Malines Conversations Group: Towards a Common Future for Anglicans and Roman Catholics

28 April 2018 • Persistent link: iarccum.org/?p=5561

Members of the Malines Conversations Group at their meeting in Long Branch, New Jersey (12 Apr. 2018)

Members of the Malines Conversations Group at their meeting in Long Branch, New Jersey (12 Apr. 2018)

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey preaching during the meeting of the Malines Conversation Group (12 Apr. 2018)

The Malines Conversation Group visited St Thomas' Church on 5th Avenue in Newark, New Jersey (12 Apr. 2018)

IARCCUM co-chairs Bishop David Hamid and Archbishop Donald Bolen together with Rev Dr Jennifer Cooper during the Malines Conversations in Long Branch, New Jersey. (12 Apr. 2018)

Many people know of the two official instruments of the international dialogue between the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church: ARCIC, (the theological dialogue) and IARCCUM (the episcopal commission on unity and mission, of which I am privileged to serve as the Anglican Co-chairman). Additionally there are many national and regional dialogues (ARCs) and many national and regional periodic gatherings of bishops from both traditions.

There is another dimension to our international dialogue which takes its inspiration from a unique initiative in the 1920s, long before Vatican II, and not long after Pope Leo XIII declared in the 1896 Bull Apostolicae Curae that Anglican Orders were “absolutely null and utterly void”. I refer to the Malines Conversations. These were held from 1921 to 1926 under the presidency of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, Cardinal Mercier. The conversations involved a small group of Church of England and Roman Catholic representatives, brought together by the friendship between the Anglican Lord Halifax, and Roman Catholic priest Fr Etiene Portal. These conversations predate our official theological dialogue which began in 1967. The early Malines Conversations did some important ground work on ecclesiology, including articulating a vision of the restoration of communion between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, summarised in the phrase l’Église Anglicane unie non absorbée.

In 2013, with the blessing of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and Lambeth Palace, the Conversations began again with theologians from each Communion taking up the task began in the 1920s. Today the Malines Conversations Group continues to explore matters which the official theological dialogue is not mandated to do, including the difficult question of Anglican Orders. This year we met in New Jersey, from 8 – 12 April, hosted by Cardinal Joseph Tobin of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. In addition to our theological work, we visited St Luke’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Greenwich Village for the Sunday mass, St Thomas’s Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue Manhatten for Evensong, and the RC Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Newark NJ for a eucharist celebrated by Cardinal Tobin.

The intense theological discussions are driven by our common commitment as Anglicans and Roman Catholics, in obedience to Our Lord’s command, to walk together as the one Body of Christ in our divided world. So we shared a surreal moment when we caught a glance of a Donald Trump impersonator as we walked through Times Square after Church!

It was good to be together at the meeting with my IARCCUM counterpart, RC Co-Chairman Archbishop Donald Bolen of Regina Saskatchewan, and another Canadian member of the Conversations Group, the Revd Dr Jennifer Cooper, who teaches systematic theology at Mirfield, and is research fellow in theology at Campion Hall, Oxford.