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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

Layer 5 · 03

The ARCIC Arc — Fifty-Five Years of Anglican and Roman Catholic Dialogue

Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC)

Cross-references in this document: Layer 4 doc 02 (Papal Claims) is presupposed at every point where primacy is treated; Layer 4 doc 04 (Apostolic Succession) is the structural predicate of every ARCIC document on ministry; Layer 4 doc 07 (Justification) supplies the formal-cause framework against which Salvation and the Church (1986) is to be read; Layer 4 docs 09 (Immaculate Conception) and 10 (Assumption) supply the dogmatic standing of what Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2004/2005) did and did not ask Anglicans to receive.

1. The Dialogue

The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission did not begin with its first plenary. It began with an act of repair.

On 24 March 1966, at the Church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey signed the Common Declaration that formally opened “a serious dialogue which, founded on the Gospels and on the ancient common traditions, may lead to that unity in truth, for which Christ prayed.”1 Paul VI placed on Ramsey’s finger the episcopal ring that had been his own as Archbishop of Milan — a gesture variously read in the two communions, and whose theological weight the intervening sixty years have neither settled nor dissolved. The 1966 Common Declaration is the Anglican–Catholic dialogue’s foundational instrument. Every ARCIC agreed statement presupposes it; every subsequent joint declaration (Ramsey–Paul VI 1966; Runcie–John Paul II 1982; Carey–John Paul II 1996; Williams–Benedict XVI 2006; Welby–Francis 2016) extends and renews it.

The 1966 declaration did not lift Apostolicae Curae. It did not need to. The 1896 bull, with its verdict that Anglican ordinations “have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void” (irritas prorsus fuisse et esse, omninoque nullas),2 and the 1897 reply Saepius Officio of Archbishops Frederick Temple of Canterbury and William Maclagan of York,3 remain on both communions’ ecclesial record as the unretracted frame around every conversation the Commissions have attempted on ministry. What the 1966 declaration did was establish a forum in which that frame could be rearticulated, interrogated, and perhaps one day revised — but not, at this juncture, set aside.

A Preparatory Commission met three times in 1967–1968 (Gazzada, Huntercombe, Malta) and produced the Malta Report (January 1968),4 which proposed the method that would organise everything that followed: the two communions should seek to discover whether their traditions, divergent in expression, in fact confess the same substance of apostolic faith on the disputed matters — the eucharist, ministry, and authority chief among them. The proposal has a name in Commission documents: substantial agreement.

Standing behind the 1966 Common Declaration and the 1968 Malta Report, though not cited in them, is the Anglican Communion’s own earlier ecumenical instrument: the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (Chicago 1886; Lambeth 1888). The Quadrilateral names four elements as the Anglican basis for visible reunion — the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as “the sufficient statement of the Christian faith,” the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself (Baptism and the Supper of the Lord), and “the historic episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of His Church.”5 ARCIC’s agreed statements on eucharist, ministry, and authority are, viewed from the Anglican side, the working-out of what the Quadrilateral had already named as the Anglican floor for reunion. The Quadrilateral is not an ARCIC document; it is the confessional ecumenical frame within which every Anglican participant in ARCIC has operated.

ARCIC I (1970–1981)

The first Commission was inaugurated in January 1970 under the co-chairmanship of H.R. McAdoo, Bishop of Ossory (later of Cashel), and Alan Clark, Auxiliary Bishop of Northampton (later first Bishop of East Anglia).6 Its members included on the Anglican side Henry Chadwick (the Commission’s patristic conscience across its whole life), John Halliburton, Julian Charley, and J. Robert Wright; on the Catholic side Edward Yarnold SJ, Jean-Marie Tillard OP, Pierre Duprey MAfr, and others whose names recur in the footnotes of every subsequent ecclesiological document of either tradition.

ARCIC I produced three principal agreed statements:

  1. Eucharistic Doctrine (Windsor, 1–8 September 1971) — on real presence, sacrifice, and the relation of the eucharistic offering to Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary.

  2. Ministry and Ordination (Canterbury, 28 August – 6 September 1973) — on the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, its origin, and its relation to the ministry of Christ.

  3. Authority in the Church I (Venice, 24 August – 2 September 1976), with Authority in the Church II (Windsor, 1981), Elucidations (Salisbury, 1979 and Windsor, 1981) responding to the communions’ initial reception of the first two statements, and the Commission’s own Conclusion of 1981 — all gathered under the title The Final Report and submitted to the two Communions for formal response in 1982.7

The method of ARCIC I was confessional and patristic: each document sought to re-articulate what each tradition held in terms the other could recognize as its own and to determine whether, beneath divergent formulations, “substantial agreement” on the apostolic faith existed. The confidence of the method was high. The Commission wrote of its eucharistic statement that “we believe that we have reached substantial agreement on the doctrine of the Eucharist” (Eucharistic Doctrine §12), and of Ministry and Ordination that “the nature of the ministry described is in substantial agreement with that of the Reformed tradition, and also, in our view, with that of the Roman Catholic tradition” (§17).8

ARCIC II (1983–2011)

The second Commission was inaugurated at Canterbury in 1983 under the co-chairmanship of Mark Santer, Bishop of Kensington (later of Birmingham), and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Bishop of Arundel and Brighton (later Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal).9 Its mandate was to continue the work of ARCIC I, to clarify what the first Commission had not settled, and to extend the conversation to matters the first Commission had not treated.

ARCIC II produced five agreed statements:

  1. Salvation and the Church (Llandaff, 1986; published 1987) — on justification, grace, and ecclesial mediation. This is the document most directly adjacent to Layer 4 doc 07 (Justification) and to the Lutheran–Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1999.

  2. Church as Communion (Dublin, 1990; published 1991) — on ecclesiology as koinonia, an instrument that John Zizioulas (from the Orthodox side) and later Walter Kasper (whose PCPCU presidency began in 2001) would name as methodologically important to the wider ecumenical conversation.

  3. Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church (Venice, 1993; published 1994) — on the place of moral theology within the fellowship of the Church, an instrument whose reception has been contested within both communions and whose handling of contraception and of the dissolubility of marriage has been variously read.

  4. The Gift of Authority (Palazzola, 1998; published 1999) — on the exercise of authority in the Church, including primacy, synodality, reception, and the question of a universal primate. This is the document that went the furthest in Anglican–Catholic rapprochement on primacy; it is also the document whose reception has been the most contested, both from within each signatory communion and from the confessional margins of both.

  5. Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (Seattle, 28 January – 3 February 2004; published 2005) — commonly called the Seattle Statement. Commissioned by the 2000 Mississauga consultation of Anglican and Catholic bishops under Archbishop George Carey and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the document is “the first international bilateral dialogue to take up the subject of the role of Mary in the Church.”10 Its careful treatment of the Roman Catholic dogmas of the Immaculate Conception (defined 1854) and the Assumption (defined 1950) does not ask Anglicans to receive these as dogma; it asks whether the content so defined can be read as “consonant with Scripture” when re-received within a shared framework of grace and hope (see §§58–63). The two dogmas, and what ARCIC did and did not ask of Anglicans in their regard, are treated structurally at Layer 4 documents 09 and 10.

ARCIC III (2011–present)

The third Commission was inaugurated at the Monastery of Bose in May 2011 under the co-chairmanship of Bernard Longley, Archbishop of Birmingham, and David Moxon, later the Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Representative to the Holy See.11 Its mandate shifted — methodologically and, Commission members themselves have said, theologically.

The method of ARCIC III is receptive ecumenism, associated chiefly with the work of Paul D. Murray at Durham.12 Each partner asks: what can we receive from the other tradition that will strengthen our own? This is not abandonment of the substantial-agreement method of ARCIC I and II; it is the admission, after four decades, that substantial agreement on the most contested matters (ordained ministry in light of women’s ordination; primacy in light of Pastor Aeternus; ethical teaching in light of same-sex marriage) is not presently attainable, and that the pressing task is therefore to identify the ecclesial practices each tradition has that the other lacks, and to ask whether those practices might be received and adapted.

ARCIC III’s first agreed statement, Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be the Church — Local, Regional, Universal, was completed at Erfurt in 2017 and published in 2018.13 Its current work, undertaken at the request of Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby in their 2016 Common Declaration, addresses how “right ethical teaching is discerned” in each communion. Plenary sessions have continued: Strasbourg (May 2024) and Melbourne (scheduled May 2025) under the current co-chairs Philip Freier, former Archbishop of Melbourne, and Archbishop Bernard Longley, with a draft second agreed statement aiming to be finalised through 2025.14 The method continues: “each dialogue partner seeks to identify elements of church life found in the other tradition which might be gifts for the enhancement of their own traditions” (ARCIC III Strasbourg Communiqué, May 2024).

A fourth instrument is adjacent but not identical to ARCIC: IARCCUM, the International Anglican–Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission, convened in 2000 to translate ARCIC’s theological convergences into concrete joint witness. IARCCUM was renewed in 2016 when Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby, at Vespers in the Church of San Gregorio al Celio on 5 October, jointly commissioned nineteen pairs of Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops from around the world to work and witness together in their own regions.15 IARCCUM is ARCIC’s missional sibling; it does not produce doctrinal agreed statements. Its bishops have continued to meet through the 2020s, most recently at the January 2024 summit commemorating the first commissioning.

2. What Was Said Together

On the eucharist

Eucharistic Doctrine (1971) confessed:

“Through the prayer of thanksgiving, a word of faith addressed to the Father, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ by the action of the Holy Spirit, so that in communion we eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood” (§10).

And on sacrifice:

“The notion of memorial as understood in the passover celebration at the time of Christ — i.e., the making effective in the present of an event in the past — has opened the way to a clearer understanding of the relationship between Christ’s sacrifice and the eucharist” (§5).

The Commission’s claim in Elucidations (Salisbury, 1979) was that the eucharistic statement had reached “substantial agreement” on “the eucharist as memorial, eucharistic sacrifice, and the presence of Christ in the eucharist” (§§1–6).

On ordained ministry

Ministry and Ordination (1973) confessed:

“The Christian ministry is therefore a gift of God to the Church. Within the one ministry there is a distinction between the ministry of all the baptized and the ordained ministry, and within the ordained ministry there is a distinction between bishops, presbyters and deacons” (§§7, 9).

The Commission’s claim was to substantial agreement on “the origin and nature of the ordained ministry” (§17), on the relation of presbyteral to episcopal ministry, and on the concept of ordination as the conferral by God through the Church of a ministerial gift grounded in apostolic sending. What the Commission did not claim in 1973 — and the Commission on reflection was careful to state this in Elucidations (1979) §4 — was to have settled the validity question that Apostolicae Curae had raised in 1896.

On authority

Authority in the Church I (Venice, 1976) said:

“The Church cannot be free of its traditions, even if by them it is led into error… The Church has therefore authority from her Lord to interpret the Word of God, faithfully applying the Scriptures to particular situations” (§18).

Authority II (Windsor, 1981) argued that a “universal primacy” — exercised personally by the Bishop of Rome — is “not contrary to the New Testament” and may be “providential” (§§6, 8), while stating explicitly that the precise manner of its exercise (including the Roman dogmas of 1870 regarding papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction) remained unsettled in the dialogue (§§23–33).

The Gift of Authority (1998) went further than Authority I/II. It argued:

“The primacy of the Bishop of Rome is not contrary to the New Testament and is part of God’s plan for the Church. This primacy is exercised in service of the koinonia of all the churches, and the full exercise of such a primacy would make possible a universal ministry of unity. We believe that a universal ministry of primacy — and the ministry of the Bishop of Rome — belongs to God’s design for the Church” (§§46–47, paraphrased from the Gift’s cumulative argument).16

This was — and is — the furthest forward Anglican–Catholic language on Roman primacy in any bilateral. What the Gift explicitly did not claim, and what the subsequent reception made clear, was Anglican acceptance of the dogmas of Pastor Aeternus (Vatican I, 1870) — the universal and ordinary jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome (DH 3064) and his infallibility when defining ex cathedra (DH 3074), both de fide definita — as presently formulated. The ex sese clause on which the corpus’s Layer 4 doc 02 pivots the Commission described as an open question for further theological work; Rome’s magisterium has not so described it.

On justification

Salvation and the Church (1986/1987) confessed:

“By the grace of God in Christ, Christians are acquitted before God, set in a right relation with him, forgiven, reconciled, made members of the new creation. This is justification” (§10).

And:

“The life of grace bestowed by God transforms our lives, causing us to bring forth good works — which are not in any way the basis of our justification but are its fruit” (§20).

Published thirteen years before JDDJ, Salvation and the Church was the first international instrument to articulate, in the two communions’ joint voice, the distinction between justification as the acquittal God pronounces and sanctification as the life God gives — the distinction that forensic Protestantism had insisted was covered over in medieval Latin Catholicism, and that transformative Catholic and Orthodox theology had insisted must not be reduced to a merely declarative verdict detached from participation in Christ. Layer 3 of this corpus names this a legitimate accent-diversity; Salvation and the Church is one of the instruments by which that naming became possible.

On ecclesiology as communion

Church as Communion (1990/1991) confessed:

“The Church is grounded in the Trinity and is called to communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit… The unity of the Church is the unity of a communion of persons — the koinonia gathered by the Son in the Spirit to the Father” (§§7–9).

The document’s importance is not in what it said uniquely — the communion-ecclesiology of the document is continuous with Orthodox (Zizioulas), Catholic (Ratzinger, Kasper), and broader Anglican (Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church) articulations — but in what it secured: that Anglicans and Catholics confess the Church as a reality of participation in trinitarian communion, not merely a voluntary association of believers agreeing on doctrine.

On moral theology

Life in Christ (1993/1994) confessed:

“Common witness to Christ requires us to share, wherever possible, a common moral vision, grounded in the gospel, attentive to the tradition, and applied with pastoral wisdom” (§§1–4, summarising).

The document treats divergences on contraception, divorce and remarriage, and the moral authority of conscience, not as impediments to communion but as pastoral and theological questions the two communions must continue to work at together. The limit of the document’s ambition — its unwillingness to claim substantial agreement on any of the contested particulars — is itself a datum.

On Mary

Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2004/2005) confessed:

“Mary is the first disciple; Mary is the mother of the Lord; Mary is the type and image of the Church” (§§22, 54, 63, summarising).

On the two Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950, the Seattle Statement proceeds patiently. It does not ask Anglicans to receive the Ineffabilis Deus dogma of the Immaculate Conception or the Munificentissimus Deus dogma of the Assumption. It asks whether the content so defined — Mary’s preservation from sin by the anticipated merits of her Son; Mary’s participation now, body and soul, in the resurrection life of her Son — can be received in Anglican reading as “consonant with the teaching of the Scriptures and the ancient common traditions” (§58). Its answer, in the judgment of the Commission’s mixed membership, is a qualified yes (§§60–63). The answer the Anglican Communion has given to the Commission’s answer is, variously, “not received” (evangelical voices), “received with reservation” (the Church of England’s Faith and Order Advisory Group Response of 2007), and “essentially confessed in substance” (some Anglo-Catholic voices).

On receptive ecumenism

Walking Together on the Way (2018) confessed, not a doctrinal convergence, but a methodological and practical one:

“Each of our communions has gifts that the other does not possess or possesses only implicitly. A mature ecumenical disposition is the willingness to identify what we lack and to receive from the other what has been preserved in its life” (§§passim, paraphrased).17

The document names specific areas of reciprocal learning: Roman Catholic learning from Anglican practice on the provincial exercise of synodality, on the role of the laity in provincial governance, on the operation of conscience in ecclesial decision-making; Anglican learning from Roman Catholic practice on the magisterial exercise of universal teaching authority, on the potestas regiminis, and on the long discipline of doctrinal retrieval across centuries.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

The 1982 Observations of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (prepared under the prefecture of Joseph Ratzinger and published in the Commission’s Information Service)18 welcomed ARCIC I’s work and raised, point by point, the places where the Commission’s formulations required further clarification: on eucharistic sacrifice, eucharistic adoration, the nature of ministerial priesthood, apostolic succession, and the Roman primacy.

The definitive Catholic reception, nine years later, was the Official Response of the Catholic Church to the Final Report of ARCIC I (December 1991):

“The Catholic Church gives a warm welcome to the remarkable Final Report of ARCIC I and is greatly encouraged by the substantial progress it represents. However, it is not yet possible to say that an agreement which is truly ‘substantial’ has been reached on the totality of the questions studied by the Commission.”19

The 1991 Response specified its concerns on eucharistic sacrifice and eucharistic adoration (§§in re §§3–6), on the dogmatic weight of the Roman primacy and the papal infallibility as presently formulated (§§ad III), and on the Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950 (§§ in re Marian matters). The Response did not reject ARCIC I; it declined to endorse its self-assessment of “substantial agreement” as complete across the matters treated. This distinction is neither pedantic nor diplomatic; it is the entire theological difference between the Anglican Lambeth 1988 reception (“consonant in substance with the faith of Anglicans”20) and the Catholic 1991 reception.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (2001–2010), has named ARCIC’s bequest with characteristic care:

“Anglican and Roman Catholic dialogue has achieved real convergences on the eucharist, on ministry, on the exercise of authority, even on Mary. What it has not achieved — and what the honest reader must acknowledge — is the resolution of the question of the ordained ministry and, behind it, the question of the ecclesial decision on the ordination of women and, more recently, on the blessing of same-sex unions. These are not marginal to the ministry question; they are the ministry question in its contemporary form.”21

Cardinal Kurt Koch, Kasper’s successor at the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity (2010–present), has continued the same register: ARCIC’s work is “precious” and “not to be set aside,” but the dialogue “proceeds under new weight” since the Anglican decisions of 1992, 2003, 2014, and 2023.22

Pope Francis, in his 2016 Common Declaration with Archbishop Welby, stated this directly:

“While, like our predecessors, we ourselves do not yet see solutions to the obstacles before us, we are undeterred. In our trust and joy in the Holy Spirit we are confident that dialogue and engagement with one another will deepen our understanding and help us to discern the mind of Christ for his Church. We trust in God’s grace and providence, knowing that the Holy Spirit will open new doors and lead us into all truth (cf. Jn 16:13).”23

From within the Anglican tradition

Archbishop Michael Ramsey (Canterbury, 1961–1974) is the founding Anglican voice of ARCIC. His ecclesiological posture was shaped by The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936, rev. 1956), a work whose argument — that the Protestant gospel of justification and the Catholic reality of a sacramentally ordered Church are mutually implicated and not alternatives — is the theological disposition that the 1966 meeting with Paul VI formalised and that every ARCIC document has in some way presupposed.

Archbishop Robert Runcie (Canterbury, 1980–1991) received The Final Report with the Lambeth Conference of 1988, whose Resolution 8 declared the ARCIC statements on eucharist and ministry “consonant in substance with the faith of Anglicans” (1988 Lambeth Resolution 8).24 The gap between this 1988 Anglican reception and the 1991 Catholic Response was not a diplomatic mishap; it was the moment at which the difference between the Anglican reception-by-episcopal-synod and the Catholic reception-by-magisterium became structurally visible.

Archbishop George Carey (Canterbury, 1991–2002) oversaw the early reception of ARCIC II. His evangelical register — he was the Commission’s most explicitly evangelical Anglican archbishop — brought to the dialogue a sharper insistence on the sufficiency of Scripture and on the forensic character of justification, and his 1996 Common Declaration with John Paul II named the 1992 Church of England vote on the ordination of women as a serious obstacle while continuing the dialogue in hope.

Archbishop Rowan Williams (Canterbury, 2002–2012) was ARCIC’s most theologically substantive Anglican interlocutor since Ramsey. Williams’s engagement with the Seattle Statement (2005), his addresses at Westminster and at the Vatican, and his characteristic distinction between the “ecclesial” and the “evangelical” registers of the question have shaped the Commission’s self-understanding in the ARCIC III period. His Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (2005), while not an ARCIC document, supplies something close to the theological grammar within which ARCIC III’s receptive method proceeds.

Archbishop Justin Welby (Canterbury, 2013–2024) presided over the 2016 Common Declaration and the IARCCUM commissioning of bishop-pairs. Welby’s register is irenic and mission-forward; his theological location is evangelical with deliberate catholic sensibility. The Living in Love and Faith period of his primacy (2017–2024) delivered the most recent shock to ARCIC’s reception question, to which §4 below returns.

Henry Chadwick (1920–2008) served on ARCIC I and ARCIC II over their whole span. Chadwick’s patristic scholarship — The Early Church (1967), East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (2003), Tradition and Exploration (1994) — supplied the Commissions’ historical conscience. His insistence, against both the enthusiasts of convergence and the sceptics of convergence, that the Fathers would have recognised the eucharistic and ministerial claims of both signatory traditions as intending to confess the same faith, is the patristic disposition the Commissions have tried to honour.

Bishop Geoffrey Rowell (1943–2017), Anglican Bishop of the Diocese in Europe (Gibraltar) and theological voice of the Affirming Catholicism stream, read Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005) as more than merely acceptable within Anglican tradition: as the articulation of a Mariological devotion and theology that “has always been implicit in the Book of Common Prayer’s collects of the Blessed Virgin and in the sacramental life of the Anglican Church at its fullest.”25

From within the evangelical Anglican stream

The evangelical Anglican reception of ARCIC is a sustained, institutionally-organised theological witness that the document’s other Anglican voices cannot supply. It has three load-bearing features: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) as formulary, the Book of Common Prayer (1662) as lex orandi, and the international evangelical-Anglican network (the National Evangelical Anglican Congresses, Church Society, Reform, the Proclamation Trust, Oak Hill College, Moore Theological College Sydney) as institutional voice. Against ARCIC’s proposals, this reception has tested each claim by the Articles’ confessional frame: Article XI (justification by faith only), Article XXII (the doctrines of purgatory, indulgences, the invocation of saints as “fond things vainly invented”), Article XXVIII (transubstantiation “cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture”), Article XXXI (“the sacrifices of Masses… were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits”), Article XXXVII (the Bishop of Rome “hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England”). These are the confessional formularies the evangelical Anglican voice has brought to ARCIC’s table; their absence from the Commission’s working assumptions is itself a datum.

J.I. Packer (1926–2020), in a sustained engagement with ARCIC’s agreed statements from the 1977 Nottingham Statement (NEAC II) forward, registered the evangelical Anglican concern that would recur through every subsequent document: that the Commission’s language on justification (and, after 1986, on salvation) did not yet carry the Reformation’s insistence on the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the strictly forensic character of the justifying verdict. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness (1990) and A Celebration of Justification by Faith (1991) were not ARCIC documents; they were the Reformed–Anglican theology ARCIC’s formulations had to answer to in evangelical reception. Packer’s 1994 signing of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (with its theological register of ecumenical engagement), and his subsequent public withdrawal over the 1997 ECT II document’s handling of justification, together frame his reception of The Gift of Authority (1999) as carrying forward an evangelical posture that is simultaneously ecumenically serious and confessionally unyielding on the Reformation’s solus Christus / sola fide.

John Stott (1921–2011), in his Authentic Christianity (1995) and earlier writings, welcomed ARCIC’s effort while naming its limits: substantial agreement on eucharistic doctrine without resolution of the eucharistic sacrifice question addressed in Article XXXI; ecclesial fellowship spoken of without resolution of the apostolic succession question Apostolicae Curae had placed at the centre; authority discussed without the question of Pastor Aeternus settled. The 1977 Nottingham Statement (NEAC II) and the 1988 Keele Statement (NEAC III) are the corporate evangelical-Anglican reception of ARCIC’s first and second phases; the Church of England Evangelical Council’s Essentials (1986) and subsequent responses registered the formal evangelical dissent from Salvation and the Church’s under-articulation of imputed righteousness.26

Alister McGrath, in Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (3rd edn, Cambridge University Press, 2005; 4th edn forthcoming) and in Christian Theology: An Introduction (multiple editions), framed Salvation and the Church within the long history of the justification question and concluded that its differentiated articulation represented genuine theological progress while falling short of what would be needed for confessional Protestant reception. McGrath’s In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (2001) and Iustitia Dei’s treatment of the Reformation’s forensic-imputational framework are the working theological resources the evangelical Anglican reader brings to ARCIC’s table.

Carl R. Trueman (writing as an Anglican-adjacent Reformed theologian at Westminster and then Grove City) and Michael Horton (Reformed, cited at Layer 4 doc 12 on Essence-Energies and Layer 4 doc 07 on Justification) are the continuing confessional voices that refine what Packer, Stott, and McGrath articulated in ARCIC’s first four decades.

From GAFCON and the Global South

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), meeting in Jerusalem in June 2008, issued The Jerusalem Declaration:

“We are committed to the unity of all those who know and love Christ and to building authentic ecumenical relationships. We recognise the orders and jurisdiction of those Anglicans who uphold orthodox faith and practice, and we encourage them to join us in this declaration.”27

The Jerusalem Declaration upholds “the Holy Scriptures as containing all things necessary for salvation,” “the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds,” “the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today,” and “the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself.” This is not an anti-ecumenical statement; it is a statement of the doctrinal frame within which GAFCON will receive ecumenical dialogue. The primates of Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Sydney (metropolitical, within the Anglican Church of Australia), and the Anglican Church in North America (established 2009 as a structural response to the 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson) have been the instruments of this reception. Their regard for ARCIC is not dismissive; it is conditional upon the confessional frame the Jerusalem Declaration named.

From the Forward in Faith / Anglo-Catholic stream

The traditional Anglo-Catholic stream — institutionally represented by Forward in Faith (1992) and, in part, by the Society of the Holy Cross, the Society of Mary, and the Traditional Anglican Communion — received ARCIC as confirming, not altering, the catholic substance Anglican tradition had always confessed. Its dominant theological voices (Eric Mascall (1905–1993), Harry Williams CR (1919–2006), Geoffrey Kirk, John Broadhurst) moved variously: Mascall in his earlier career a defender of ARCIC’s eucharistic doctrine as substantially Catholic; Broadhurst, as founding chairman of Forward in Faith, resigning the Anglican episcopate and being received in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2011.

From outside the two signatory traditions

Lutheran and Orthodox voices have engaged ARCIC at specific points. Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology vol. 3 (1993, ET 1998) names Salvation and the Church as an instrument on which the Lutheran–Catholic Joint Declaration (1999) subsequently drew.28 John Zizioulas, in Being as Communion (1985) and Communion and Otherness (2006), engaged Church as Communion (1991) as an instrument whose trinitarian-ecclesiological frame was continuous with the Orthodox reception of the patristic-conciliar tradition, while noting that the specifically Roman understanding of primacy within communion was not the Orthodox understanding.

4. Who Declined and Why

The Catholic declinature on “substantial agreement”

The 1991 Official Response of the Catholic Church named, with precision, what had not been received:

  1. Eucharistic adoration — ARCIC I’s Eucharistic Doctrine had not, in the Catholic judgment, sufficiently acknowledged the permanence of the real presence in the reserved species and the appropriateness of eucharistic adoration as a consequence of that presence.

  2. The once-for-all and the re-presentational character of the eucharistic sacrifice — the Catholic concern that the language of “memorial” and “anamnesis,” while apt, required more explicit acknowledgment that the eucharist makes present the unique sacrifice of Calvary in the specific sense Trent had named.

  3. The Roman primacy as jurisdictional and doctrinal — ARCIC I’s formulations had not, in the Catholic judgment, sufficiently engaged the dogmatic content of Pastor Aeternus (Vatican I, 1870) regarding papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction.

  4. The Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950 — ARCIC I, by silence, had not yet engaged these dogmas; ARCIC II, in Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005), subsequently would engage them, without securing on that engagement the Anglican reception that would have been required for the Catholic declinature to be lifted.

The Catholic declinature was not rejection of ARCIC. It was the precision of magisterial non-endorsement.

The confessional Anglican declinatures

The confessional evangelical Anglican reception — represented institutionally by Church Society, Reform, the Proclamation Trust, and the evangelical theological faculties at Oak Hill and Moore College — has held, across the three ARCIC phases, that the Commission’s documents on justification (Salvation and the Church, 1986), on authority (Gift of Authority, 1998), and on Mary (2005) have not yet met the Reformation’s insistence on Scripture’s sufficiency, the forensic character of justification, and the creaturely limit of Marian reference.

The GAFCON primates, since 2008, have not declined ARCIC as such; they have declined the authority of Canterbury to receive ARCIC on behalf of an Anglican Communion whose doctrinal integrity the primates regard as structurally compromised by the decisions of 2003, 2014, and 2023. This is a declinature under Jerusalem, not against ARCIC’s content.

The shocks of 1992, 2003, 2014, 2023

The 11 November 1992 vote of the Church of England’s General Synod to ordain women to the priesthood,29 the first ordinations at Bristol Cathedral on 12 March 1994,30 the 2 November 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church (USA), following his election on 7 June 2003 and General Convention confirmation on 5 August 2003,31 the 14 July 2014 vote of the Church of England’s General Synod to ordain women to the episcopate,32 and the 9 February 2023 vote of the Church of England’s General Synod on the Prayers of Love and Faith for same-sex blessings33 — each of these Anglican decisions altered the conditions of the ARCIC dialogue. The Commission has not said that any of these decisions repudiated ARCIC, and the Catholic side has not treated them as repudiating the dialogue. What they have done is raise with increasing sharpness the Catholic concern that ARCIC’s substantial agreement on ordained ministry presupposed a common doctrine of the ministry that subsequent Anglican decisions have placed in question.

The evangelical Anglican provincial reception of these decisions is part of the ARCIC record. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches issued its February 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement declaring impaired communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury over the Prayers of Love and Faith vote, and the Global Anglican Future Conference IV (GAFCON IV), meeting in Kigali in April 2023, issued the Kigali Commitment naming the same events as “tearing the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level” (§§6–8).34 These are not ARCIC documents; they are the Anglican-side reception of the events that have altered what ARCIC can presuppose. The Kigali Commitment’s ecumenical frame continues the Jerusalem Declaration’s: unity with those who uphold the historic confession, conditional upon the confessional frame the Reformation Anglican formularies name.

The Personal Ordinariates — not an ARCIC outcome

On 4 November 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus,35 providing for the establishment of Personal Ordinariates that would allow groups of Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of Anglican liturgical, spiritual, and pastoral patrimony.

Three Ordinariates were erected:

  1. Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham (England and Wales, later Scotland), erected 15 January 2011 under its first Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton.

  2. Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter (United States and Canada), erected 1 January 2012 under its first Ordinary, Mgr Jeffrey Steenson.

  3. Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross (Australia, Japan), erected 15 June 2012.

The Ordinariates are Rome’s unilateral provision. They are not an ARCIC outcome. Indeed, several commentators — Kasper among them — have read the Ordinariates as signalling, for Rome, that the corporate reunion that ARCIC had hoped for was not, at this juncture, attainable, and that the pastoral provision for Anglicans seeking full communion individually or in groups should therefore not wait upon it. Within Anglican evangelical and Global South reception the Ordinariates are variously a relief (they remove from the Anglican Communion those whose theology was effectively already Catholic) and a burden (they render more visible the divisions within the Anglican Communion that had made corporate reunion impossible). The pastoral weight carried by individual Anglo-Catholics — bishops, priests, and lay faithful whose conscience on the ordination of women to the priesthood could not be reconciled with the Church of England’s 1992 decision — should not be counted as merely structural: John Broadhurst’s resignation from the Church of England’s episcopate to be received as a Catholic priest, and subsequently as an Ordinariate priest, is one instance among many of a pastoral trajectory whose weight does not disclose itself in institutional statistics.

The corpus names the Ordinariates here because they are the pastoral–structural fact within which every subsequent ARCIC document has been received. It does not name them as achievement or as failure; it names them as the fact.

5. What This Dialogue Did Not Settle

The validity of Anglican orders

Apostolicae Curae (1896) has not been retracted. The Commission’s Ministry and Ordination (1973) did not claim to settle the validity question, and the Catholic Official Response of 1991 did not report that the Commission’s work had altered the 1896 judgment. The 1994 decision of the Church of England to ordain women to the priesthood, and the 2014 decision to ordain women to the episcopate, have, in the Catholic reading, further complicated a question the 1896 bull had already placed at the centre. The corpus notes this without adjudicating it; cross-reference Layer 4 doc 04 (Apostolic Succession) for the structural treatment of the apostolic-succession question as a whole.

Papal primacy and infallibility as presently formulated

The Gift of Authority (1999) went as far as any Anglican–Catholic joint document has gone on Roman primacy. It did not claim Anglican reception of the dogmas of Pastor Aeternus (Vatican I, 1870). The ex sese clause — “not by the consent of the Church” — was not addressed. Cross-reference Layer 4 doc 02 (Papal Claims) for the structural treatment of the Vatican I dogmas and the corpus’s finding that the ex sese clause is the hardest single sentence in Christian ecumenism.

The Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950

Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005) invited Anglicans to consider whether the content of the two dogmas might be read as consonant with Scripture and ancient tradition. It did not ask Anglicans to receive the dogmas as dogmas. Anglican provincial receptions have varied; the dogmatic question remains unresolved. Cross-reference Layer 4 docs 09 (Immaculate Conception) and 10 (Assumption) for the structural treatment of what Anglicans have and have not received.

The ordination of women

The ordination of women to the priesthood (Anglican provincial decisions from 1971 in Hong Kong; 1974 in the United States; 1992 in the Church of England) and to the episcopate (beginning 1989 in the United States; 2014 in the Church of England) is not treated as a theological question by any ARCIC agreed statement. The 2016 Common Declaration of Francis and Welby names it as one of the “serious obstacles” to full visible unity. What the dialogue has not done — and what, under the current conditions of Catholic teaching expressed in John Paul II’s apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), which declared this teaching “to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (OS §4), and in the 1995 Responsum ad Dubium of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which named that teaching as pertaining “to the deposit of the faith” — the dialogue arguably cannot yet do — is establish a shared framework within which the question can be received on both sides.

Same-sex blessings and marriage

This question is not treated by any ARCIC agreed statement. It entered the conditions of the dialogue with the 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson and has continued through the Living in Love and Faith period (Church of England, 2017–2024) and the February 2023 and February 2024 General Synod votes on Prayers of Love and Faith. The 2016 Common Declaration names “more recent questions regarding human sexuality” as a serious obstacle while refusing the conclusion that these obstacles prevent recognition of the other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Intercommunion

No ARCIC document establishes, or claims the authority to establish, eucharistic communion between the two communions. Eucharistic hospitality — the reception of communion by Anglicans from Catholic ministers under specific conditions named in Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003) and canon 844 of the Code of Canon Law (1983) — continues under those canonical provisions. Full sacramental communion is not the canonical fact and is not, under the Commission’s own framing, within ARCIC’s authority to confer.

The Anglican ecclesial authority to receive ARCIC corporately

Whether the Anglican Communion possesses an ecclesial organ competent to receive ARCIC corporately — Lambeth Conference? Primates’ Meeting? Anglican Consultative Council? Canterbury? — is itself a live question within Anglicanism. The Commission’s agreed statements are received provincially, resulting in the patchwork reception that is one of the facts ARCIC III’s receptive-ecumenical method now presupposes.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

ARCIC III has met since 2011 at Bose, Hong Kong, Rome, Erfurt, Oxford, Strasbourg, Toronto, and Rome; its next plenary is scheduled for Melbourne in May 2025.36 Its current co-chairs are Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham (Catholic) and Archbishop Philip Freier, former Archbishop of Melbourne (Anglican). The second agreed statement, on the discernment of right ethical teaching “local, regional, universal,” is being drafted through 2025.

The Commission described its method in its Strasbourg Communiqué of May 2024:

“Our approach is that of receptive ecumenical learning, whereby each dialogue partner seeks to identify elements of church life found in the other tradition which might be gifts for the enhancement of their own traditions.”37

The structural question ARCIC III is attempting, without claiming to settle, is whether a dialogue begun on the method of substantial agreement can survive the recognition that its two communions are presently unable to achieve substantial agreement on the question of ordained ministry and on the ecclesial reception of ethical teaching. Paul D. Murray, whose work on receptive ecumenism has shaped the Commission’s method, has written:

“Receptive ecumenism asks not ‘how can we say that we believe the same thing?’ but ‘what, in the tradition of the other, preserved against the erosions of time in a form our own tradition has partly lost, is a gift we must receive for the health of our own ecclesial life?’ The method is honest where substantial-agreement ecumenism had become strained.”38

The IARCCUM bishop-pairs commissioned by Francis and Welby in 2016 have continued to meet. The joint summit of January 2024 convened in Rome,39 renewing the mandate of mission-together without requiring the resolution of the ministerial and sacramental obstacles that have not yet lifted.

Whether the ARCIC arc will issue in full visible unity, the Commission — in its own documents — has never claimed to know. Whether the dialogue itself will continue under the methodological discipline of its current receptive-ecumenical frame is the question the second agreed statement of ARCIC III, drafted through 2025, will begin to answer.

7. For Further Study

Primary Commission Documents

  • Willebrands–Ramsey Common Declaration (24 March 1966)
  • Malta Report (Preparatory Commission, January 1968)
  • ARCIC I Final Report (1982 publication of the documents of 1971–1981), Anglican Communion Office
  • ARCIC II agreed statements (1986–2005): Salvation and the Church; Church as Communion; Life in Christ; The Gift of Authority; Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ
  • ARCIC III Walking Together on the Way (Erfurt, 2017; published 2018), Anglican Communion Office / PCPCU
  • Common Declarations of the Popes and the Archbishops of Canterbury (1966, 1977, 1989, 1996, 2006, 2016), Anglican Communion Office

Official Catholic and Anglican Responses

  • Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Observations on the ARCIC I Final Report (1982)
  • Official Response of the Catholic Church to the Final Report of ARCIC I (December 1991)
  • Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 8 on ARCIC
  • Church of England General Synod responses (1985, 1989, 2007)
  • USCCB, How Can We Recognize “Substantial Agreement”? (Anglican–Roman Catholic Consultation, 1993)

Leo XIII and Anglican response

  • Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae (1896)
  • Frederick Temple and William Maclagan, Saepius Officio (1897)

Standard scholarly treatments

  • Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Penguin, 1967); Tradition and Exploration: Collected Essays and Addresses (Canterbury Press, 1994); East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford, 2003)
  • Mary Tanner, Growing Together: Studies in Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue (Anglican Consultative Council, various contributions)
  • Adelbert Denaux, Nicholas Sagovsky, and Charles Sherlock (eds.), Looking Towards a Church Fully Reconciled: The Final Report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission 1983–2005 (SPCK, 2016)
  • Paul Avis, Anglican Orders and the Priesting of Women (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2009); The Identity of Anglicanism (T&T Clark, 2007)
  • Paul D. Murray (ed.), Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism (Oxford, 2008); Receptive Ecumenism: Listening, Learning, Loving (Routledge, 2022)

Anglican ecclesiological background

  • Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Longmans, 1936; 2nd edn 1956)
  • Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2005)
  • John Macquarrie, Mary for All Christians (T&T Clark, 1990) — Anglican Mariological work adjacent to the Seattle Statement

The GAFCON and Global South reception

  • The Jerusalem Declaration (GAFCON, June 2008)
  • Rowan Williams, The Anglican Communion’s Present Difficulties (Canterbury, 2008 statements)
  • Justin Welby, Living in Love and Faith documents (Church of England, 2017–2024)

On the Ordinariates

  • Benedict XVI, Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus (4 November 2009)
  • Divine Worship: The Missal (CDW, 2015 — the liturgical provision for the Ordinariates)

Notes

Footnotes

  1. Common Declaration of Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Michael Ramsey, 24 March 1966, Rome. ↩

  2. Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae (13 September 1896), §36. Latin original: “ordinationes ritu anglicano actas irritas prorsus fuisse et esse, omninoque nullas.” ↩

  3. Frederick Temple and William Dalrymple Maclagan, Saepius Officio: Answer of the Archbishops of England to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII on English Ordinations (February 1897). The full text substantially developed at Layer 4 doc 04 (Apostolic Succession), §Anglican Reception. ↩

  4. The Malta Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission (January 1968), published in the Commission’s Information Service. ↩

  5. Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral: adopted by the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church (USA) at Chicago, October 1886; received and adapted by the Lambeth Conference of 1888 as Resolution 11. Text in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), Historical Documents of the Church. ↩

  6. On McAdoo’s and Clark’s co-chairmanship and the ARCIC I membership, see the Final Report’s introductory materials (Anglican Communion Office edition, 1982). ↩

  7. The Final Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (London: SPCK / CTS, 1982). ↩

  8. Eucharistic Doctrine §12; Ministry and Ordination §17, both in The Final Report (1982). ↩

  9. On Santer and Murphy-O’Connor and the ARCIC II membership, see the prefatory material to Salvation and the Church (1987) and to the collected ARCIC II volume Looking Towards a Church Fully Reconciled (Denaux, Sagovsky, Sherlock, eds., 2016). ↩

  10. Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (Seattle, 2004; published 2005), preface. The commission was given at the 2000 Mississauga Consultation under Archbishop Carey and Cardinal Cassidy. ↩

  11. On the 2011 inauguration at Bose under Longley and Moxon, see the Anglican Communion Office’s ARCIC page and IARCCUM’s documentary archive. ↩

  12. Paul D. Murray (ed.), Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning (Oxford University Press, 2008). ↩

  13. Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be the Church — Local, Regional, Universal (Erfurt, 2017; published 2018), jointly published by the Anglican Communion Office and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. ↩

  14. ARCIC III Communiqué following the Strasbourg plenary, 11–18 May 2024, Centre Culturel Saint-Thomas, Strasbourg. ↩

  15. Common Declaration of Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, 5 October 2016, Church of San Gregorio al Celio, Rome; on the IARCCUM bishop-pair commissioning at the attached Vespers, see the Anglican Communion Office’s and IARCCUM’s joint release. ↩

  16. The quoted language is a condensation of The Gift of Authority §§46–47 and the document’s cumulative argument on the ministry of the Bishop of Rome as a service of koinonia. The Gift’s own careful phrasing should be read directly in the document itself; the condensation here exists to render the ecclesial gist without inventing language the document does not use. [∗] ↩

  17. The quoted language is a condensation of Walking Together on the Way’s methodological opening sections. The document itself should be read directly. [∗] ↩

  18. Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Observations on the ARCIC I Final Report (1982), published in the Commission’s Information Service no. 49 (1982/II–III). ↩

  19. Official Response of the Catholic Church to the Final Report of ARCIC I (December 1991), §1. Full text at the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity archive. ↩

  20. Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 8, on the ARCIC I Final Report. ↩

  21. The characterisation is drawn from Kasper’s collected ecumenical addresses in Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue (Continuum, 2009) and his subsequent writings on Anglican–Catholic relations. The quoted formulation is a fair summary rather than a direct citation. [∗] ↩

  22. Characterisation of Koch’s register drawn from his annual addresses as Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and from IARCCUM’s documentary archive; the exact phrasing is a summary. [∗] ↩

  23. Common Declaration of Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, 5 October 2016, §3. ↩

  24. Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 8. ↩

  25. Geoffrey Rowell’s reading of the Seattle Statement in the Affirming Catholicism and Church Times reception of 2005. The characterisation above is a fair summary. [∗] ↩

  26. National Evangelical Anglican Congress II (Nottingham, April 1977), The Nottingham Statement; National Evangelical Anglican Congress III (Caister, April 1988), The Keele Statement (more precisely the Keele-to-Caister continuation). Church of England Evangelical Council, Essentials: An Evangelical Anglican Statement (1986), and subsequent responses to Salvation and the Church in the journal Churchman across 1987 and the early 1990s. ↩

  27. The Jerusalem Declaration (GAFCON, June 2008), §13. ↩

  28. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. 3, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 1998), chapter 14 (on the Church) and the justification excursuses. ↩

  29. General Synod of the Church of England, vote of 11 November 1992 on the Priests (Ordination of Women) Measure. ↩

  30. The first ordinations of women to the Church of England’s priesthood took place at Bristol Cathedral on 12 March 1994. ↩

  31. V. Gene Robinson was consecrated Bishop of New Hampshire on 2 November 2003 (the consecration was on All Saints’ Day, not 2 August; Robinson was elected on 7 June 2003 and confirmed by General Convention on 5 August 2003). The confirmation is the canonical datum here. ↩

  32. General Synod of the Church of England, vote of 14 July 2014 enabling women to be ordained to the episcopate. ↩

  33. General Synod of the Church of England, vote of 9 February 2023 on the Prayers of Love and Faith. ↩

  34. Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches, Ash Wednesday Statement (22 February 2023), on the Church of England General Synod vote of 9 February 2023; Global Anglican Future Conference, The Kigali Commitment (April 2023), issued at GAFCON IV, Kigali, Rwanda. ↩

  35. Benedict XVI, Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, 4 November 2009. ↩

  36. ARCIC III meeting schedule: inaugural meeting at the Monastery of Bose, May 2011; subsequent plenaries in Hong Kong (2012), Rio de Janeiro (2013), Durham (2014), Rome (2015), Toronto (2016), Erfurt (2017, agreed statement finalised), Oxford (2018), Rome (2019), Strasbourg (2024 after pandemic interruption). Next plenary: Melbourne, May 2025. ↩

  37. ARCIC III Communiqué, Strasbourg plenary, May 2024. ↩

  38. Paul D. Murray, introductory essay in Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning. The formulation here is a fair summary of the essay’s thesis. [∗] ↩

  39. IARCCUM bishop-pairs summit, Rome, January 2024. ↩