Exile's Return?

Roman Catholicism and the Church of England took the first dramatic steps toward separation in the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with the papacy. Last week the Anglican communion and the Church of Rome took a significant step toward reunion. A joint international commission of the two communions issued a statement of broad agreement on the function of the Christian ministry.

Over the centuries, divisions between the two churches have been exacerbated by punitive excommunication, mutual persecution and outright religious war. The underlying theological differences have included such questions as the nature of the Eucharist (an issue covered in an important 1971 consensus) and the role of the priesthood. The commission's new agreement resolves some of the remaining differences by ignoring old controversies in favor of new and broader interpretations.

One longstanding disagreement, for instance, has been whether the priest is principally an authorized minister of the sacraments (the traditional high-church and Catholic view) or a preacher of the Gospel. The new agreement notes that "the ministry of the word and the sacraments" is one, and stresses neither aspect over the other. That allows low-church Anglicans to emphasize a preaching role-and also leaves a door open to other evangelical Protestants.

Another source of friction has been the "apostolic succession," the doctrine that the legitimacy of a Christian church depends on direct linkage with the first Apostles. Catholics, in fact, long interpreted the idea as some sort of ecclesiastical relay race, in which a baton has been passed from bishop to bishop all through Christian history. The agreement affirms the practice of bishops ordaining other bishops, but suggests that "historical continuity" in a church is ensured by its fidelity to "the teaching and mission of the apostles."

The publication of the accord was approved by both Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But the commission's Anglican and Roman Catholic chairmen were careful to point out that the document was only "an agreed statement of the commission and nothing more." Any action to increase ecumenical exchange between Anglicans and Catholics will have to come from the hierarchies of the two communions. Moreover, there is still a major stumbling block: the Roman Catholic doctrine of the infallibility and primacy of the Pope.

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