Those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified. Romans 8:30

DON'T think I realised, when I preached at the 150th anniversary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, on 8th December last year, that less than six months later I would be preaching here again on the subject of Mary. What on earth shall I say? The good news, for me, is that the new ARCIC report, 'Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ' was finally published this week, on this side of the Atlantic in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey last Thursday. The bad news, for me - and perhaps for you too - is that I haven't yet seen a copy. What a good thing that the Church Times yesterday had an edited extract and the Tablet a summary! What a good thing that the various church newspapers and journals have some comment. As they say, there's no need to read the book if you can get hold of a good review….

But the most useful thing now is not so much to analyse the latest report as to use this latest milestone as an opportunity to take stock of where we have got to with ARCIC.The workings of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) are now old enough to be recorded in the third edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. It was in 1966 when Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI launched the whole enterprise, hoping that it would lead to 'that unity in truth and faith for which Christ prayed. After some preparatory work, meetings began in earnest in 1970, resulting in several 'Agreed Statements'. There was one on Eucharistic Doctrine (Windsor 1971), one on Ministry and Ordination (Canterbury 1973) and one on Authority in the Church (Venice 1976). The next report, 'Elucidations' (Salisbury 1979) dealt with questions arising from the first two reports. The 'Final Report' (Windsor 1981, published in 1982) brought the documents together, with a new introduction, a second Agreed Statement on Authority and a further 'Elucidation'.

It is important to re-tell this history because, for many of us, this was the exciting context in which the last Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, made his 1982 visit to England and walked side by side with Archbishop Robert Runcie into Canterbury Cathedral, a picture of which event I still see on the walls of many clergy studies and church sacristies. It all seemed to be coming together. What on earth went wrong in the last twenty odd years?

There are two stories here. One is a story of Roman intransigence and stubbornness. The CDF, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presided over by the present Holy Father, then known as Cardinal Ratzinger, poured cold water over the whole thing. The CDF in 1982 came out with a preliminary report, 'Observations', which was a bit critical. This was followed up by the formal Response in 1991, in which there was concern expressed about 'differences or ambiguities'. Meanwhile the Lambeth Conference, in 1988, was also a bit cautious - being, no doubt, rather defensive about the Roman reactions that seemed to be emerging - and asked for further study of papal primacy. In view of Roman intransigence and stubbornness - our first story goes - no wonder Anglicans got on with their own business. As Archbishop George Carey later said in his autobiography,

'the Congregation had totally misunderstood the rationale of ARCIC….I wrote immediately to Cardinal Ratzinger …. firmly rebutting a theology that put ecumenism back 30 years …The Congregation's call for yet more "clarifications" led many, including myself, to conclude that it was pointless to wait any longer [on the ordination of women]. Indeed, it is my firm belief that the present low state of ecumenism, at the theological level, is mainly due to the appearance of that report in August 1991'*

A second and different story is that Rome was beginning to see that it was dealing with a very peculiar animal in Anglicanism.There had been the recognition of Florence Tim Oi Li's 1944 priesting by the diocese of Hong Kong in 1970, further Hong Kong priestings in 1971, irregular ordinations of 11 women deacons in the USA in 1974 and four more in 1975, followed by regularisation of these ordinations in 1976. As you know, there was then a gradual spread of the practice of the ordination of women, justified by a new doctrine of 'provincial autonomy' throughout the next thirty years. If the Roman authorities were disturbed by the ordination of women and the new doctrine that individual provinces were effectively separate churches, each able to make up its own mind about matters of faith and order, they were also disturbed by some other things too. For one thing, prominent Evangelicals in 1988 issued a letter showing profound disagreement with ARCIC on some of the matters that had been discussed. And it is an open secret that there has been delay in presenting the later ARCIC reports to General Synod for fear that they would be voted down by an increasingly powerful Evangelical lobby.

No matter what weight we put on these stories - Roman bloody-mindedness or Anglican bloody-mindedness (take your pick) - it has obviously been against a very background that the second series of ARCIC reports have been issued. For one thing - as the new Commission (ARCIC II) was set up by Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Runcie when they met on that historic day in Canterbury - there was in the background a regular exchange of correspondence about the ordination of women. Since 1982 we have had an 'Agreed Statement' on 'Salvation and the Church' (Llandaff 1986, published 1987), and 'The Church as Communion' (Dublin 1990). More recently we have had 'Requested Clarifications on Eucharist and Ministry' (1993), 'The Gift of Authority (1998, published 1999) and now, in 2005, much delayed, 'Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ'. This latest report is the last of the second series - ARCIC II - and we wait to see all the second series reports gathered and bound together.

I hope this retelling of the story - a story which I thought I knew but which, as I did a bit of research yesterday, I realised was quite a complicated one which I had partly forgotten - is a reminder to all of us why we are where we are. I don't quite mean by that 'sitting in Pusey House and attending a May Devotion', though our coming together today is in itself a sign that we mean business. I mean 'where we are on our search for Catholic unity'. We are amongst those who have kept faith with the ARCIC process - have wanted it to succeed - who see most of the problems in the process caused not by Roman delay and nit-picking (though there has been delay and even a certain amount of nit-picking) but by the waywardness of the Anglican Communion, first in going its own way, province by province, on the ordination of women and now - the reason for the delay in the publication of the latest ARCIC report - all the difficulties caused by the Gene Robinson affair and so-called same-sex marriages.

The signs are that the Windsor Report, which arguably treats the ordination of women with a sleight of hand, and a certain amount of new Anglican resoluteness, has persuaded Rome to agree to allow the publication of the 'Agreed Statement' on Mary. Meanwhile, as Anglo-Catholics, we maintain our position prayerfully and eirenically: we don't yet know whether we shall be at the heart of a rediscovery of a truly Catholic ecumenism in the Anglican Communion or be an ecumenical forward party - moving on prophetically to reunion with Rome. I say 'we don't yet know': sad to say, I can't see the former happening and, truth to tell, I can't see any real future for us except as the latter. Let us, in our corporate life together, get on with becoming the ecumenical forward party.

I shall conclude with some necessarily brief remarks about 'Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ', brief because I must hold fire until I've read it and, anyway, I have already gone on long enough this afternoon. The 'Agreed Statement' links Mary's place to that of Christ and the Church, stressing both that Christ is the one Mediator and that Mary had the unique calling of being Mother of God incarnate. There is a Cook's tour through the Scriptures, showing us that God does call men and women for particular tasks and gives them the necessary grace for those tasks. There is a basis in the New Testament, says the report, for devotion to Mary.

We then have another Cook's tour, this time through Christian tradition, looking at the first seven centuries when the main lines of Marian doctrine and devotion were established, at the Middle Ages, when there was a real flowering of Marian devotion and devotion to the humanity of Christ, and at the Protestant Reformation when there was a reaction against 'real and perceived abuses' in Marian devotion. The tour continues to show how entrenched Marian devotion was in Counter-Reformation Catholicism and how the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was made an article of faith in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950.

The last bit of the tour takes us to the Second Vatican Council, where the place of Mary is considered firmly within the context of the teaching on the Church - Mary as the elect of Israel, the faithful daughter of Zion, responding whole-heartedly to God's call. It looks too at the flowering of Marian devotion in Anglicanism. The word the 'Agreed Statement' uses to describe what has happened, both in Roman Catholic and in Anglican teaching and devotion, is 're-reception'. Speaking as one who finds the word 'reception' difficult enough, I'm not sure how to begin to cope with 're-reception'….

'Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ' tackles the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption very imaginatively: it admits that Anglicans cannot accept that these doctrines should be required as articles of faith but makes the point that, even if they cannot be proved from Scripture - the Anglican test - they nonetheless are fully supportable from Scripture - the Roman Catholic requirement for a teaching of the Church.

The report concludes with some suitably contemporary insights: Mary is a model for Christian discipleship; she has an ongoing ministry (which makes her sound like one of the retired clergy…); her sufferings are a source of solace for many; she is an inspiration in the search for justice and peace and particularly for women and the oppressed.

The report doesn't deal with everything: as Sarah Jane Boss points out,** there is no engagement, for example, with what really divides Catholics and Calvinists on this issue - and we have plenty of Calvinists in the Anglican Communion. For Catholics and for many Protestants too, a human being accepting God's call is co-operating with God. That co-operation - her words to Gabriel, 'be it unto me according to your will' - is at the heart of Marian devotion and teaching. For Calvinists, Mary and any other Christian too, is an instrument of God, someone whom God chooses to use in furtherance of his will. Put baldly, it's the batsman not the bat that should get the credit for hitting a six. It is down to the batsman to choose a good bat, not down to the bat to choose its batsman. Boss goes on to make a second point, about the relationship of Mary and the Church, where such matters as Mary as Mother of the Church or Mary as embodiment of the Church rather depend on a Catholic view of the Church, a view that many Anglicans would not accept.

And now I really will finish. I hope this afternoon that our devotion to our Blessed Lady reminds us firmly of the ecumenical task to which we are committed and, as we salute her who is 'full of grace', may we too be given grace by God faithfully to serve him and pursue the search for the unity of the Church, of which the ARCIC process is a seedling and sign. Amen.

NOTES
* Carey, George, Know the Truth, Harper Collins 2004, pp135f
** in 'Making Sense of Mary', The Tablet, 21 May 2005, pp6f

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet
Bishop's House, Dry Sandford, Abingdon, OXON OX13 6JP
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 390746

All text and images on the web site of the See of Ebbsfleet are
© The Bishop of Ebbsfleet unless otherwise acknowledged.

The menu system is the intellectual property of www.milonic.com