Bishops and archbishops claiming to represent 40 million Anglicans around the world have publicly endorsed a new breakaway network of churches set up outside the Church of England amid disputes over issues such as homosexuality.
The Church of England's decision to consecrate women as bishops marked a "difficult moment" that will "sadly" harm relations with the Catholic Church, the archbishop responsible for ecumenism has warned
Pope Francis and the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians prayed together Sunday inside the Holy Sepulcher church in Jerusalem, calling their historic meeting a step toward healing the centuries-old Catholic-Orthodox schism.
The newly formed St. Peter’s Cricket Club also hopes to play Muslim, Hindu and Sikh teams, as well as those from other religions and cultures, to promote dialogue and virtue.
In his inaugural lecture at Heythrop College, newly-appointed Professor Michael Barnes SJ explored the value attributed to the ‘fourth stage’ of life by various religious traditions. Old age ‘opens up a contemplative space that cultivates attention not just to the great sweep of life but more exactly to the present moment’: how does this idea find expression in different communities of faith?
The Archbishop of Canterbury is encouraging Anglicans to adopt the practice of going to confession, a tradition more commonly associated with the Roman Catholic Church. His comments came as he addressed the heads of other churches – including the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England Wales, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols – about divisions between Christians.
Justin Welby warned against “severing the roots” of more than 1,000 years of Christianity in Britain as he was enthroned as 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.
While saying farewell the night before he died, Jesus told those with him that he "had other sheep that are not of this fold" and that those with him at that particular moment were not his only followers. Very importantly, he also said that he longed for unity with those others just as urgently and deeply as he longed for unity with those in the room with him.
Ecumenism is quite different from a matter of mere ecclesial policy or a purely pragmatic issue; rather, it is intrinsic to the faith itself. For this reason the Year of Faith also calls us to actualize the foundations of faith of the Church's ecumenical endeavour and to reinforce them anew.
Commenting on the theme of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity — “What does God require of us”, taken this year from the Book of Micah — the Pope underlined how the Prophet explains “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God”.
Nothing captures that better than his own words: “Canterbury is much more than a functional building. It is an effort to make sense of the cosmos and reach out to its maker. Whether or not you want to talk about God, you can’t help but stand back and admire what humans can achieve in pursuit of transcendence.”
Eleven Anglican Sisters will be received into the Catholic Church via the ordinariate, it emerged this week. The Sisters, from the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage, Oxfordshire, will be received into the Church by Mgr Keith Newton, leader of the ordinariate in England and Wales, on New Year’s Day.
The media has depicted the Church of England as being on the verge of collapse because of the rejection of a General Synod Measure permitting the appointment of women as bishops. It was seen as a triumph of obscurantism over progress, a refusal to recognise the right of women to equal treatment with men. But there is more to it than that.
A “bridge” between religions and culture at a global level: this is essentially what the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue [KAICIID] intends to be
One of the things we know about the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is that he doesn’t like bankers. Another is that he has given a good deal of thought to the question of social sin. A third is that he has been profoundly influenced by the social teaching of a nineteenth century pope, Leo XIII, as expressed in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
Even friends of an Established church like myself – though I’m a Catholic – should think twice about the wisdom of the idea after the naked political interference in the affairs of the CofE in the Commons. The Speaker, who is non-religious/agnostic, was among the most overt in encouraging MPs to overturn the church’s decision not to approve women bishops.
Bishop Tawadros has been chosen as the new pope of Egypt's Coptic Christians, becoming leader of the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. His name was selected from a glass bowl by a blindfolded boy at a ceremony in Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral. Three candidates had been shortlisted.
Dr Rowan Williams has told Pope Benedict XVI and the Synod of Bishops that evangelisation is not a project, but the natural “overflow” of an experience of Christ and his Church that transforms lives, giving them meaning and joy.
France, a nation of 60 million people, is home to Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish minorities, estimated at about 5 million and half a million respectively. They rub shoulders with about one million Buddhists, many of them immigrants from France's former east Asian colonies.
"In Russia, possibly for the first time since the (1917 Bolshevik) revolution, the rule of the Church's separation from the state, proclaimed as a result of the October Revolution, is being followed quite closely," Kirill said in an interview with Polish media before a visit to Poland.
