Saturday, November 21, 2009

Basis for women priest ban not so solid: Canterbury Archbishop

Speaking at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, Archbishop of Canterbury queried the theological solidity of the Catholic ban on women priests and also described Pope Benedict's Apostolic Constitution on Anglican groups as imaginative but not groundbreaking.

Archbishop Williams of Canterbury spoke Nov. 19 at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University at a conference marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism, CNS reports.

He said the Vatican's ban on ordaining women was not as solidly grounded theologically as the core Christian doctrines the two denominations agree on, Reuters reports.

"The question ... is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain," he said.

"Do the arguments advanced about the 'essence' of male and female vocations and capacities stand on the same level as a theology derived more directly from scripture and (our) common theological heritage?" he asked.

Archbishop Williams said he obviously also had to mention Pope Benedict's apostolic constitution establishing "personal ordinariates" for Anglicans wanting to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

He said the constitution was "an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some" Anglicans who felt their church was moving in the wrong direction, particularly over questions related to the ordination of women and the acceptance of homosexual behavior.

Allowing the Anglicans to maintain elements of their Anglican heritage "shows some marks of the recognition that diversity of ethos does not in itself compromise the unity of the Catholic Church," the archbishop said.

However, he said, it does not fulfill one of the goals of ecumenism, which is to bring Christian churches into full unity without one denomination absorbing another.

The papal document, he said, "does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making," such as an Anglican synod that would include laity, "but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture, we might say."

Archbishop Williams said, "It remains to be seen whether the flexibility suggested in the constitution might ever lead to something less like a chaplaincy and more like a church gathered around a bishop."

In addition to speaking at the conference, Archbishop Williams was to meet with leaders of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and other Vatican officials and was scheduled to meet Nov. 21 with Pope Benedict.
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