Ecumenical greetings for the World Council of Churches, the Mar Thoma Syrian Orthodox Church, Old Catholic Church, Lutheran World Federation, Methodist Church, Baptist Church and Churches Together, a British ecumenical group, interspersed the sessions of ACC-13 in Nottingham.
Presentations on behalf of Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity at the Vatican, and by Bishop Kalistos Ware on behalf of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew took a theological turn, offering criticism and support for recent events within the Anglican Communion.
Bishop Ware, a patristic scholar at Oxford University, opened his address on June 24 noting that “Anglicans and the Orthodox have in common a tradition of Church polity which values highly the autonomy of each ecclesiastical province to which the Orthodox have given the name of autocephalous Church.”
While the Anglican and Orthodox systems were not identical, “both of them present the same problems with regard to the unity of the Church” as the “problem of the relation between the local church and the Church at the universal level is one of the crucial issues we face today.”
Bishop Ware lauded the Windsor Report’s teachings on the “ecclesiology of communion” as “it is our view, too, that decisions of major importance can be carried into effect in a constructive manner only after consultation and agreement with the rest of the local churches.”
He noted Orthodox displeasure with unilateral actions taken by some Anglican Provinces noting that decisions taken without seeking the mind or consensus of the wider Church have had significant “ecumenical repercussions”.
The Vatican’s observer to the ACC, the Rev. Canon Donald Bolen, sounded similar themes, reading a letter from Cardinal Kasper on June 25. Anglicans and Roman Catholics, he said, “have come to learn as dialogue partners that the actions and decisions of each of us has a significant impact on the other.”
The actions of the Episcopal Church's 74th General Convention, Cardinal Kasper stated, “raised serious questions, from both moral and ecclesiological perspectives, regarding the degree of faith we share.”
In the aftermath of General Convention, Cardinal Kasper outlined the steps taken by Lambeth and the Vatican to maintain relations. The Vatican, he said, had been invited to participate in the Windsor Report process, and “We have been able to speak with an openness and directness which in the past would have been impossible.”
Cardinal Kasper praised the “ecclesiological foundations” laid by the Windsor Report, noting, “They are largely consistent with the koinonia ecclesiology articulated in the agreed statements of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Committee.”
The Windsor Report and the primates’ February, 2004 communiqué were “a starting point rather than a point of arrival” for improved relations, he suggested.
Where the Windsor Report’s recommendations “concretized by tangible decisions to give it an authoritative character” Cardinal Kasper wrote, they would “strengthen the bounds of communion, which are consistent with the apostolic faith as witnessed in the scriptures, the early councils and patristic tradition” and are bound to “draw us more closely together”.
Delegates welcomed the reports, passing resolutions of thanks for all the ecumenical presentations on June 28.
The Rev. George Conger is in Nottingham, England reporting for The Living Church from the triennial meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council.
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