Vatican Keeps a Watchful Eye on Lambeth Conference

VATICAN CITY--As the bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion meet for the first time in a decade in England this month, they will be joined by two high-ranking members of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Vatican office that deals with other Christian churches, and Cardinal Ivan Dias, who oversees Catholic missionary work, will both address the Anglicans' Lambeth Conference, which opened Wednesday (July 16) in Canterbury.

The cardinals' presence underscores Rome's commitment to more than four decades of Anglican-Catholic dialogue aimed at restoring "full visible unity" between the two churches, separated since the 16th century.

But this year's Lambeth Conference takes place amid intense intra-Anglican turmoil that is complicating ecumenical dialogue with Rome and perhaps encouraging some Anglicans to leave and become Catholics.

The Anglican Communion is deeply divided by its Western branches' embrace of a gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire and same-sex unions in some parts of the U.S. and Canada.

The Vatican has long been sympathetic to the concerns of conservative Anglicans. In 2003, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI, sent a friendly though noncommittal greeting to a gathering of U.S. conservative Episcopalians in Texas.

At the same time, the Vatican is troubled by recent moves within the Church of England--the mother church of the worldwide communion -- to allow women bishops. More than 1,300 Anglican priests have threatened to leave if that's allowed.

Yet the Vatican's ecumenical officials have nevertheless consistently discouraged an Anglican schism as antithetical to the ultimate goal of Christian unity.

"We are on good terms with the archbishop of Canterbury and as much as we can we are helping him to keep the Anglican community together," Kasper told a British interviewer last December.

Such support, however, in not unconditional. Kasper's office released a statement last week saying that the prospect of women bishops in the Church of England is a "further obstacle to reconciliation."

It is that prospect, and the refusal of the Church of England to allow a separate all-male hierarchy to accommodate traditionalists, that is fueling talk of a mass exodus from the Church of England to Rome.

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