Vatican response to Primates’ gathering

[Italian original below] To respond to the Gospel message with faith immediately implies a whole network of relationships, it implies that something is owed to those others who have also responded in faith. This is true of individual Christians and it is true of Christian communities be they parishes, dioceses, national or international ecclesial communities. In decision-making and in what we do, something is always owed to those other Christians beyond our community who are our brothers and sisters. That we don’t act unilaterally is a given of ecclesial life.

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) is currently examining the way in which the Church local and universal discerns right ethical teaching. The starting point is the theological understanding shared by Catholics and Anglicans that recognises both the proper ecclesial fullness of a local church constituted under a bishop, but also its necessary related-ness to the wider communion of churches.

However, beyond this fundamental principle or bedrock conviction there is necessarily a lived tension between the legitimate self-determination of a Christian community in a particular place and the limits imposed on that freedom by what is owed to the wider communion. The Anglican Communion describes itself as a Communion of churches, and this signals a decentralised structure in which a great deal of autonomy is located at the regional level, that is, the various provinces, which very often are national churches. Provinces have their own processes of synods through which they discern and promulgate teaching. This model of dispersed authority, for all its strengths, has in recent years been a source of considerable tension when the decisions of one province prove to be distressing to other provinces of the Communion.

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