Meeting in Rome of ARCIC Drafting Group

The drafting group  of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) met in the offices of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity in Rome for three days (20-22 September) to work on a draft of the first three chapters of the Commission’s next document. Bishop Garth Minnot, the Reverend Dr Peter Sedgwick, and Professor Sigrid Müller met together with the Catholic Co-Secretary of the Commission, Father Anthony Currer, and were also joined for part of the meeting by Father Martin Browne, who will be taking over from Father Currer when he returns to his diocese in a month’s time.

The Commission’s mandate is to examine how the Church in communion, local and universal, discerns right ethical teaching. The Commission addressed the first ecclesiological part of its mandate in its 2018 agreed statement, Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be Church ‒ Local, Regional, Universal. Like that document, the Commission intends to use the method of receptive ecumenism to examine how the two communions have practised moral discernment. The first three chapters of the report examine both the shared tradition which Catholics and Anglicans inherit particularly from Aquinas. After the Reformation this tradition developed in distinct but related ways within each tradition. The Commission believes that, despite deep and painful divisions between and within each communion, Catholics and Anglicans can learn from one another as both communions engage in processes of discernment in order to know the mind of Christ, to do his will and to grow, both corporately and individually, into his likeness.