An Anglican Dispatch to Rome
(article in The Guardian, Saturday 30th April, ‘Face to Faith’ series)
I met Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, briefly at the D-Day commemorations in Caen last June. He radiated an aura of distance and perception, rather than spontaneous warmth. He struck me immediately as a man of intelligence and holiness. And as I sat among the local French hierarchy (who had asked me to process in with them) listening to his words with care, though perhaps not with total acclaim, I also sensed that he is the kind of person best suited to the one-to-one encounter or addressing a public audience, rather than the collective atmosphere of a seminar.
There is some understandable caution around about the new papacy, not least over AIDS and Africa. Many Anglican clergy of my generation - hardly be described as ‘trendy liberals’ - were brought up on the writings of the two theologians, Hans Küng and Eduard Schillebeeckx, whom Ratzinger tried to silence. And the ‘death of Protestantism’ lobby seems to have forgotten Rome’s late entry into the cause of ecumenism. As a teenager in the early 1960’s, I once served as an intermediary to seek an abbot’s permission for us all to say the Lord’s Prayer at the end of an inter-church meeting. We were not even allowed to do that in public until then. Ratzinger, brought up in partly Catholic and partly Lutheran Bavaria, at a time when both Churches were to a greater or lesser extent affected by the Nazi régime, struck the note of international reconciliation in Caen that day. He would certainly take for granted the importance and the need for different Christians to pray together.
But just how far is Pope Benedict XVI likely to go in the wider cause of Christian unity, or indeed to build some bridges (the meaning of the word ‘pontiff’) in his own Church, which under the surface seems as much in need of its own ecumenical movement as the Anglican Communion? My own litmus test comes from some of the advice given by one of his predecessors, Gregory the Great, to an earlier Archbishop of Canterbury. In 597, Augustine arrived at Canterbury from Rome with a mandate to heal the wounds of Christianity, at the time divided between Celtic, Old Roman, and Frankish, and to evangelise the recently arrived Anglo-Saxons. Gregory advised him to take a moderate line with the different Christian groups, provided they worked together and accepted his authority. But his advice about what to do with pagan temples was even more intriguing: do not knock them down, just destroy the idols inside them, and replace them with Christian symbols. I have frequently thought about those words, as they seem to me to have a wider application. When Christianity meets new terrain, as it has done before, and will do again, it needs to enter the constructs and mind-sets of the people concerned – and not destroy them. But then comes the more tricky process of ensuring that the old idols inside are replaced by Christian truth.
Of course, analogies break down. But I cannot help thinking that the new Pope’s track-record, the result of his early formation, is based on a profound mistrust of new ideologies. Yes, consumerism and relativism can run riot and become their own kinds of dictatorships. But they are themselves only the demerits of what could be deeper merits – that faith has to be appropriated (not just given), and that twentieth century European history has so many deep scars that many people find it hard, if not impossible, to trust any kind of authority, which has to be at least partly won and not simply assumed. The signs are that the new occupant of the papacy is aware that these are issues, not just for Europe, but for the developing world as well. Some years ago, a wise priest said to me that the heart of the gospel was about the tension between affection and demand. That is a perennial challenge for every bishop – including the Bishop of Rome.
Kenneth Stevenson is Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth
