Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's Anglicans, will meet Pope Benedict XVI on November 21, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi confirmed Friday.Lombardi told AFP that Rowan's visit to the Vatican was "already planned" before the Vatican's October 20 announcement of a structure for welcoming Anglican converts into the Roman Catholic Church.
Williams will be on hand for celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Johannes Willebrands, a Dutch cardinal who was a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism and who died in 2006.
The Vatican announced last week that Pope Benedict XVI has approved a new structure to ease the way for Anglicans -- including married priests -- to join the Roman Catholic Church.
The Holy See said the move was a response to "numerous requests to the Holy See from groups of Anglican clergy and faithful in various parts of the world who want to enter into full and visible communion."
The Anglican church has been confronted by a growing split over the ordination of women and gay marriage.
Several conservative Anglican priests have defected to Catholicism since the ordination of women was adopted from 1984 in various branches of the Anglican Communion and by the Church of England as a whole in 1992.
Most vocal on the issue has been an Australia-based group, the Traditional Anglican Communion, whose leader Bishop John Hepworth made a formal request to the pope in 2007 for its members to be allowed into the Catholic fold.
The TAC, which split from the Anglican Communion in 1991, claims a membership of some 400,000 -- of whom several hundred are thought to want to convert to Catholicism.
The Church of England is the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has about 77 million followers.
The Catholic Church counts some 1.1 billion faithful.
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SIC: AFP