as giving, finding great respect for the Orthodox clergy and people in their moment of destitution, as his heart opened to their faith and the beauty of their worship. He was astonished to find Catholics from the old Russian Empire who were not Latins, but Eastern Christians who maintained their unity with the Bishop of Rome with roots to before the Great Schism. Over the next decade, Paul Couturier became convinced of the need for Christian unity, and in 1935 he took hold of the Catholic Church Unity Octave, founded in 1908, and developed it into a “Universal Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians in the charity and truth of Christ”. Inspired by the holiness of the Orthodox, beyond this world he imagined an “invisible monastery”, in which all could unite in prayer to God in Heaven, in the hope of seeing the same union realised in the Church here. He took for his motto the saying of Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev: “The walls of separation do not rise as far as Heaven.”
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Pope Francis’ reference to himself as the ‘Bishop of Rome’ was music to the ears of Orthodox leaders for whom the question of papal primacy has long been a problem for reunion. Their attendance at the new Pope’s inaugural Mass was a sign of their hopes for closer communion. A statement from the patriarchate explained Bartholomew’s decision to attend Pope Francis’ inauguration personally: the need for “a profoundly bold step … that could have lasting significance”. It is the first time the Bishop of Constantinople has attended the inauguration of the Bishop of Rome ever, let alone since the great schism of 1054. According to the patriarchate ­website: “after such a long division … authentic reunion will require courage, leadership and humility. Given Pope Francis’ well-­documented work for social justice and his insistence that globalisation is detrimental to the poor … the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic traditions have a renewed opportunity to work collectively on issues of mutual concern … But such work requires a first step and it would appear as though Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is willing to take such a step.” In one of those seemingly informal but resonant gestures that we are beginning to expect from Francis, the response was immediate and commensurate. The successor of Peter greeted the successor of the other Galilean fisherman as “my brother Andrew”.
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The Archbishop of Birmingham has said he understands those frustrated with ecumenical dialogue but stressed the long term aim is “full visible unity”. Archbishop Bernard Longley was speaking to The Tablet days before members of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) gathered for their latest round of meetings in Hong Kong, which was due to start on Friday.
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by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, The Tablet Lutheran Bishop Johannes Friedrich has said that the Pope’s visit to the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt on his visit to Germany last year “cannot be rated highly enough”. The former Bishop of Bavaria was writing in the German Protestant monthly Chrismon about the papal visit to Germany’s Protestant heartland last
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Jonathan Luxmoore and Christa Pongratz-Lippitt, The Tablet The head of the German Church’s Ecumenical Commission has said that he believes the Pope “rehabilitated” the reformer, Martin Luther, during his visit to the country last month, write Jonathan Luxmoore and Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. Speaking on 23 September to the council of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, in
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Pope Benedict XVI’s third visit to Germany last week was billed as the 84-year-old pontiff’s latest effort to help convince people in highly secularised Europe that their society would be better and more human if God were at its centre. He won high praise for a deeply philosophical paper given to the Bundestag in Berlin on the foundations for a free state of law (see page 10). In that address, he said it was “urgent” to start a “public debate” on the necessity of retrieving the natural law tradition in developing legislation. As with his speech at Westminster Hall a year ago, the Pope was hailed for reaching across the political and religious divide of Germany’s parliament and its intellectual class.
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As the Bishop of Rome, it is deeply moving for me to be meeting you here in the ancient Augustinian convent in Erfurt. As we have just heard, this is where Luther studied theology. This is where he was ordained a priest. Against his father’s wishes, he did not continue the study of Law, but instead he studied theology and set off on the path towards priesthood in the Order of Saint Augustine. And on this path, he was not simply concerned with this or that. What constantly exercised him was the question of God, the deep passion and driving force of his whole life’s journey. “How do I receive the grace of God?”: this question struck him in the heart and lay at the foundation of all his theological searching and inner struggle. For Luther theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God.
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The joint commemoration of the Reformation by Catholics and Lutherans could begin with an admission of guilt by both sides, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, said in an interview last week. The Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation are planning a joint declaration on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. “Without joint recollection, joint purification and without an admission of guilt on both sides, an honest commemoration will not be possible,” Cardinal Koch told the Austrian Catholic Press Agency.
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by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt for The Tablet Pope Benedict XVI has intervened personally to demand more time for ecumenical talks with the Protestant Churches when he visits Germany in September. In a highly unusual move he has written directly to the leader of the Protestant Churches, Chairman Nikolaus Schneider, expressing dissatisfaction with the brevity of the
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You have spoken, Your Grace, of the historic meeting that took place, almost thirty years ago, between two of our predecessors – Pope John Paul the Second and Archbishop Robert Runcie – in Canterbury Cathedral. There, in the very place where Saint Thomas of Canterbury bore witness to Christ by the shedding of his blood, they prayed together for the gift of unity among the followers of Christ. We continue today to pray for that gift, knowing that the unity Christ willed for his disciples will only come about in answer to prayer, through the action of the Holy Spirit, who ceaselessly renews the Church and guides her into the fullness of truth.
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The head of the Vatican’s education office has described the religious education curriculum introduced by the government of Quebec as bordering on “anti-Catholic”.

Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, the Prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, stepped into the row over religious education, which has divided the Canadian province, when he criticised the Ethics and Religious Culture programme. It was implemented last September and has replaced all other RE curricula in the province’s state schools and Protestant and Catholic schools.

Eighty-two per cent of Quebec’s 7.5 million population are at least nominally Catholic, and boycotts of the course are occurring throughout the province. Cardinal Grocholewski said: “Talking in the same way about all religions is almost like an anti-Catholic education, because this creates a certain relativism.” He said this approach could ultimately be anti-religious, since young people are left with the impression that each faith is a fictional narrative. Speaking to the Zenit news agency in Rome, he also said that teaching all religions equally “violates the right of parents to educate their own children according to their own religion”.

Some Quebec schools have suspended pupils who take part in the boycotts. Loyola High School, a private Jesuit school in Montreal, is suing the province after its request that it be exempted from teaching the programme because it was “contrary to its faith mission” was denied.

• Read the complete news article in The Tablet, February 28, 2009
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It came during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s announcement of the Second Vatican Council – news that Pope Benedict had decreed that the “Lefebvrists”, the four bishops excommunicated for disobedience and who have never fully accepted the Council, could return to the Church.

The Pope instructed the Congregation for Bishops to “remit” the excommunications of four leaders of the schismatic Society of St Pius X (SSPX) otherwise known as Lefebvrists. The four men — Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso del Gallareta — incurred automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication in June 1988 when they were illicitly ordained bishops by renegade Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (d. 1991), who founded the SSPX in 1970 and the Seminary of Ecône in south-west Switzerland.
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Catholics and Muslims find common ground in Rome

[The Tablet] The first meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum of scholars and religious leaders has ended in a joint declaration saying religious minorities have a right to “practise their faith in private and public” and to have their own houses of worship.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, ranked this as the most important of the 15 points agreed with delegates from the Common Word project, a dialogue initiative launched last year by 138 Islamic leaders from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Western countries. The declaration also called for respect for personal “choices in matters of conscience and religion,” which could apply to the thorny question of conversion from Islam, which the delegates discussed briefly but did not seek consensus on.

• See the complete article from The Tablet, November 15, 2008 at www.thetablet.co.uk/article/12282
• See the Final Declaration of the Catholic-Muslim Forum at ecumenism.net/archive/news/2008_11.htm#000787
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[The Tablet] The symbolism of next week’s inaugural meeting of the Catholic-Muslim Forum at the Vatican is likely to be as important as what is actually said. The public perception of religion is that it leads to trouble, especially between one religious or ethnic group and another. Indeed, in Iraq and Pakistan, Christians have had reason to fear for their lives from extremist Muslims who are, it must be stressed, acting in defiance of the teachings of their own faith. In Western Europe many Muslims have experienced discrimination and prejudice, and occasionally violence, not so much from anti-Islamic ideology as from sheer bigotry and racism. Yet in the Vatican next week leaders of the two faiths will stand side by side in mutual respect. One of them will be Pope Benedict XVI.

• The complete editorial published in The Tablet, November 1, 2008, is available online.
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Christian-Jewish relations ‘difficult’

[The Tablet • Christa Pongratz-Lippitt] Cardinal Walter Kasper this week admitted that Christian-Jewish relations were going through a difficult period following the publication of the revised Good Friday Prayer for the Tridentine Rite, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. Cardinal Kasper, president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, was speaking in an interview with the Ulm-based daily Südwest-Presse on the eve of the Katholikentag in Osnabrück. Several prominent German Jews will not be attending that event on account of the prayer.

Admitting the current tensions in Catholic-Jewish relations in Germany, Cardinal Kasper said: “Germany is, of course, particularly sensitive for historical reasons. This is a difficult period but I think we will be able to get back to the level of dialogue we have had up to now – at least that is what we would like to achieve.”

Asked why a German Pope “of all people” had been so “insensitive to German history” Cardinal Kasper said Pope Benedict “wanted to do something positive. He wanted to improve a prayer that the Jews found offensive and he succeeded. But that did not go quite as far as people wanted or expected. The Pope showed his good will as his unplanned visit to a synagogue in the US shows. This was seen as something most positive in America. In Germany things are different but we are doing all we can to overcome the difficulties.”

Asked why Pope Paul VI’s Good Friday Prayer for the Jews had not been adopted for the Tridentine Mass, Cardinal Kasper replied, “The present Pope wanted the language of the old prayer kept while improving the contents. He did not want to introduce a new liturgical form into the old, extraordinary form.”
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A hundred years on from the establishing of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, how much further forward are we? And what exactly are we praying for during this week of prayer? On the whole, it’s become a fixture for most “mainstream” denominations, a few days when the more enthusiastic or more biddable members of the congregation turn up to someone else’s church for a well-mannered but often rather lukewarm joint service or two, or perhaps for a talk by a prominent local leader.

The aspiration that we end up relating better with each other, or even that we end up more willing to engage in witness and work together is entirely worthy, and is probably widely fulfilled. But are we praying for anything more than this?

For some people, the answer is clearly “no”. To look beyond this fostering of local goodwill, they would say, is always in danger of slipping towards the yearning for some universal institution with clear central control – at worst, a Pullmanesque Magisterium, some people’s nightmare of Roman Catholicism.
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Film of captured female sailor Faye Turney shown on Iranian television has highlighted concerns about the increasing number of women forces personnel at risk of abuse and exploitation by an enemy. But they are here to stay

The headlines said it all: warrior, mother, pawn. They were referring to the plight of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, the 26-year-old ship’s boat crewman from the frigate HMS Cornwall, seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the upper Gulf on 23 March along with seven Royal Marines and seven fellow sailors.

Manipulating Faye Turney seems to be central to the tactics of her captors, whoever they really are in the baffling mosaic of intrigue and loyalties in the Revolutionary Guard and the dwindling circle of militant student followers of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President. They certainly appear to be more disturbed over her role as a woman serving on operations with a British man-o’-war than that of her commanders.
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When Catholic cardinals meet in conclave they tend to do so under the stern eye of God in the Sistine Chapel. Anglican primates are different; this past week they have been meeting privately in the agreeable surroundings of a beach-front hotel overlooking the shimmering Indian Ocean just outside Dar es Salaam. Where the cardinals have Swiss Guards to protect them, the Anglicans have enjoyed what we journalists took to calling satirically the ring of steel: a group of young askari cadets, dressed in white shirts and black berets, who nervously fingered their truncheons when anyone approached.
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Rather than be split by a much-trumpeted schism,the Anglican Communion emerged from its meeting in Tanzania this week as a new kind of twenty-first century Church, reflecting changes in ecclesial and geopolitical power

Will the Anglican Communion survive? Before the Primates’ Meeting in Africa this week there was much discussion of schism, and an atmosphere of crisis prevailed. At the heart of the problem is how Anglicans reconcile the value they place on diocesan and provincial structure of autonomy at the national level with the legitimacy given to a comprehensive range of practices and positions with the bonds of ecclesial communion that allow the Communion coherence as one effective, united, interdependent worldwide body of Christians. Given that, what does the Anglican Communion mean? Is it a fellowship of independent national churches with historical roots in the Church of England that worship through a provincial expression of the Book of Common Prayer, or is it a hierarchical system with the Archbishop of Canterbury at the top as a sort of mini-Pope?
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by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali for The Tablet. Pope John Paul II has invited leaders and theologians of other Churches to help him in seeking new forms for the papal ministry. In this article the Bishop of Rochester makes a contribution from the Anglican Communion’s point of view. As I write, conversations are taking place in
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The murder this week of Brother Roger Schutz, founder of the Taizé community, shocked Christians everywhere. But his vision will still draw pilgrims.

The success story of this Protestant “monastery” is the unlikely story of a determined man, Roger Schutz, and of his impossible dream: the reconciliation of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians. How did his little community of companions, both Protestant and Catholic, who settled in a small village in Burgundy in 1940, become the European ecumenical pastoral youth centre which it is today, visited by 6,000 adolescents each week and 100,000 pilgrims every year, from every part of the world? The programme is austere – worship three times a day in the hangar-like church (built by young volunteers), Bible study and discussion groups – and the lifestyle spartan – sleeping rough in tents or barracks, simple food hastily consumed after queuing at length to be served.
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When Catholics hold interfaith dialogue with Muslims, one of the first topics to be discussed is the veneration given to the Virgin Mary in the two traditions. Teaching about Mary is seen as something that unites, rather than divides Catholicism and Islam; yet among Christians, the practices of Marian doctrine and devotion have generally been read as clear indicators of the differences between Catholics and Protestants. They have also, on occasion, signified the differences even between Catholics and Orthodox.

It is only fairly recently, therefore, that ecumenical dialogue groups have arrived at this touchy subject. The most recent statement from the ARCIC (Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission), “Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ” – which was ready many months ago, but had been awaiting approval from Rome before it could be published – has therefore been anticipated with bated breath.
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During Holy Weeek, one Anglican member of ARCIC sent the rest of us the poem, “Good Friday Falls on Lady Day” via email. The poet, G. Studdert Kennedy, also an Anglican, wrote:

She claims no crown from Christ apart
Who gave God life and limb
She only claims a broken heart
Because of Him.

I knew that the Feast of the Annunciation of the Lord would coincide with Good Friday this year, but I did not know the poem, and I was touched to receive it. In a way, this captures something special about the process of producing “Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ”.
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Some of the liveliest debates at ARCIC meetings have been over titles. We worked together for five years on the “Mary document”, so we all have strong feelings about the progress we made and the best way to present it. “Put Mary in the title”, said one member, “and it will fly off the shelves.” “Put grace and hope in the title”, said another, “because that’s how we have approached the two Marian dogmas.” “Put Christ in the title,” we all agreed, because again and again we reminded each other that the Church is interested in Mary because she is the mother of the Lord.

ARCIC does not set its own agenda. We worked on Mary because we were asked for “a study of Mary in the life and doctrine of the Church” and because of the acknowledged differences between our two communions over Mariological teaching.
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For all the Vatican’s increasingly enlightened view of women’s role in the world, prejudice still prevents many from participating fully within Catholicism. Changing that needs to be high on the next pope’s agenda

Last week I stood in a pew at Westminster Cathedral watching the procession to the altar for Solemn Vespers for Pope John Paul II. It was an impressive, dignified sight, with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the bishops of Westminster diocese, priests, ecumenical and interfaith guests, and the choir gathering for a service to commemorate John Paul II. Both the procession and the service could be perceived as a metaphor for the Church and its relationship with women. The voice of a woman was heard just once, reading a bidding prayer and the reader, a cleric from another denomination, was one of just two females in the procession. The other was a young teenage altar server. The congregation, however, was different: I would estimate that more than half the people attending were women.
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Communion is sign of unity, but often it leaves people feeling excluded, on the outside of the community of the faithful. In the fifth of our series, a Benedictine monk seeks a theological basis for a pastoral re-examination of the problem
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The Christian Churches face a crisis in ecumenism. Before rapprochement with other faiths becomes possible, they must overcome their own differences

There are four areas which are crucial to Christianity within the next 20 years and which have to be faced by all Christians. They will certainly be among the main challenges facing the next pope.

The first is the de-christianisation of Europe. How extraordinary that in the space of 50 years the secularist culture of Europe should have gained such sway, especially at a time when, around the world, the Enlightenment prediction that religion would become merely a private affair seems to have been so misplaced. The rise of an assertive Islam, with all its huge challenges, speaks for itself, as does the new popularity of religious practice in the former Soviet Union. The crucial 2 per cent or 3 per cent margin which handed victory to President Bush is being attributed to the newly galvanised ranks of evangelical Christians in the United States. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Churches are expanding fast. Even in our old, tired Europe, religious belief is exerting a new fascination among the young, as is evident in the increased take-up of RE at A-level and theology at university.
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Rome’s new document on men and women shows that feminists and the Church have more in common than perhaps either realises, but Catholic theology has yet to describe the sacramental nature of women.
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On Monday 29 March I left Glasgow for the third Building Bridges seminar convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury and hosted by John J. DeGioia, president of Georgetown University in Washington. A few days earlier, the former Archbishop George Carey, the man responsible for hosting the first of these seminars at Lambeth Palace in 2002, had made front-page headlines after delivering a public lecture in which Islam and Muslims had come under severe criticism over a variety of political and theological issues. “It is sad to relate”, he said, “that no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries.” “During the past 500 hundred years,” he continued, “critical scholarship [in theology] has declined, leading to strong resistance to modernity.” Dr Carey added that moderate Muslims must “express strongly on behalf of the many millions of their co-religionists, their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah.” Much to the dismay of many Muslims and non-Muslims, in subsequent interviews, Dr Carey remained steadfast that he had not meant to offend the Muslim community.
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On a visit to Jerusalem in the mid-1990s, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, said ruefully that so many Palestinian Christians were emigrating in despair from the West Bank that the Christian holy places would soon become Disneyland attractions rather than places of “living worship”.

Three and half years into a second intifada, the situation is still deteriorating. Only one branch of Christianity — Christian Zionism — feels comfortable in the Holy Land these days. The reason is simple: while the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican Churches line up behind their embattled and dwindling Palestinian flocks to protest against Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and the expansion of settlements there, Christian Zionists stand shoulder to shoulder or even comfortably to the right of Likud and the Orthodox rabbis.

Among its demands are more Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the relocation of Palestinians to neighbouring Jordan and even the razing of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque to make way for the third Jewish Temple.
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Next week Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, is due to travel to Russia to meet the Patriarch in the highest-level visit by Vatican officials in four years. The aim of the five-day trip (due to start on Monday) is to improve relations between Rome and Moscow, which are at their lowest point since before the Second Vatican Council. Two years ago a visit by the cardinal was cancelled by the Moscow Patriarchate, outraged by what it described as aggressive Catholic missionary activity in its “canonical territory”.
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I. When Jesus uttered the words ‘may they all be one’, they by no means represented a vision or a dream. Jesus said these words on the eve of his death. This was not the time for triumphal utopias. The Galilean spring, when the enthusiastic crowds overwhelmed him, was over. They no longer cried ‘Hosanna!’ but ‘Crucify him!’. Jesus was well aware of this, and predicted also that his disciples would not be one, and that they would be dispersed. What else could he do in this situation than to leave the future of his work in the hands of his Father? Thus, the words ‘may they all be one’ are a prayer, a prayer in a humanly perceived hopeless situation.
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Last weekend, taking a brief respite between bouts of ‘Bread of Heaven’ and the national anthem in our exhaustive school end-of-term ceremonies, I dived into a paper and turned on the radio. Bad mistake. I was assaulted from two directions.

First, in a seemingly authoritative survey, a quarter of Church of England clergy and nearly one in five of the laity say that even now, eight years after the first women priests were ordained, there ‘should not be any women bishops, anywhere’. So the old horror of an oestrogenated ministry still lurks strongly within that Church, despite the shake-out when herds of outraged clergy and miffed laity defected to Rome over the issue (their worries about transubstantiation and papal infallibility strangely vanishing overnight in their greater worry about women in cassocks).
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The celebrations of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee reached a high point this past week. The stunning success of the festivities shows that the British monarchy has climbed back into the affection of the people. What does it need to do to stay there? A Church of Scotland minister looks particularly at the monarch’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith.
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The underground Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in Communist times ordained married men and a woman vicar-general. The aim was to bring the sacraments to those who otherwise would have to do without. Our Vienna correspondent has been reading a new biography of Ludmila Javorova.
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An organisation bringing together campaigners from all over the world in favour of ordaining women met in Dublin for the first time last weekend. The delegates to the first-ever conference of Women’s Ordination Worldwide, or WOW, were mainly Catholics, but other denominations were also represented. Gathered in University College Dublin, the delegates, from 26 countries, made an impressive and colourful gathering, but the most significant part of the event was what happened behind the scenes.

First, there was the case of the would-be keynote speaker on the first night, Aruna Gnanadason of the World Council of Churches (WCC). In mid-May the organisers announced that Gnanadason would not be able to attend. The reason given was that the WCC didn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of the Catholic Church. But one of the conference organisers, Soline Vatinel, told the Irish Times: The unofficial reason was that the Vatican said it would withdraw from commissions involving the WCC if Ms Gnanadason spoke at the conference. Some observers suggested that Orthodox Churches who are members of the WCC were also unhappy about her participation. In any case, her slot was instead filled by a Jamaican-born London vicar, the Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, while the text of Gnanadason’s undelivered speech was circulated to conference participants.
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Pope John Paul, who celebrated his eighty-first birthday this week, is a man in a hurry. In the twilight days of his long papacy, he is expanding the perspective of his by now traditional pastoral visits around the world and he is laying down markers for the future. These concern the future relations of the Roman Catholic Church both with the separated Orthodox Christian Churches, and with the other monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism.

Hence the first-ever visit this month by a pope to a mosque, the impressive Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that a pope from Rome should remove his shoes, put on white slippers and traverse one of the great Holy Places of Islam for a meeting with the Grand Mufti and other clerics in the courtyard of the mosque.
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The recent elevation of 44 new cardinals may have seemed to show that for the Catholic Church, it was business as usual. In reality the ceremony marked a radical break. For this first consistory of the new millennium was at the same time a farewell ceremony for a whole era — the era of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The eminent prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), that capable and controversial guardian of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, had enjoyed a monopoly of spiritual power under papal primacy. Now that was challenged. The consistory was both an individual personal drama and an institutional setback to Roman centralism.
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One of the subtleties of Shakespeare’s As You Like It is the existence of layers of sexual ambiguity implied in its original performance: a boy-actor played the part of a young woman disguised as a young man who at one point is pretending to be a girl. I was put in mind of these layers of meaning when I read The Eucharist: sacrament of unity (ESU), the Church of England’s highly courteous and careful response to the British and Irish bishops’ 1998 teaching document on eucharistic doctrine and sharing entitled One Bread One Body (OBOB). There is of course one vitally important difference: whereas the play’s layers form the stages in a dialectic, i.e. an interactive process, of ambiguity, the theological document offers a dialectic of clarification, which provides a model of what is involved in ecumenical reception.
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Pope John Paul is to make a brief visit to Athens in May. Many of the Greek Orthodox clergy and the monks of Athos are up in arms. Could this nevertheless turn out to be a breaking of the ice which has lasted since the Western and Eastern Church split in 1054? An Assumptionist priest who was formerly stationed in Athens looks at the tensions.
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On 7 January, Russia’s Orthodox Church celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ. Thousands attended the Christmas liturgy in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, triumphantly, and, many have averred, tastelessly, restored to the city’s skyline more than 60 years after Stalin ordered its obliteration from it. Live coverage of the event was marred, however, when Patriarch Alexis II arrived more than an hour late, delayed by his participation in the day’s informal meetings between President Putin and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

As the television cameras panned in on the massed faithful awaiting their Patriarch, they picked out the emerald robes of seemingly the most senior cleric in attendance — Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, head of Russia’s Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims. For the third year running, the chief representative of Russia’s Roman Catholics, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, had not been invited.
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It seems a far cry now from the mid-1950s when Roman Catholic ecumenism was in the main led by the Abbé Paul Couturier and other French pioneers, though a church historian could look further back to the Malines Conversations in Belgium between Catholics and Anglicans, and to the work of the Sword of the Spirit during the Second World War, when Cardinal Hinsley co- operated with William Temple, by then Archbishop of Canterbury. I well remember being involved with Oxford’s Catholics in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in its refashioned form — praying for the unity Christ willed for his Church by the means he chose. With some trepidation some of us ecumenical cognoscenti went to St Aloysius’ in St Giles, where we were invited to take part in Benediction. Well, there was no harm in entering in at the deep end, was there?
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With our short ecclesiastical memories, we have almost forgotten that in the run-up to its dogmatic definition in 1854, Mary’s Immaculate Conception was often justified on the grounds of her being a priest. Tradition frequently applied the words found in Hebrews 7:26 to her: “It is fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens.” The Benedictine prior Jacques Biroat wrote in 1666 that “Paul’s reasoning” in Hebrews 7:26 “is relevant to Christ’s mother. She shares in the priesthood of her son and is the origin of our reconciliation to God. Therefore, she had to be entirely innocent and separate from sinners. She had to be preserved from original sin.” Mary was immaculately conceived because she had to be a priest without stain. Mary has captured the Catholic imagination more than any other person except Jesus. Generation after generation has seen in her the highest reflection of saintliness and love. Catholics have been fond of Mary because she is Jesus’ own mother. They also respected her as his closest associate in redemption, as his first “priest”.
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Catholics are permitted to support attempts to limit the evil aspects of an abortion law, says Pope John Paul in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae. In Germany, however, the moral complexities have made the Church draw back, which threatens to reduce its influence in society. A journalist on the weekly Rheinischer Merkur highlights the German bishops’ dilemma.
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