The Lambeth Conference concluded on Sunday with the Archbishop of Canterbury urging the Anglican Communion to act on its discussions and statements.
“A key mark of declining institutions or companies or countries – and churches – is that they may have a vision of what they should do, they may even have a clear strategy: they just can’t turn their strategy into action,” Archbishop Justin Welby told the assembled bishops on the final morning of the conference.
This ended a week which he said had unintentionally “become a time of intense ecclesiological development”, as organisers strived to accommodate different provinces’ attitudes towards homosexuality and confronted the challenges these posed to the ecumenical movement.
Archbishop Welby spoke before the discussion of the controversial “Call on Human Dignity” on Tuesday 2 August. “We are deeply divided,” he said. “That will not end soon. We are called by Christ Himself both to truth and unity.”
He said that the Anglican Communion’s formal prohibition of same-sex marriage had not changed, but said that those provinces that bless same-sex unions “are not careless about Scripture” and “have not arrived lightly at their ideas that traditional teaching needs to change”.
These remarks received a standing ovation, and bishops on both sides of the debate credited the intervention with facilitating fruitful discussion of other issues, such as the communion’s response to the climate emergency. An event at Lambeth Palace on Wednesday 3 August saw the launch of the Communion Forest initiative, in which bishops committed to care for the environment in their dioceses, with a liturgy and ceremonial tree-planting on the palace’s lawn.
However, that morning Archbishop Welby had acknowledged that the world’s churches require a fresh impetus to escape the presnt “ecumenical winter” and admitted that he is “not proud” of the progress on Christian unity over the past nine years.
Responding to these comments, the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, who is co-chair of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, told The Tablet that it was more important that the conference seemed to have secured the unity of the Anglican Communion.
“From a Catholic perspective, we deal with other Churches at the universal level,” he said. “If the Communion were to divide, we would have to find new partners for dialogue, and that would significantly hamper the process.”
In an address delivered to the conference’s plenary session on Christian unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, the prefect of the dicastery for promoting Christian unity, warned of an “ecumenical emergency” caused by different denominations’ conceptions of the movement.
Because Cardinal Koch was absent due to illness, Fr Anthony Currer delivered the address on his behalf, who prefaced it with an apology for the Church’s historic reluctance to participate in ecumenical discussions.
Speaking afterwards, Fr Currer told The Tablet that it was valuable to “live alongside” the Anglican Communion at the conference, but said that it demonstrated significant differences of ecclesiology.
The other major Catholic contribution came on Saturday 6 August from Cardinal Louis Antonio Tagle, who emphasised the description of early Christians as “sojourners” and “aliens” in the First Epistle of St Peter, as he called for “cultural intelligence” in evangelisation.