Following up on our earlier story on the meeting between Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict XVI, The Guardian reports that Cardinal Ivan Dias, the Indian prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, would be among the speakers at this summer’s event, which brings Anglican bishops together in London once every 10 years.
Dias has been touted as a possible future candidate for the papacy. Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, may also attend the Lambeth event.
“We expect someone from the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity to attend, as we have in the past,” said a spokesman for the Anglican Communion office in London.
Rev Keith Pecklers, a professor of liturgy at the Gregorian University in Rome, who has worked with the Anglican Centre in Rome on relations between the two churches, said: “Cardinal Kasper might be expected to attend, given his role, but Cardinal Dias’s presence is proof that the Vatican wants to be supportive of Williams.
The message of this announcement appears to be that Rome is sticking with Canterbury as the locus of authentic Anglicanism and want nothing to do with GAFCON, even with the presence of women clergy and bishops and gay bishops. This makes the plans for a non-Canterbury centered Anglicanism focused on the “global south” appear to be more and more a lonely outpost far from the heart of catholic unity.
Read more here.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is in Rome to participate in the seventh annual Building Bridges seminar, a dialogue of Muslim and Christian scholars. And to preach and preside at the service for the Inauguration of his new Representative to the Holy See and Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, the Revd David Richardson. More here.