ACI Prensa Staff, Jan 26, 2024 / 15:45 pm (CNA).
Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby celebrated an Anglican liturgy this morning in the Catholic Basilica of St. Bartholomew, located on Tiber Island in Rome’s Tiber River.
At the beginning of the ceremony, the current archbishop of Canterbury thanked Pope Francis for allowing him to hold the service in this Catholic church.
The ceremony was included on the official calendar of activities held in Rome during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that was published on the website of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.
In a statement to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Father Angelo Romano, rector of St. Bartholomew Basilica in Rome, explained that the prefect for the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Kurt Koch, requested for the Anglican liturgy to be held there.
“We simply welcomed this liturgy by the archbishop of Canterbury,” he said, pointing out that no Catholic faithful participated in the celebration and that “it’s not blasphemy” but rather a gesture of “fraternity with this church so close to ours.”
Welby is in Rome as part of the ecumenical week and also to participate in the summit titled “Growing Together” organized by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission for Unity and Mission.
Yesterday, Jan. 25, in Rome, the leader of the Anglican Church celebrated an ecumenical second vespers with Pope Francis for the solemnity of the Conversion of St. Paul at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
Throughout the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, held Jan. 18–25, different ecumenical events have taken place in Rome, including a concert by an Anglican choir in St. Peter’s Basilica on Jan. 23, also promoted by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
In our conflicted, incoherent, and precarious world, the search for MIDDLE-TERM vocabulary goes on.
Not a criticism, here, just an observation. Yes to “fraternity,” as far as it goes. Yes to “pluralism” of religions, as far as it goes. Yes to “liturgy,” as far as it goes, even if the celebrant lacks the Apostolic Succession and can only mimic the reality of consecration and the Real Presence (CCC 1374).
Apart of what’s “ecumenical,” yours truly experienced a profound friendship with a young Muslim barrister visiting a thriving Newman Center on one of our campuses, hailing from what he called the most “bottom-feeder” Islamic country in the world. He was surprised and stunned to see that “all Americans are not atheists.”
While Catholicism and Islam cannot be harmonized even by the cleverest word merchants of middle-terms, it is still possible for an individual “witness to Christ” to find personal friendship with a devout “follower of Islam.” Devout, not zealous.
But then, of course, there’s Cardinal Fernandez and his middle-term/non-liturgical “blessing” of couples in FIDUCIA SUPPLICANS…Very Anglican, this “Middle Way” approach, which was outgrown by the Catholic convert John Henry Newman, but which is now manifested in both Anglicanism and Catholicism. Even as centerline Africa (and many others) in both cases holds up a candle to our sexual revolutions and convolutions.
Catholics might even learn from some Anglicans who in 1948 still protested (“Protestants”?) the 1930 Lambeth Conference:
“It is, to say the least, suspicious that the age in which contraception has won its way is not one which has been conspicuously successful in managing its sexual life. Is it possible that, by claiming the right to manipulate his physical processes in this manner, man may, without knowing it, be stepping over the boundary between the world of Christian marriage and what one might call the world of Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism?” (Cited in Wright, “Reflections on the Third Anniversary of a Controverted Encyclical,” St. Louis: Central Bureau Press, 1971).
Africa versus “Aphrodite, the world of sterile eroticism”!