Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Malines Conversations

The centenary of the Catholic-Anglican talks known as the Malines Conversations was marked in the city of Mechelen (Malines) between 18 and 21 September 2025. Hosted by the then Archbishop of Malines, Cardinal Désiré Joseph Mercier, the group met four times between 1921 and 1925, the year of Cardinal Mercier’s death.

A fruit of the friendship between the English Anglican layman, Viscount Halifax, and the French Catholic priest, Abbé Fernand Portal, the Malines Conversations were the first substantial theological discussions about unity between Anglicans and Catholics since the Reformation.

On the occasion of the centenary, the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, Msgr Luc Terlinden, hosted a conference on the theme The Centenary of the Malines Conversations and Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue Today. Pairs of Catholic and Anglican scholars led four plenary sessions on the historical context of the Conversations, and on Anglican-Catholic Dialogue as an opportunity to reflect on ecumenical method, on Church and ministry and on life and worship. The Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity was represented by Revd Fr Martin Browne OSB.

The formal commemoration of the Conversations took place on Sunday 21 September. In the morning, the Prefect of the Dicastery, Cardinal Kurt Koch, presided and preached at a solemn Mass in the Cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula in Brussels. In the afternoon, the Cardinal was one of the speakers at an academic session in St Rumbold’s Cathedral Mechelen, along with the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, and the Bishop of Antwerp, Johan Bonny. In his address, Cardinal Koch noted the importance of the Malines Conversations in preparing the ground for the Catholic Church’s later embrace of the ecumenical movement and underlined that dialogue is “above all a spiritual task, carried out in the conviction that it is the Holy Spirit who has begun the ecumenical work and that the same Spirit will also complete it and show us the way”.

At the end of the session, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at Cardinal Mercier’s tomb by the great-grandson of Viscount Halifax, the current Earl of Halifax, along with Archbishop Terlinden, Archbishop Cottrell and Cardinal Koch. The Anglican office of Evensong was then celebrated, sung by the choir of Christs College Cambridge, with a homily from Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham, Catholic co-chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC).