The Eastertide Council

The Eastertide Council was the seven-week council of three churches, the Catholic Church, the Church of England and the Church of America, that met at Canterbury from Easter Monday to Whit Monday in 2026 and ended, on Friday 22 May, by adopting the Eastertide Declaration and declining to say that it had brought the churches into communion. It is the first council in which a Pope sat beside the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primate of America as one of three principals, and the first at which the Catholic Church and an Anglican church exchanged a text that both received as their own.

The Declaration does two things the three churches had been unable to do for four centuries. It declares Anglican orders valid and sufficient, reversing in substance a judgment Rome had delivered in 1896, and it restates the papacy as a primacy of service, exercised only in council and carrying no immediate jurisdiction over any Anglican province. These were the two questions that every commission since the council of the 1960s had identified as the whole obstacle, and the Vatican City article described them as the two points at which neither side would yield.

It then stopped. The Declaration binds none of the three churches until each has received it by its own constitutional means, it fixes a reception period of five years, and it names two matters it did not resolve, women in the priesthood and the episcopate and the same-sex marriage rites of the Church of America, which Rome does not receive and does not make conditions of communion in the interim. Communion will be proclaimed, or deferred, by the Council reassembled at Canterbury at Pentecost in 2031.

Since the Council the process has run ahead of its schedule and behind its promise. The Church of England received the Declaration by Measure in 2027, the Church of America’s extraordinary Synod carried it in all three houses in 2026, and Rome received it by a Synod of Bishops and an apostolic letter in 2027. The three churches have shared bishops, buildings and, in one contested case, Communion. They have not agreed on women or on marriage, a Lambeth Conference has since received the Declaration with reservations, and the one man whose view is not in doubt is sixty-six and has said he will resign when he must.

History

The break and the Charter

The Church of America descends from the Church of England, which broke with Rome in the 1530s and kept its bishops, its liturgy and the Crown at its head, as Supreme Head and from 1559 as Supreme Governor. The American colonies received it as an offshoot without bishops: no bishop of the Church of England ever resided in America before the Charter settlement, which left the laity to run the parishes and left Rome, until much later, with no reason to think about Anglican orders in America at all.

The Charter of 1783 made the Church of America a distinct body, established by law under Article V.3, which gives its bishops seats in the Lords, and left every other religion free under the clause forbidding compulsion in worship. It also left the Catholic Church, which arrived in the colonies through Maryland, Louisiane and later the great migrations, outside the establishment and inside the Realm, a position that grew steadily less peculiar as Catholics became the largest single religious body in the country.

Catholic Emancipation in the Realm

Catholics in the Realm met disabilities that were mostly local, imposed by the polities and not by the Charter, and the removal of the last of them is dated, by the churches’ own historians, to the nineteenth century. By then the numbers had made the question academic. The Church of America remained the established church and the Catholic Church became the largest single religious body, though never a majority.

This matters to the Council because it is the reason Rome came to Canterbury with a delegation that included a good many Americans. A Pope born in the Realm, a Church of America that is a minority among Christians and a Church of England that is established in a country where Catholics are a small minority produce three delegations of three different kinds of confidence.

The Malines conversations

In the 1920s a small group of Anglican and Catholic churchmen, meeting at Malines under the protection of its cardinal, discussed what a union of the English church and Rome might look like if both were willing to move. The conversations proposed that the Archbishop of Canterbury might be treated as a patriarch in communion with Rome, which is the model the Council’s second part would later decline to adopt, and they collapsed on the death of their principal sponsors and the disapproval of Rome.

The Church of America took no formal part and followed them closely. They are the first in which both sides said aloud what the real difficulties were, and the Declaration of 2026 refers to them once, in a footnote, as “the first honest attempt”.

Rome’s judgment of 1896

In 1896 Rome declared Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void” on the ground of defect of form and intention in the Ordinal of the Church of England. The Church of England’s archbishops answered in 1897 with a long reply, which Rome did not accept, and the judgment became the single largest obstacle to any recognition of Anglican ministry by the Catholic Church.

The judgment was not a casual one. It rested on a reading of the Ordinal as it was understood at the Reformation and on the claim that the intention to make a sacrificing priesthood had been deliberately removed. Everything the Council later said about orders was said in answer to that reading, and the Declaration carries the date 1896 in its text for that reason.

The Old Catholic line

The Old Catholic Church of Utrecht had maintained valid episcopal orders, as Rome itself acknowledged, outside communion with Rome since the eighteenth century. After the Bonn agreement of 1931 established communion between the Old Catholic and Anglican churches, its bishops began to take part in the consecration of Anglican bishops, laying hands beside the Anglican consecrators, and from the 1960s the practice became routine across the Anglican churches.

The effect, argued by Anglican theologians for a century and by Catholic ones with increasing reluctance, was that the Anglican episcopal succession now included a line that Rome could not question. If Anglican bishops were consecrated with Old Catholic co-consecrators, then Anglican bishops were validly consecrated, whatever might be said of the Ordinal. The Archbishop of Utrecht said so at the Council, in the third week, and the orders text rests on what he said.

The council of the 1960s

The general council of the Catholic Church in the 1960s reformed the liturgy, declared that no person may be coerced in religion, reconsidered the Church’s relation to Judaism, Islam and the other Christian communions, and issued a constitution on the Church in the modern world. Its opening to other Christians is the origin of every joint commission that followed, and it is the council that Peter II cited, without naming the dubia, in his homily at Pentecost.

It also produced the division the Vatican article calls the Church’s deepest: the older rite survived as a permitted exception, and attachment to it became the banner of a general traditionalism against the vernacular, against the declaration on religious liberty and against the ecumenical opening. The same people who objected to the council of the 1960s objected to the Eastertide Council, and for the same reasons.

The joint commissions

From the 1960s the Catholic Church and the Anglican churches maintained joint commissions that produced agreed statements on the Eucharist, on ministry and on authority. The statements were careful and in places remarkable, and they converged on a position that the Vatican article describes in one sentence: substantial agreement on doctrines that once divided them, and no movement on the validity of orders or the nature of papal authority.

The commissions’ work was gathered in 2025 by the Joint Preparatory Commission of twelve, whose co-chairs found that decades of agreement were scattered across forty volumes and had never been put in one document, and the working papers of the Council were largely that document.

Women in the Church of America

The Church of America ordained women to the diaconate in 1974, to the priesthood in 1984 and to the episcopate in 1997, each by decision of its General Synod after years of debate. Rome did not follow, though it restored women to the diaconate in the years of the pontificate before the present one, which the Council treats as common ground and the traditionalists as a first step.

The Church of England ordains women to the priesthood (1994) and the episcopate (2015), with a dissenting minority provided for. The question of women’s orders is the reason Rome does not receive the Church of America’s ministry in full, and the Council deliberately did not resolve it.

The marriage decision

The Church of America solemnises marriages between people of the same sex, following a General Synod decision that divided it and has not been reversed. The decision cost the Church standing in parts of the Anglican Communion, particularly among provinces that were once its own missions, and the Communion remains full in law and interrupted in practice.

The Church of England permits blessings and does not solemnise. Rome does neither. The Council treated the question as the second matter not resolved and referred it, with women’s orders, to a standing commission.

The election and the letter

Peter II was elected in 2025, the first Pope from the Realm, born in Detroit and formed in the industrial Catholicism of the Midwest. He took a name no Pope had taken in two thousand years, and in one of the unscripted answers his communications staff find difficult he said that the churches had been in each other’s company long enough. He wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primate of America within weeks.

Both answered within a month. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a scholar of the Fathers and a cautious man, wrote that he would come if the Pope would come to him. The Primate, who had welcomed the election of a Pope formed in the Realm with unaffected pleasure and said so repeatedly, wrote that the Church of America would send forty and hoped Rome would send more.

The preparatory commission

The Joint Preparatory Commission of twelve sat for about eight months, from the autumn of 2025 to Easter 2026. Its three co-chairs were Bishop Teodor Wieczorek, a Jesuit-trained historian of the early Church from a Michigan diocese, for the Catholic Church; Dr Imogen Hallam, Dean of Winchester and a scholar of orders, for the Church of England; and the Rt Revd Samuel Okonkwo-Ward, Bishop in the Province of the Southwest, for the Church of America, who knew overlapping jurisdictions better than anyone alive and was accordingly the commission’s best drafter of compromises.

It did not write the Declaration. It wrote the papers from which the Declaration was written, and it made the one structural decision on which the whole Council turned: that each delegation would vote separately and each would need two-thirds, so that no church could be outvoted by the other two.

The Council

Calling it

Peter II raised it first in public in an unscripted answer, in the first weeks of his pontificate, to a question about whether the Church would ever be in communion with the Church of England. He said that the two had been in each other’s company long enough to know what divided them, and that the sensible thing was to put the question to the people who could answer it. He wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primate of America that month, and the Council was called inside four months of the conclave.

The speed was the first charge made against it. The traditionalists said the Pope had called the Council before the Curia could object, and the Curia had in effect been presented with it: the Cardinal Secretary of State, Lorenzo Vitale, who had been the compromise candidate of the 2025 conclave and was not the Pope’s man, learned of it from the letter. The Register records that nobody in Rome has ever said the Pope acted improperly and that nobody has said he asked.

Why Canterbury

The Church of America asked to host, which would have meant New Westminster and a Pope returning to the Realm for seven weeks. The Archbishop of Canterbury asked for Canterbury. Peter II settled it in a sentence at the first meeting of the preparatory commission: a mother church should be visited. He did not say whether he meant Canterbury or Rome, and both were content.

The choice mattered more than the sentence. A Council at New Westminster would have been a Council in the Realm, a state with a Church of America established by law, the Catholic Church the largest body among the churchgoing and a Prime Minister of its own. Canterbury is in a Kingdom of England whose Church is established under a King who is Supreme Governor of two churches and subject to the advice of two governments, and the sister-realm rule is easier to keep on neutral ground than in a capital.

The principals

Peter II was sixty-two at his election, a Detroit-born Augustinian formed in parish work, with four years in the Curia at the end of a pastoral life and no wish to be a creature of it. He gives unscripted answers in doorways. He lives in the Deanery at Canterbury for the whole of the Council, having celebrated Easter in Rome on the Sunday and flown to England on the Monday, which makes seven weeks the longest absence of a Pope from Rome in modern times.

Thomas Aldous, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a patristic scholar and a cautious man. He gave the Deanery to the Pope and lived in the Old Palace beside the cathedral, which he called his own cell, and the two men walked to the cathedral together every morning, a practice the English press found unaccountably moving and the Rome press corps found tiresome.

Naomi Achebe, Archbishop of New Westminster and Primate of America, is the warmest of the three. She had welcomed the election of a Pope formed in the Realm with unaffected pleasure and said so repeatedly since, and she arrived at Canterbury with a delegation of forty and a belief, which she had not discussed with them, that the Church of America would be the hardest of the three to carry.

Cardinal Vitale stayed in Rome. He governed the Curia for seven weeks in the Pope’s absence, correctly and silently, and was seen by the traditionalists as the man who could have stopped it and did not, because accepting the Pope’s absence was the price of his post.

The delegations

Each church sent forty voting delegates, 120 in all, chosen by its own methods: bishops, theologians and clergy and, in the Church of America’s case, laity, since its General Synod has a House of Laity. About a third of the Church of America’s forty were women, about a fifth of the Church of England’s, and about a tenth of the Catholic delegation, all of whom were deacons, lay theologians or members of religious orders. The women whose ordination was the live dispute between the churches were a small part of the room that would decide how it was treated.

The Realm’s Catholics had no national delegation, because they had no national conference. Their bishops attended as individuals, a handful among the Catholic forty, and the Archbishop of New Orleans declined to attend at all and said nothing, which in a Catholic polity was understood.

The observers

About thirty observers sat with no vote.

The Ecumenical Patriarch’s delegate, Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Chalcedon, gave warm support, because the primacy formula could serve the Orthodox too, and said at the end that Rome had answered a question Constantinople had been asking for a thousand years. The Archbishop of Utrecht, Joost van der Meer, was the honoured guest and, in the third week, the decisive voice. The Church of Scotland welcomed it and noted that it had no bishops to receive it. The Lutheran churches of the Scandinavian Union asked whether the primacy formula would also apply to them, and Peter II answered in a footnote that it would not be refused.

Five Anglican provinces sent observers: the Provinces of East Africa, the Philippines and the West Indies, which said the Council betrayed the Communion, and the Provinces of South Africa and New Albion, which said it was overdue. The rest of the Communion sent nobody.

Arrival

Peter II arrived at Canterbury on Easter Monday, 6 April. Asked on the station platform whether he had come to take the Church of England back, he said he had come to be corrected by it. The English press ran the line for a fortnight. Rome’s staff said he was quoting Gregory and the English press said he was quoting nobody.

The King received him, in his British capacity and on the advice of British ministers, at a palace audience in London on the Tuesday of the first week, the one journey the Pope made away from Canterbury. The King sent also a letter, read at the opening by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s chaplain, and attended no session of the Council and no service of it. The Realm’s Crown had no part, being a different Crown, and the sister-realm rule was kept. The letter’s first sentence reached across that line, since the King is Supreme Governor of the Church of America only as King of the Realm, and the Palace said afterwards that the sentence described a fact and exercised neither office; the Realm’s ministers, who had been shown the text, did not object.

The three principals prayed together on the first night at the site of the shrine of Thomas Becket, in the cathedral, where nothing remains but a candle and a stone. No Eucharist was shared.

Seven weeks

The first week was arrival, the opening, the audience and the prayers at the shrine. The second and third weeks were orders and the history of the succession. The fourth and fifth weeks were primacy, infallibility and the Crown. The sixth week was reception and the matters not resolved. The seventh was the vote, Pentecost and the closing.

The delegations worked in plenary in the mornings and in committee in the afternoons. Evening Prayer was the one service all attended. The Catholic delegation heard Mass daily at the Catholic church of St Thomas in Canterbury; the Anglicans kept daily Eucharist in the cathedral. There was no joint Eucharist at any point.

The orders week

In the third week the Archbishop of Utrecht rose from the observers’ bench to answer a Catholic bishop who had argued that the defect of 1896 could not be cured by the history of consecrations. He recited from the register the dates of the Anglican bishops he had helped to consecrate, and said that if their orders were not valid then neither were his own, since Anglican hands had been laid on his line since before most of the room was born, and that he would say so in public.

He sat down. The Council did not adjourn, but the afternoon session was late, and the sentence of the orders text that begins “No priest or bishop of either church shall be reordained” was written that evening.

The dubia

In the fourth week five cardinals published in Rome, and in the Realm, a set of five questions to the Pope. They asked whether the primacy text was compatible with the definitions of 1870; whether Anglican orders could be valid without reordination; whether the Marian definitions could be made optional; whether a council might bind the Bishop of Rome; and whether the Pope might leave Rome for seven weeks.

The leading signatory was Anselm Roche, Cardinal Archbishop of Charles Town, a cardinal of the Realm. Peter II answered none of the questions directly. The Cardinal Secretary of State received no one. The Pope’s answer, if it was one, came at Pentecost.

The penitence

On the Wednesday of the fifth week, 6 May, the Church of America proposed a joint act of penitence for the mission-school and abuse records of all three churches, in the form of the Penitential Rite it had enacted four times. The Rite has bishops lay their staffs down on the floor, wear plain cassock and rochet, and not take up the staffs again until it is over.

Peter II laid down his own staff first, unscripted, and Archbishop Achebe laid hers beside it. The Archbishop of Canterbury followed. The Catholic delegation was divided on whether the Pope should have done it, and a photograph of the three staffs on the floor of the cathedral was the one image of the Council that the Realm remembered.

Resignation and vote

In the sixth week a retired bishop of the Province of the Southwest resigned from the Church of America’s delegation, on grounds of age and conscience, and said so in a letter that was published by the Church. A Church of America theologian, Canon Beatrice Aldrich, an Anglo-Catholic and a delegate, said in a plenary address that the Council had settled the question of orders and left the question of the Eucharist in a drawer. She voted for the text.

The vote was taken on Friday 22 May, the three delegations voting at the same hour in three rooms, the Catholic delegation at St Thomas’, the Church of England in the chapter house and the Church of America in the great hall of the Old Palace. Each needed two-thirds, or twenty-seven of forty.

The Church of America cleared the threshold by one. Five Catholic delegates, traditionalists who voted against, asked that their votes be recorded by name, and they were. The House of Laity delegates in the American delegation were the narrowest.

Pentecost

The closing service was on Pentecost, Sunday 24 May, and the Council ended on Whit Monday. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury processed out of the cathedral together. Ana Valdez, then Prime Minister of the Realm, attended the Pentecost service as a private person, and said so.

The Pope’s homily did not mention the dubia. It quoted the council of the 1960s on religious liberty, and it contained one sentence that the traditionalists read as an answer and the Pope’s staff did not: “A church that may not be compelled to believe may not compel another to doubt.”

The Eastertide Declaration

The Declaration is in five parts, and its first sentence is the one the Realm remembers. The three churches meeting at Canterbury declare that they have received one another’s bread, and not yet one another’s cup.

I. On Orders

Rome had said in 1896 that the Ordinal lacked the form and the intention to make a sacrificing priesthood. The Declaration does not say that Rome was wrong in 1896. It says that the defect it alleged is not found in the Ordinal as the Church of England has received and explained it, which lets both sides keep their histories. The argument that carried it was the Old Catholic line: if Anglican bishops have been consecrated for a century with Old Catholic bishops laying on hands, they are validly consecrated whatever the Ordinal says, and a Rome that has always admitted the validity of Utrecht’s orders cannot hold the contrary.

The text says nothing about conditional ordination of priests who move between churches in the other direction. It is silent, and the traditionalists say deliberately, on whether a Catholic priest may serve at an Anglican altar.

II. On Primacy and Council

This is the settlement the whole Council turned on. The Anglican churches accept a primacy of service: a universal ministry of unity, first in charity and the court of last resort in disputes between churches in communion. Rome surrenders immediate jurisdiction, the claim that the Pope may act directly in any diocese, so far as the Anglican churches are concerned, and restates infallibility as a charism of the whole Church, exercised by the Pope only in council with the bishops in communion.

The Marian definitions of 1854 and 1950 are received as Roman teaching and are not made conditions of communion for the Anglican churches, which is the least noticed sentence in the Declaration and the one the five cardinals asked about directly. A model that treated the Archbishop of Canterbury as a patriarch, as the Malines conversations had proposed, was considered and declined: the Anglican delegates did not want to be a patriarchate, and the Catholic delegates did not want a Pope who was first among equals in only some of his churches.

III. On the Crown

The Church of America’s own article already says that the Supreme Governorship is “a constitutional office and not a theological one”, and the Declaration takes the sentence and puts it in a treaty. Rome notes it without endorsing it, which is the most Rome could say about a royal supremacy and the least the Anglican delegates would have accepted. The King, informed, said nothing. He had said what he had to say in his letter.

IV. On Reception

The second paragraph answers the sharpest legal question the Council raised. The Church of America is in full communion with the Church of England. If the Church of England entered communion with Rome and the Church of America did not, communion would have to be shown not to be transitive, and the Declaration says in terms that it is not. Rome notes it, in the same word the Declaration uses for the Crown, and the word is the Council’s way of saying that it has accepted what it cannot approve.

V. Matters Not Resolved

Part V is the reason communion was deferred. The Council was able to settle the two questions that could be settled by formula, orders and the papacy, and left alone the two that cannot. The common ground the text cites is Rome’s own restoration of women to the diaconate, and, in a single sentence, the married priesthood that Rome has relaxed, which the traditionalists read as the real offence.

Reception

The Church of England

The General Synod of the Church of England voted in July 2026, carrying the Declaration by two-thirds in all three houses, the House of Laity the narrowest at 68 per cent. A Measure to give it effect passed the Parliament of England at Winchester in 2027, establishment having been an English question since the England Act of 2025, and received the Royal Assent the same year, so the Church of England has already received the Declaration by its own constitutional means.

The Church of America

The Church of America’s rule is that the General Synod may not alter the creeds, that a question of order may be decided by the three houses and a question of doctrine may not, and no tribunal settles which is which; the Standing Committee on Doctrine advises. Accepting a primacy tested the line, and the Committee advised by five votes to four that a primacy of service was a matter of order, advice the three houses then accepted. The minority’s dissent was published.

An extraordinary session of the General Synod met at Columbia Cathedral, New Westminster, for three days in November 2026, the three houses meeting separately and voting in the order Bishops, Clergy, Laity. It carried the Declaration in all three: Bishops 91 per cent, Clergy 78, Laity 61, the Laity’s margin the narrowest. The Diocese of Charles Town, which had said in advance that its lay delegates would vote against, voted against, and the vote was the nearest the Synod came to the opposition the Council had feared.

The Catholic Church

The Realm’s Catholic bishops had never met as a national body. The Pope convened them for the first time in September 2026 at New Westminster, the Archbishop of New Orleans in the chair, to consider the Declaration, and the Archbishop, who had declined to attend the Council, presided without comment. They voted by secret ballot, and the vote was published by Rome only.

The meeting left behind, as an unintended by-product, the first permanent national conference of the Realm’s bishops. The Catholic hierarchy of the Realm, divided by polity and unable until then to speak for itself, acquired a conference by way of an argument about the Church of England.

For the whole Church, a Synod of Bishops at Rome in the autumn of 2027 approved the Declaration by a large majority, and Peter II issued an apostolic letter on it, the first formal document of the pontificate. The traditionalists read it as the reason he has published no encyclical, and the Vatican article now records that he has published no encyclical and only the letter.

In New Granada, where the Catholic Church is established under a concordat, the Archbishop of Bogotá, Cardinal Fidel Arango, received the Declaration cautiously after Peter II’s state visit of 2027. The coastal bishops welcomed it and the highland bishops signed a letter of concern, and whether the letter becomes a Granadine break with the Declaration is open.

Interim measures

The Declaration allowed five interim measures, and all five have happened. Baptism is recognised by all three. Two bishops of the Church of England were consecrated in 2027 with a Catholic bishop among the consecrators. Columbia Cathedral was lent to the Catholic archdiocese for a funeral Mass the same year. A dying Anglican bishop received Communion from a Catholic priest, which the traditionalists protested, and a joint baptismal register is in use in a number of parishes. The Declaration also set up a standing commission on women’s ministry and marriage, which is the subject of the next section.

The standing commission

The standing joint commission on women’s ministry and marriage published an interim report in spring 2028 which recorded that the three churches could not agree and proposed a ten-year period of study. The traditionalists called it a stall. The Church of America called it honest. The report’s single sentence of substance is that the question of women’s orders is not a question of the validity of Anglican orders, which the Council had settled, and not a question of the papacy, which it had also settled, and that it was therefore a question of what the three churches meant by the word priest, which nobody had settled.

The Lambeth Conference

The Lambeth Conference met at Canterbury in July and August 2028 and received the Declaration with reservations, leaving each province to decide for itself. Three provinces walked out of the plenary, the Provinces of East Africa, the Philippines and the West Indies, which had sat as observers at the Council and said it betrayed the Communion, and the Communion did not split. The Conference is not legislative and cannot bind a province, which is a strength when the Communion agrees and the whole of its difficulty when it does not. On 28 October 2028 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Aldous, wrote to the primates of the three provinces inviting them to private talks at Canterbury before the end of the year, and said that receiving the Declaration would not be a condition of attending. None of the three has replied.

The opposition

Rome

The five cardinals’ dubia asked the five questions set out above and were never answered in form. Their leading signatory, Cardinal Anselm Roche, retired as Archbishop of Charles Town at seventy-five in 2027 and remains a cardinal and a critic. The Fraternity of Saint Gregory the Great, a traditionalist order, announced that it would not recognise the Declaration, and is tolerated. Peter II has spent his pontificate preventing a schism, and the Declaration has not caused one.

The Anglican churches

A Church of England evangelical network, the Network of the Reformed Parishes, published a statement that it would not receive the primacy text and would petition its bishops, and has. The Society of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, an Anglo-Catholic society, said the text was the answer to four centuries of prayer and demanded that it be received entire. In the Church of America the Diocese of Charles Town declared for a no vote and cast one.

The provinces

Of the five Anglican provinces that sent observers, three, East Africa, the Philippines and the West Indies, said the Council betrayed the Communion, and they are the same three that walked out of Lambeth. Two, South Africa and New Albion, said it was overdue. Two of the three, East Africa and the Philippines, are the Church of America’s own former missions and among its harshest critics over marriage, and the Declaration gave them a second reason.

In the Realm

The ministry

The Valdez ministry was in office. The Commons was told that the ministry had no view on a matter between churches. Ana Valdez, a practising Catholic who has kept it private, attended the closing Pentecost service as a private person and said so; she is now Home Secretary. Caleb Whitlock, the present Prime Minister, belongs to the Church of America and has said nothing on the Declaration. The Prime Minister confirms a Primate’s appointment, which would apply to a Primate in communion with Rome once the five years run.

The Lords Spiritual

Twelve seats in the Lords are held by bishops of the Church of America, the number Parliament has appointed under Article V.3 of the Charter, which leaves it to Parliament. A debate on the seats was called by a member of the Lords without a hereditary title, nobody moved a motion, and the Constitution Committee announced a study. The Church of America’s own Primates have said the Church would survive losing the seats and have never proposed to give them up.

Opinion

A survey in the Realm found 52 per cent of Catholics and 31 per cent of Church of America members approving of the Declaration, and most of the rest replying that they had no opinion. The Register states the main reaction plainly: it was indifference. The congregations that would have to live with the result are mostly asleep to it, and the argument over it is conducted by people who are not.

The press

The ABC reported the Council from Canterbury under the ABC World News banner. The ABC has no bureau in England, the BBC supplies it, and the corporation sent its own religious correspondent, Deborah Lindqvist, to report for the Realm’s audience. The English press ran the Pope’s remark at the station for a fortnight.

The King, twice

The King is Supreme Governor of two churches, and one of them has received a text that the other has not yet been asked to receive in communion with Rome. The question the Council did not need to answer is what it means for one man to govern, as Supreme Governor, a Church of England that may be in communion with Rome and a Church of America that may not.

The answer is that nothing changes in law. The Supreme Governorship is civil, as the Council states, and the arrangement is the same as everything else about the Realm’s relation to Great Britain: two things held by one man, in two Crowns, on the advice of two governments. The King is missing, and the question has been put to nobody.

What the Council did not resolve

The Council left the Marian definitions as Roman teaching, which stand as they are; the abuse archives and diocesan files, which are shut and which it cited without opening; the establishments and the Lords Spiritual, which are matters for the Crowns and the Parliaments; and the Church of America’s same-sex marriage rites, which it recorded and referred.

Failings

The Register states three of the Council’s failings plainly.

The women whose ordination is in dispute had little say. The delegations were mostly men, and the women who sat were deacons, theologians and religious in the Catholic delegation and a minority in the others. A text that treats women’s ordination as a matter not resolved was written largely by those who do not ordain them or who ordain them in a minority.

The Church of America’s former missions were observers with no vote. The provinces that grew out of its missions, and are now larger than the Church that sent them, sat on the observers’ benches and either walked out or stayed away. A council that decided what the Communion was to do about communion with Rome decided it without them.

The Realm’s Catholics had no national voice. They had no national conference, and so no national delegation, and the Council’s text was received in the Realm by a body that did not exist until the Council required it. The permanent conference is the best thing to come of it, and it came by accident.

What is open

Three things are open as the article is written. The second session at Canterbury at Pentecost in 2031, which will proclaim communion or defer it, and who will be Pope: Peter II is sixty-six, has said he will resign when he must, and the Declaration’s fate may depend on who holds the office in 2031, which nobody in Rome will say aloud. Whether the standing commission will ever agree, on a question it has given itself ten years to study. And whether the Anglican provinces that walked out of Lambeth will ever receive it.

Assessment

The Council is the most successful act of Christian reunion in the Realm’s history and the least finished.

It settled the two questions every commission since the council of the 1960s had named as the whole obstacle. It did so by formula, not by concession: Rome did not say it had been wrong in 1896 and the Anglican churches did not say they had been wrong about the Pope, and both sides were able to describe what they had signed as their own position. It has since been received by a Measure, an extraordinary Synod, a Synod of Bishops and a Lambeth Conference, none of which was certain, and it has produced a permanent conference of the Realm’s bishops that nobody planned. The process leans towards communion, and the three churches are about equally close.

The reservations are the ones the Declaration names and the Register adds one. Women’s ordination and marriage are the live disputes and the standing commission has deferred them for a decade, and a decade is a long time for a standing commission to agree on what a priest is. The traditionalists have not left and have not been answered. Two of the three provinces that walked out of Lambeth are the Church of America’s own former missions. And the Declaration’s central device, five years of waiting that depend on the health and the continued office of the man who called the Council, is the plainest weakness of a settlement whose strength is that it was done by people who knew what they were doing.

The Register’s judgment is cautiously favourable. It did what the commissions since the council of the 1960s could not, and it left the harder questions where the Anglican churches themselves have left them, unresolved. The open question is whether three bodies that cannot agree on women and marriage will ever receive one another, and Pentecost in 2031 will say.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Peter II, who called the Council and laid down his staff first
• The Church of America, whose General Synod carried the Declaration and whose Primate was a principal
• Vatican City, for Peter II, the Cardinal Secretary of State, the council of the 1960s and the traditionalist opposition
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain, for the Church of England, the established churches and the King as Supreme Governor
• The Crown in right of America, for the Supreme Governorship the Declaration calls civil
• The House of Lords, for the twelve Lords Spiritual and the Constitution Committee’s study
• The Charter of Union, whose Article V.3 establishes the Church of America
• The American Broadcasting Corporation, which reported the Council under the World News banner
• Ana Valdez, the Prime Minister of the time, and Caleb Whitlock, the present one

Categories

Institutions · Religion · The Church of America · The Catholic Church · The Church of England · Ecumenism