Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue ~ IARCCUM.org
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Bishop Cahal Daly, a member of the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, attended the Lambeth Conference 1978 as a Roman Catholic observer. He presented the following statement on behalf of the Secretariat.
The Conference will be well aware of the correspondence which has taken place between Pope Paul VI and His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, prompted by the decision of some provinces of the Anglican Communion to ordain women to the priesthood and the declarations of others that they find no fundamental theological objections to such ordinations. This correspondence was characterised on both sides by realism but also by an earnest wish to do nothing which could possibly be avoided to impair the growth of understanding, remarkable in the perspective of four sad centuries of history, which has marked the relations of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion since the Second Vatican Council.
Pope Paul in his first letter wrote that it was “within this setting of confidence and candour” that he wished to state the Roman Catholic position concerning this new and grave obstacle to our growing together. In restating the Catholic position at this important “hearing” of the eleventh Lambeth Conference, I would wish to speak in the same spirit. As the Holy Father wrote to Archbishop in the same letter, the Catholic Church “holds that it is not possible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons”. The reasons were enlarged on in the declaration later made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which, with obvious reference to the Pope’s letter, judged it “necessary to recall that the Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorised” to make this momentous change.
The tradition, unbroken and universal in east and west, on which the Catholic Church takes her stand is not an inert one, but one so firm and decisive as not to have needed formulation or defence. The onus of defence is on those who depart from so long a practice founded on Christ’s own example and considered to conform to God’s plan for his Church.
The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity feels and wishes to express anxiety about what seems a prevailing tendency, aggravated by some press reports, to regard the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the ordination of women to the priesthood as unclear and somehow provisional. The main purpose of the present declaration is to say to the members of the Lambeth Conference that it is not possible to call in question the seriousness and the firmness of the Catholic position in this matter.
But this having been clearly said, the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, of which I am a member, would in no way wish to dissociate itself from the hopefulness and the commitment to continued search for reconciliation which was clearly apparent in the Holy Father’s letters and has characterised Anglican-Roman Catholic confrontation of this “new and grave obstacle”.
