Lutherans and Ukrainian Catholics in Regina, Saskatchewan joined the annual celebration of the Anglican and Roman Catholic ecumenical Covenant on Sunday afternoon, May 26. The Covenant began in 2011 between the Anglican Diocese of Qu’Appelle and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Regina. In recent years, the Covenant partners have been working towards a renewed covenant which will include the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) and the Ukrainian Catholic Church. This year’s annual covenant service was an opportunity to give thanks to God for drawing the four churches towards this renewed relationship.

The Bishop of Mauritius, the Most Revd Ian Ernest, has been appointed Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Personal Representative to the Holy See. Archbishop Ian, who served as Primate of the Anglican Church of the Indian Ocean for 11 years until 2017, will take up his new role towards the end of 2019. One of his last duties as Bishop of Mauritius will be to welcome Pope Francis to the island when he makes an official visit in September.

“I feel deeply honoured and humbled by this appointment. It is a calling from God which I accept with all humility”, Archbishop Ian said. “I will try my best to honour this calling and to honour the office. I look forward to working in close collaboration with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Board of Governors of the Anglican Centre in Rome.”

The Anglican Consultative Council has adopted new procedures for the official recognition of agreed statements from mandated ecumenical dialogues. The decision was taken this week by members at the seventeenth meeting of the Council (ACC-17) in Hong Kong. Previously, the Anglican Communion received such texts through the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, but Canon Dr John Gibaut, the Anglican Communion’s Director of Unity, Faith and Order, said that the previous system had not functioned for more than two decades.

The new system was recommended by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO). Dr Gibaut explained that previously, texts would first go out to the provinces of the Anglican Communion who were responsible for making a judgement on the text before feeding back to staff at the Anglican Communion Office. The Lambeth Conference would study those responses and the texts themselves, and then would discern whether each text was “consonant with the faith of the Church as Anglicans have received it”. The texts would then be recommended to member churches of the Anglican Communion.