Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue ~ IARCCUM.org
Online resource centre for Anglican-Roman Catholic relations
IARCCUM.org development notes
3 August 2019 • Persistent link: iarccum.org/?p=3362
This website has now been in development for over seven years. The initial scanning of the ARCIC I materials in 2009 was a project of, at that time Msgr. Don Bolen, a staff member of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He was responsible for the Anglican desk at the PCPCU from late 2001 to late 2008. In the months before he left Rome, he collected the documents, borrowed some from the Anglican Centre in Rome, and took them to a quiet summer rental in Sicily where he proceeded to individually scan nearly 18,000 pages on a flat-bed scanner. Some of the missing documents were located at the Lambeth Palace Library, and so he travelled there and was able to collect almost all of the documents.
When Msgr. Bolen returned to parish ministry in Regina, he intended to return to the project after a few other commitments. However, in December 2009 he was named Bishop of Saskatoon, which is when I joined the project. I was the ecumenical officer in Saskatoon already and had worked on a few other websites. Even before he was ordained as bishop, we sat down for a planning meeting to discuss ecumenical projects in Saskatoon, and he asked me if I would be interested in joining this project. This led to a special fundraising appeal in Saskatoon to a find a donor to support initial development and my salary as a special assistant to the new bishop. Over the next six years we worked on a number of ecumenical projects, some of them local ecumenism, but many were writing projects and lectures as Bishop Don became a popular speaker across Canada and at ecumenical conferences around the world. He was also serving on four ecumenical dialogues, three of which he was the Roman Catholic co-chair.
Four times between 2012 and 2016, I joined the annual meeting of the IARCCUM steering committee to plan this website and to access the archives at the Anglican Centre. The website itself was launched in June 2014 during the visit of Archbishop Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to Rome.
