Anglican-Catholic Relations 100 Years after Malines
Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity
Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Malines Conversations
Saint Rumbold’s Cathedral, Mechelen, 21 September 2025
I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on Anglican-Catholic relations a century after the conclusion of the Malines Conversations. In marking this anniversary, the Archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels is reminding us that no matter how many challenges or disappointments we may experience, the search for Christian Unity must never be abandoned. I am thankful that the most recent successors of Cardinal Mercier, Cardinal De Kesel and Archbishop Terlinden, desired to keep the memory and the goal of the Malines Conversations alive as the centenary of the death of Cardinal Mercier and the end of the Conversations draw near. The importance of remaining faithful to the search for the unity among believers for which our Lord himself prayed cannot be overstated, no matter how difficult or tortuous the road may be.
We see this very clearly in the attitudes of the protagonists of the Malines Conversations, Lord Halifax and l’Abbé Portal. More than twenty years before the Conversations took place, having once been hopeful that long-standing controversies about Anglican ordinations might soon be overcome, they were grievously disappointed when the uncompromising judgment contained in Apostolicae Curae was published in 1896. Nevertheless, they remained faithful to what they sensed was their calling. Halifax wrote very beautifully to Portal: “We have failed for the moment, but, if God wishes it, His Will be done, and if He allows us to be disappointed, it is because He wishes to accomplish it [ie unity] Himself.”[1]
It is fair to say that 1896 was not the last time that those who long for unity between Catholics and Anglicans have been disappointed. The Malines Conversations themselves ended inconclusively and the vision of Cardinal Mercier and Dom Beauduin of l’église anglicane unie, non absorbée did not find favour. While the proposal was probably more of a romantic dream than a rigorously researched argument, it is also true to say that the ecclesial climate of the time was not very receptive to ecumenical activity generally. The Catholic Church remained very suspicious of the emerging ecumenical movement for many years afterwards. However, regardless of the merits of any individual paper or proposal, the Malines Conversations stand out as a major milestone.
The Malines Conversations were the first significant theological encounters between Anglicans and Catholics since the Reformation. For this reason, their greatest significance may simply be the fact that they took place, rather than what they achieved. Looking back, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, the Conversations were one of many low-key unofficial encounters that prepared the ground for the Church’s more whole-hearted institutional embrace of ecumenism at the Second Vatican Council.
Though Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher had met with Pope John XXIII more or less unofficially in 1960, it was not until the Second Vatican Council that Anglican-Catholic relationships truly became warm and fraternal. The language of the Council’s Decree on Ecumenism was not the language of 1896. Referring to the churches and communions of the West separated from Rome, it acknowledged that “[a]mong those in which Catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a special place.”[2] Two years later, Archbishop Michael Ramsey visited Pope Paul VI in Rome. The moment when the Pope put his own ring on the Archbishop’s finger is a particular highlight in our shared history. A Common Declaration was issued by the two leaders after their meeting, which spoke of “a new stage in the development of fraternal relations, based upon Christian charity”.[3] The Declaration was soon followed by the establishment of what was eventually to become the Anglican Roman-Catholic International Commission – ARCIC. However, the declaration is also memorable for what it said about the history of mutual mistrust and condemnation between the two communions.
In willing obedience to the command of Christ who bade His disciples love one another, they declare that, with His help, they wish to leave in the hands of the God of mercy all that in the past has been opposed to this precept of charity, and that they make their own the mind of the Apostle which he expressed in these words: ‘Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 3:13-14).[4]
There can be no doubt that since then, relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion have grown deeper and warmer. The bilateral dialogue commission, ARCIC, has produced many important documents during the intervening sixty years. The first phase, ARCIC I, published statements on Eucharistic doctrine and Ministry and Ordination, as well as two statements on Authority in the Church. ARCIC II published reports on Soteriology, Koinonia, Morals, Mary and a third statement on Authority. More recently, ARCIC III has already produced a statement on the Church as Communion, local, regional and universal, and is expected to complete its second and final document shortly, on the subject of moral discernment.
Echoing the words from the letter to the Philippians quoted by Pope Paul and Archbishop Ramsey in 1966, when Pope Francis met with the current members of ARCIC in 2022, he said: “In three phases, your Dialogue Commission has sought to leave behind what compromises our communion and to nurture the bonds that unite Catholics and Anglicans. Yours has been a journey, at times fast, at times slow and difficult. Yet I would emphasize that it has been, and continues to be, a journey.”[5]
Anglicans and Catholics are no longer strangers to one another. Archbishops of Canterbury and other Anglican Primates and leaders are regular visitors to the Vatican and are ably represented by the Director and staff of the Anglican Centre in Rome. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby and the late Pope Francis enjoyed a particularly warm friendship. The same is true of their respective predecessors, Bishop Rowan Williams and the Pope Benedict XVI. Throughout the world, pairs of Anglican and Catholic bishops are supported to work ecumenically and to bear witness to their unity and friendship in Christ by the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission – IARCCUM.
However, as Pope Francis pointed out to the members of ARCIC in 2022, sometimes the journey has been “slow and difficult”. At the Lambeth Conference of 2008, my predecessor, Cardinal Walter Kasper, was invited to offer some reflections on the Anglican Communion. Speaking, he said, “in the frankness which friendship allows”, he reflected on divisions within the Anglican Communion over questions regarding the presbyteral and episcopal ordination of women and over questions of human sexuality.
I know that many of you are troubled, some deeply so, by the threat of fragmentation within the Anglican Communion. We feel profound solidarity with you, for we too are troubled and saddened when we ask: In such a scenario, what shape might the Anglican Communion of tomorrow take, and who will our dialogue partner be? Should we, and how can we, appropriately and honestly engage in conversations also with those who share Catholic perspectives on the points currently in dispute, and who disagree with some developments within the Anglican Communion or particular Anglican provinces?[6]
Cardinal Kasper was speaking in 2008. The questions he posed have not been clearly answered and they have not gone away. We know well that divisions within Anglicanism have become even more pronounced in the intervening period. The next Lambeth Conference did not take place until fourteen years later. On that occasion, many bishops did not attend, and even some of those who did attend abstained from the Eucharist. There is currently much talk of realignment and resetting within Anglicanism.
Whereas Cardinal Mercier and Dom Beauduin seemed to think of the Church of England and Anglicanism as more or less synonymous, and saw the Archbishop of Canterbury as having primatial or patriarchal authority over all Anglicans, some member churches of the Anglican Communion no longer recognise any leadership role at all for Canterbury. For us in the Catholic Church, this causes both confusion and sadness.
Such profound division within individual communions makes reconciliation between separated communions and churches much more complicated to achieve. In our weariness, we could be tempted to abandon theological dialogue altogether, and to seek only good relationships and practical cooperation. When confronted by such temptations, we need to recall that our divisions are scandalous counter-signs and so redouble our efforts to transcend them. Above all, we need to intensify our prayer.
Praying for unity reminds us that the ecumenical endeavour 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. The ecumenical movement has been a prayer movement from the very beginning. Pope Benedict XVI once expressed this auspicious beginning with the vivid image: “The ship of ecumenism would never have put out to sea had she not been lifted by this broad current of prayer and wafted by the breath of the Holy Spirit.”[7] Prayer for Christian unity is therefore at the heart of all ecumenical endeavours. Thankfully, it is no longer strange or controversial for us to pray together. When we do, as we will at Choral Evensong later, we express our conviction that we humans cannot bring about the unity of the Church on our own, nor can we decide on its form and timing. We can only open ourselves in order to let the Holy Spirit guide us.
Since his election on 8 May last, Pope Leo XIV has frequently emphasized dialogue and reconciliation. Meeting ecumenical and interreligious guests the day after his inauguration, he declared that one of his priorities as Bishop of Rome is to seek the re-establishment of full and visible communion among all who confess faith in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
With this commitment in mind, we should note that despite much progress, for Anglicans and Catholics, important challenges remain. Along with the sacramental and ethical questions already mentioned, we continue to have ecclesiological differences that require careful dialogue, particularly regarding primacy and synodality. Our Dicastery’s 2024 study document The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in Ecumenical Dialogues offers one step forward, showing that the papal office can be understood not as an obstacle but as a service to unity. We are grateful that many of our ecumenical partners, including the Church of England individually and the Anglican Communion as a whole, have taken up the invitation to study and respond to the document.
The fragmentation of Christian witness in an increasingly secular and divided world scandalously weakens the credibility of the Gospel and so the call to join in defending human dignity, justice, peace and care for creation is an urgent one. However, we must avoid giving the impression that unity is all about activity. The unity of the Church which we seek to regain can never be anything other than unity in the Apostolic Faith, given and entrusted to every new member of the Body of Christ in Baptism.
One hundred years after the Malines Conversations, there remain many challenges to Catholic-Anglican unity. The problems and questions are, variously, theological, pastoral, cultural and spiritual. Meeting them requires perseverance, creativity, and above all fidelity to Christ’s prayer, “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21). We know that alongside the Malines anniversary, being marked by Anglicans and Catholics, the entire Church is commemorating the 1,700th anniversary the first Ecumenical Council this year. This anniversary is a reminder to us that we can only move forward credibly if we, together, return to the source of faith, which is found, as the Fathers of the Council of Nicaea confessed, in Jesus Christ. This is well expressed in the motto of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, In illo uno unum – “in the One [ie Christ], we are one”. As Anglicans and Catholics, continuing to walk together, let us keep in mind that the more we unite in Christ and become one in him, the more we shall also be united with one another.
[1] Viscount Halifax, Leo XIII and Anglican Orders, London, Longmans & Green, 1912, 358.
[2] Unitatis redintegratio, §13.
[3] Common Declaration by Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Michael Ramsey (24 March 1966).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Francis, Greeting to the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue Commission (13 May 2022).
[6] Walter Kasper, Address at the Lambeth Conference (30 July 2008).
[7] Benedict XVI, Homily at Vespers for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (25 January 2008)