Canterbury

Randall Davidson is Archbishop of Canterbury--has been through many stormy years. He has an intimate knowledge of the Church of England from Canterbury to the uttermost parts of the Commonwealth. It has frequently been said that the dream of his life is that the Church of England, so sane, so sensible, so "rightly insistent on moral earnestness," shall become, with the growth of the British Commonwealth, the greatest of all Christian churches--more catholic than Rome.

But within his own church there has been increasing desire for reconciliation rather than competition with the Roman Catholic Church.

On the surface it is a small matter which has brought the Roman Catholics, the Anglicans and the Orthodox (Russian and Greek) Churches together this week. It is the matter of the calendar. Representatives of the Pope, of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the Ecumenical Patriarch are sitting together at Geneva for the first time since 1453. All three Churches are now deciding whether they can adopt a fixed date for Easter.

Instrumental in bringing these Churches together to discuss the calendar was the League of Nations.

It is widely believed in England and elsewhere that from this meeting will spring other meetings of more serious religious import, and that before the close of the 20th Century there will come some union, or at least some common working agreement, between the three greatest liturgical Churches of Europe.