The Archbishop of Canterbury has mounted a direct challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's stance against the ordination of women priests. In a speech in Rome today, he made clear there could be no turning back of the clock on women priests to appease the Pope, the Catholic Church or malcontents in the Church of England.
He dismissed the Pope's plan to welcome disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic Church as little more than a "pastoral response" which broke little new ground in relations between the two churches.
Speaking at an ecumenical conference at the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome, Dr Rowan Williams went on to outline complex proposals for church unity, but on Anglican rather than Roman Catholic terms.
He damningly described the papal decree which outlined norms for a new Anglican Ordinariate to allow Anglicans to convert to Rome as creating a "chaplaincy" rather than a church.
"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," he told the meeting of senior priests, bishops and cardinals in Rome.
"As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground."
And in a significant departure from Anglican polity, he did not apologise for the ordination of women priests, the development in 1992 that derailed progress towards full unity between the two churches.
Instead, he issued a direct challenge to the Catholic prohibition on women's ordination and said that refusing to ordain women could not enhance a Church communion.
"For many Anglicans, not ordaining women has a possible unwelcome implication about the difference between baptised men and baptised women," he said.
The Anglican provinces that now ordained women had retained rather than lost their Catholic holiness and sacramentalism, he said.
Acknowledging the divisions in the Anglican Communion, he said that the way Anglican leaders were dealing with division and dissent held its own lessons for Catholics. "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?"
Dr Williams made clear his determination not to allow the formal talks between Catholics and Anglicans to be derailed by the Catholic bid to capitalise on the flight of traditionalist Anglicans from the Church of England and other provinces in the Anglican Communion. He said that the ecumenical glass was half full rather than half empty.
He put the row over the Apostolic Constitution into the context of a centuries-old debate about the soul of Christian unity, and questioned whether unity talks should even continue if there was no hope of resolving disagreements over issues such as Papal primacy.
"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," he said.
But he went on to argue that if there was hope that such issues could be resolved, the churches could begin to talk about converging their structures of administration and governance, and seeking "sacramental" fellowship.
The speech laid the groundwork for a frank encounter with the Pope on Saturday, the highlight of Dr Williams's Rome trip. Dr Williams is expected to discuss the Pope's forthcoming visit to Britain next autumn, including the status of the visit and whether it should proceed as a pastoral or State visit.
If the latter, it would be the first ever State visit by a Pope to Britain and he would be hosted by the Queen, Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
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