Pope Francis and the Most Rev. Justin Welby,
the archbishop of Canterbury, would bring a new tone, language and
imagery to the long years of schism dividing their churches since Henry
VIII broke with Rome in the 16th century.
At their first encounter at the Vatican on Friday, indeed, their words seemed friendly and hopeful enough.
“Since we began our respective ministries within days of each other,”
the pope told the archbishop, “I think we will always have a particular
reason to support one another in prayer.”
But their public silence on their myriad doctrinal differences seemed to
offer a gloomier omen for Christian unity between a hierarchical Roman
Catholic Church claiming 1.2 billion faithful, and the much smaller
Anglican Communion of which Archbishop Welby is the spiritual leader.
Pope Francis, 76, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos
Aires, held his inaugural Mass as the 266th pontiff of the Roman
Catholic Church on March 19, two days before Archbishop Welby, 57, was
enthroned as the 105th archbishop of Canterbury.
And, for those seeking ecumenical signals, both men have tilted against
economic injustice, while Archbishop Welby has joined with Vincent
Nichols, archbishop of Westminster and head of the Roman Catholic Church
in England and Wales, to call for an end to the war in Syria.
From another perspective, though, the contrasting choreographies of the
two inaugurations offered a remarkable tableau of their differences, the
pope flanked by the sober ranks of his all-male cardinals — perhaps the
answer to Stalin’s famed question: how many divisions has the pope? —
while Archbishop Welby chose a preponderance of female priests and
drummers from Africa, where Anglicanism has recorded the strongest
growth among its 80 million followers.
Personal affinity, in other words, is hardly likely to trump dogma on
such central issues as women’s place in the priesthood and the
ordination as bishops of celibate gay men in civil partnerships —
notions rejected by the Vatican and approved by the Church of England.
In London, moreover, senior church officials are pressing for decisive
steps to approve the consecration of women as Anglican bishops, a step
supported passionately by Archbishop Welby but anathema to Roman
Catholic doctrine.
In the public remarks surrounding the encounter at the Vatican, “there
was no mention whatever of women bishops in the Anglican Communion,”
wrote Alexander Lucie-Smith, a Catholic priest and moral theologian.
“Presumably the reason for this is because the matter is simply not
worth discussing and can be relegated to the realm of things we must
simply agree to disagree on.”
Indeed, some Catholic commentators remained profoundly suspicious of
ecumenical dialogue simply because, as the Catholic writer and
broadcaster William Oddie put it, “the impression is being given that in
some way the pope and the archbishop are equivalent figures, and that
Welby’s beliefs about his church and his office are understood and
recognized by the Holy See.”
The differences between the two churches extend to the most basic
notions of how they function, setting the Vatican’s tradition of
monolithic global reach against Anglican divisions among its followers
in Africa, Britain and the United States.
“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 columnist and author Andrew
Brown wrote in The Guardian.
For all that, there is some prospect that the pope and the archbishop
may feel more at ease with one another than their predecessors, whose
relationship chilled when Benedict XVI devised a canonical stratagem to
lure dissident Anglicans from the Church of England, then led by the
Most Rev. Rowan Williams.
There is some common ground. Both men face a crisis of Christian belief in the materialist West.
Both oppose same-sex marriage, although the language they bring to the question of homosexuality seems to signal a profound divergence.
While the archbishop has spoken of “gay relationships that are just
stunning” in their quality, the pope, confronting huge sexual abuse and
corruption scandals clinging to the Vatican, has spoken darkly of a “gay
lobby” vying for power and influence within the Curia, his church’s
secretive hierarchy.
Some analysts see similarities in their paths to primacy.
“Welby and Francis came to their jobs as outsiders,” Mr. Brown wrote in
The Guardian: The pope is the first Jesuit pontiff, while Archbishop
Welby, a former oil executive, was associated with a charismatic
evangelical organization within the Church of England.
Most fundamentally, their churches share a scriptural narrative, even
though the conclusions they draw from it seem irreconcilable, down to
the most basic clerical ways.
When he visited the Vatican, for instance, Archbishop Welby was
accompanied by his wife, Caroline.
But his interlocutors were from of a
world of single men whose vaunted celibacy defines the very essence of
their priesthood.