In Memoriam Bishop Mark Santer

The Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity has learned with sadness of the death on 14 August 2024, in his eighty-eighth year, of the Right Reverend Mark Santer. In the course of many years of ordained ministry, Dr Santer served as an assistant bishop in the Church of England Diocese of London from 1981 to 1987, and as Bishop of Birmingham from 1987 to 2002. In the field of ecumenism, Bishop Santer served as co-chairman of the second Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II) from 1982 to 1999.

Under his chairmanship, alongside Catholic co-chairman Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, ARCIC II published four reports, Salvation and the Church (1987), The Church as Communion (1991), Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church (1994), and The Gift of Authority (1999).

In September1987, as ARCIC II was beginning its work on The Church as Communion, Pope John Paul II visited the commission when it was meeting at Palazzola, near Rome. Speaking on behalf of the Anglican members, Bishop Santer told Pope John Paul that, “we perceive your visit as an example of that loving care for the unity of all the churches which we, as Anglicans, are coming to recognise afresh as one of the gifts which inheres in the office of the Bishop of Rome”. The commission reflected further on this role in The Gift of Authority, the final document from Bishop Santer’s time as co-chairman.

Requiescat in pace.

^{Photo on home page: Visit of Pope John Paul II to Palazzola (1987).}