It is rare that religion and science find agreement, but that is what happened when Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spoke at a meeting on saving the earth from climate change.

“The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a book in 2007 called “Creation”, subtitled An Appeal to Save Life on Earth,” Sacks told leaders of all the major faiths meeting at Lambeth Palace in London on Thursday.

(Photo: A partially dried reservoir in Yingtan, Jiangxi province, China, 29 Oct 2009/stringer)

“I thought that was a very good book. E.O. Wilson is known not to be religious, but what this book was was a call to religious people and scientists to call off the war between religion and science and work together for the sake of the future of life on earth.

“And I felt that was a very generous and appropriate call by a non-religious scientist.”

He said “that science and religion despite their apparent friction actually converge on a profoundly scientific and at the same time religious idea that there is a kinship of life and hence a covenant of life”.

Not only did such a high-profile religious figure agree with the scientific world, but faith leaders found harmony among themselves at the same meeting.

Sitting next to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican Church, was the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who only days earlier had delivered the Pope’s offer to disaffected Anglicans the chance to convert to Rome.

Also attending were faith and community organisation leaders including Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i, Jain and Zoroastrian.

(Photo: Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, 23 July 2006/Paul Hackett)

Organised by Williams, the leaders issued a joint statement in which they “recognised unequivocally that there is a moral imperative” to tackle the causes of global warming.

They agreed to work together to raise awareness about the effects of “catastrophic climate change”, saying it was the poor and vulnerable who most suffered from the ensuing droughts, floods, water shortages and rising sea levels.

Quoting from the book of Genesis, Sacks said man was placed on earth to serve it and protect it. “Man was a guardian, not the owner using and abusing the good things on earth,” he said.

“We are taken from the earth and therefore owe it a sense of kinship and responsibility. We believe our very existence as human beings come wrapped up in environmental imperatives and ecological responsibility.”

Drawing on the story of Noah’s Ark where all animals, including the lion and the lamb, had to survive side by side, he said we would all drown if we failed to work together.

Of course, if everybody kept the Sabbath, when nobody drove cars, flew by plane, or switched on any electrical appliances, the environmental problem would be solved, he said.

But more realistically, a new set of rituals would have to be devised that recognise the importance of the environment.

“What religion allows us to do is take the big ideas and translate them into daily rituals,” he said.

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One can guess what Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will say to Pope Benedict when the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion travels to the Vatican later this year. The more interesting question might be what  Queen Elizabeth is likely to say when she hosts the pope next year.

(Photo: Queen Elizabeth, 13 June 2009/Luke MacGregor)

The timing of the trips couldn’t be more intriguing, especially the second one. The pope is due to visit Britain in September 2010 and is expected to preside there over the beatification of the late Cardinal John Henry Newman, a famous 19th-century convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

The queen is, after all, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, many of whose flock the pope is seeking to poach with his offer last week allowing Anglicans to convert en masse while keeping many of their traditions. And among her honorifics is “Defender of the Faith.” While that sounds impressive, it pales in comparison to Benedict’s long string of titles including “Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.” But oneupmanship is a British sport, so one never knows how these things can turn out.

It is unclear how many CofE traditionalists, upset at moves to ordain women bishops and the issue of homosexuality, will move over to Rome, but the conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith suggested 12 Church of England bishops may switch - more than a quarter of their total.

It was suggested by the Daily Telegraph newspaper earlier this month, before the Vatican effectively sabotaged decades of dialogue between the two churches, that the pope would receive a warm welcome at Buckingham Palace. “The warmth of her welcome will come as no surprise to the pontiff,” it said.

Citing sources speaking to the Catholic Herald weekly, the Telegraph said the queen has “grown increasingly sympathetic” to the Roman Catholic Church over the years while being “appalled,” along with her son and heir Charles, at developments in the Church of England.

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 11 Oct 2009/Max Rossi)

The Sunday Telegraph in July said the queen had told the heads of a traditional group that she “understood their concerns” about the future of the 77 million-strong global church.

But whether the warmth will stand up to the pope parking his tanks on her lawn, as Ruth Gledhill described it in The Times — especially Buckingham Palace’s lawns — would be astonishing.

As head of her faith she must defend her church, and can do so on an equal footing in both political and spiritual terms, Vicki Woods of the Telegraph wrote. “When Pope John Paul II met the queen on his visit to Britain, he was for once wrong-footed,” she pointed out.  “She spoke to him not as a fellow head of state but as a fellow head of the church: her church. Her faith. Which she defends. He was quite taken aback.”

It is not only her church’s clergy and laity which are up for grabs, but possibly also the buidlings.

And it was Queen Elizabeth I, after all, who so staunchly defended the English Reformation introduced by her father Henry VIII in 1534 in his dispute with Rome over his desire to divorce one wife and marry another.

The queen has already potentially been slighted by her Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who it has been reported in the media, apparently personally invited the pope to visit Britain during a private audience last February.

“He should read Carla Powell’s diary in The Spectator,” Woods wrote.  “Gordon Brown says he invited His Holiness, which if true would represent a gross breach of protocol. Only the queen can invite a head of state to Britain.”

(Photo: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, 11 Feb 2009/Kieran Doherty)

The queen, needless to say, has said even less than her archbishop. The older royals don’t often leave themselves open to be quoted. On one of the rare occasions they have, the late queen mother was reported to have only commented that church services should not last beyond an hour. The archbishop has barely said much more in response to the pope other than he did not see it as “an act of aggression” and that it would not derail dialogue between the two churches.

But when you become the focus of general sympathy, you must know that you have probably been dealt a rum deal.

The fact that the archbishop was only notified two weeks before the pope revealed just how far he was prepared to go in accommodating the Anglo-Catholics must have left him “starting to wonder if he has any friends left,” Gledhill wrote in the Times over the weekend.  “He is like the academic boy at school who no one wants to play with because he doesn’t understand the rules of fisticuffs,” she added.

Many religious figures have been indignant at the way the Vatican has behaved towards Williams, with his predecessor George Carey urging him to protest at its “appalling” injustice.

The Vatican is expected to reveal more details about the offer in the next week or two. The conservative Anglican group Forward in Faith debated the offer in London at the weekend and decided its members would be consulted, with a decision due in late February after the CofE general synod.

Some women priests say that timing is cynical, based on emotional blackmail.

“It is beginning to sound like an abusive marriage,” said the pro-women ordination spokeswoman Reverend Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, chaplain at University College, Durham, in northern England. She suggested the disaffected will threaten to leave unless concessions are made on the possible ordination of women bishops, which is due to be discussed at the synod.

(Photo: Rev. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes)

The Vatican made moves 17 years ago to attract Anglicans when the ordination of women priests was being discussed.  “They could say we will leave unless you do this and that,” she  said.

What do you think? Will Queen Elizabeth surprise Pope Benedict and defend the faith, as she did with Pope John Paul? Or will diplomacy prevail?

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(Photo: Anglican Bishop of London Richard Chartres with wife and children, 5 Sept 1995/Russell Boyce. Under the Vatican offer, bishops could not be married and Anglican bishops who join the Catholic Church must give up their episcopal rank.)

Pope Benedict’s decision to fling open Catholicism’s doors to disaffected Anglicans could challenge centuries of Catholic opposition to married priests and may bring the Church closer to married priesthood.

The opening announced last week could lead to as many as half a million Anglican faithful, some 50 of their bishops and thousands of married Anglican priests converting to Catholicism.

The conservative Anglicans, who oppose female priesthood and gay bishops, now have an exit strategy. They will have their own niche within the Catholic Church and will be allowed to convert as individuals, parishes or even as whole dioceses.

They will not have to jettison their Anglican traditions and many will find their new parishes headed by formerly Anglican married priests who will become de facto married Catholic priests after they convert.

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the pope’s job until he was elected in 2005, acknowledged that the Vatican will have some serious explaining to do to groups that have been pushing for a married priesthood: “I think for some people it seems to be a problem because as you know there have been many Catholic priests who have left the priesthood to get married, and the question arises, ‘well, if these former Anglicans can be married priests, what about us?’”

Read the whole analysis here.

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Conservative bishops who say they represent almost half the world’s Anglicans urged fellow believers on Sunday to reform the Anglican Communion rather than take up Pope Benedict’s invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church.

(Photo: A Bible, 20 Aug 2008/Simon Newman)

The “Global South” group, which last year seemed close to quitting the Communion, said those opposed to gay clergy and other liberal reforms should “stand firm with us in cherishing the Anglican heritage (and) pursuing a common vocation.”

Indirectly declining the pope’s offer to receive alienated Anglicans, the group called on the Communion’s member churches to adopt a “covenant” to coordinate policy in the loosely structured 77-million-strong worldwide Anglican community.

“The proposed Anglican Covenant … gives Anglican churches worldwide a clear and principled way forward in pursuing God’s divine purposes together,” said the statement posted on their website. Conservatives see this plan as a way to block liberal reforms in the United States, Canada and Britain.

A call to convert to Catholicism by bishops in developing countries, where the faith is expanding, could have dealt a body blow to the Anglican church, founded when King Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 to divorce one wife and marry another.

Read the full story here.

Read also our earlier blog posts on this story:

Vatican-Anglican: where in the details will the devil be hiding? — October 24th, 2009

How many Anglicans will switch to the Roman Catholic Church? — October 23rd, 2009

Pope makes it easier for Anglicans to switch to Rome — October 20th, 2009

Orthodox Anglicans skate around schism at conference — June 20th, 2008

Is Benedict planning to take in traditionalist Anglicans? — June 12, 2008

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If “the devil is in the details” when two groups seek a merger, where will he be hiding when the Vatican talks with disaffected Anglicans who want to join the Roman church? Neither the agenda nor the schedule for these talks are clear, but some issues are starting to emerge as possible hurdles to a smooth switchover for Anglicans who want to “swim the Tiber.”

(Photo: St. Peter’s Basilica and the Tiber River, 23 Dec 1999/Mario Laporta)

There is little clarity yet on either side. The Vatican has not spelled out the conditions of the “Apostolic Constitution” to accept Anglicans who want to join Catholicism while maintaining some of their own traditions. Additionally, there are varied faces of Anglicanism, which in its dogmas and practices stands somewhere between Roman Catholicism and Protestant traditions such as the Lutheran or Reformed churches. This will clearly take a while to work out.

The spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, played down any problems when the offer was announced. But several reactions from Anglicans to Tuesday’s announcement, including from some inclined to make the switch, have begun to trace the outlines of the looming doctrinal debates among Anglicans worldwide and between the Vatican and Anglicans knocking at its door.

Bishop Donald Harvey, moderator of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), posted a succinct summary of sticky issues on his group’s website. This group of about 3,500 regular churchgoers is a diocese of the breakaway conservative Anglican Church in North America, which claims over 100,000 members across the continent. Harvey asked:

1. “Will the Roman Catholic Church require Anglican priests who choose this option to be re-ordained?

(NB:  The Vatican has traditionally said that Anglican ordinations are not valid.) 

2. “Will people who accept this invitation have to subscribe to Roman Catholic dogmas to which the Anglican Formularies are diametrically opposed – such as “Papal Infallibility”, the “Immaculate Conception” and Transubstantiation?

(NB: Papal infallibility says the pope cannot err when he rules on matters of faith and morals. The Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin is not a dogma in Anglicanism, although some Anglo-Catholics believe it. The Catholic dogma of transubstantiation says bread and wine actually become the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, while Anglicans believe this transformation is only symbolic.)

3. “Will Anglican priests – especially married ones – choosing to accept the Roman Catholic Church’s invitation have equal status with existing Roman Catholic clergy and will their ministry be interchangeable and welcomed in Roman Catholic parishes?”

In his statement, Harvey brought up another issue that could lead to disagreement — the meaning of the word “catholic.” Anglicans say they are a part of an undivided catholic (i.e. universal) Church, while Rome says it represents the true Church and churches that split off at the Reformation are not churches in the true sense. Pope Benedict has been quite clear on this point, most notably in his 2000 doctrinal document Dominus Iesus. Harvey quoted an ANiC priest as saying: “As for me and my house, we will remain ever faithful to the authority and primacy of the Holy Scriptures and the Faith and Order of the undivided Catholic Church. I need not become a Roman Catholic to be a Catholic Christian. As an Anglican, I am a Catholic Christian.”

(Photo: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict at the Vatican, 23 Nov 2006/Alessandro Bianchi)

Bishop Jack Iker, head of the Episcopal (U.S. Anglican) diocese of Forth Worth, Texas, touched on the same issue in his reaction: “Not all Anglo-Catholics can accept certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, nor do they believe that they must first convert to Rome in order to be truly catholic Christians.”

Pittsburgh-based Archbishop Robert Duncan, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America formed by that split off from the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada last year, wrote on the ACNA website: “This significant decision represents a recognition of the integrity of the Anglican tradition within the broader Christian church” and added that “our historic differences over church governance, dogmas regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary and the nature of Holy Orders continue to be points of prayerful dialogue.”

Another point is ecclesiology, or what the precise nature and role of a church are. The Roman Catholic Church is hierarchical, with an authoritative pope at its head, a set body of dogma and a clear chain of command through bishops down to the parish level. Anglicanism is organised around national churches with considerable autonomy and its spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has influence but not authority over them.

As Rev. Rod Thomas, chairman of the evangelical Reform group in the Church of England (C of E), noted on his website: “If priests really are out of sympathy with the C of E’s doctrine (as opposed to the battles we are having over women’s ministry and sexuality), then perhaps it is better they make a clean break and go to Rome. However, when they do, they will have to accommodate themselves to Rome’s top-down approach to church life, whereas the C of E has always stressed the importance of decision making at the level of the local church.”

(Photo: All Saints Cathedral Church in Nairobi, 3 Nov 2003/Antony Njuguna)

Reactions from Africa, where traditional Anglicans opposed to female and gay bishops are the majority, showed that some heads of the national churches there prefer the Anglican Communion’s “unity in diversity” to Roman discipline. “Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have been disillusioned by the liberal churches in the West that created a theological crisis with their liberal attitude to sexuality. Many of them would be happy with the Pope’s initiative. But the African Church does not need that because it is strong on biblical theology,” the primate of the Church of Uganda, Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, was quoted on the local New Vision website as saying. “The African Anglican Church has undertaken measures to deal with the excesses of liberalism that invaded the western church. We are a Bible-believing Church.”

What do you think? Where do you see potentials bumps on the disaffected Anglicans’ road to Rome?

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Disaffected Anglican Dioceses in Papua New Guinea, the United States and Australia might consider switching to Roman Catholicism under a new constitution offered by Pope Benedict, according to Forward in Faith (FiF), a worldwide association of Anglicans opposed to the ordination of women priests or bishops. About a dozen bishops from the Church of England, the Anglican mother church, are also likely to convert, it says.

(Photo: Vatican Cardinal William Levada announces offer to Anglicans, 20 Oct 2009/Tony Gentile)

The Church of England could not comment on numbers likely to convert, with one source adding: “It’s all guesswork.” But Stephen Parkinson, director of FiF, said a figure of 1,000 Church of England priests, reported in the media, was “credible.” Read our news story on this here.

Estimates of laity are “much harder,” Parkinson said.  “Inevitably if you say 1,000 priests you are then talking about several thousand laity.”

But he said he “would not be at all surprised at a dozen” bishops in England switching. However, in England, bishops were likely to move individually rather than take their entire dioceses, which tend to have diverse views, with them. Some Anglican clergy anticipated numbers would not be great, pointing to the early 1990s when about 500 switched over the ordination of women priests. Some later returned to Anglicanism.

Outside the Anglican Communion, a breakaway group called the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) looks keen to join the Catholic Church along with its 400,000 followers. Archbishop John Hepworth, the Australia-based head of the TAC, posted a delighted reply to Pope Benedict’s offer on his website. The TAC petitioned the Vatican to be received into the Church two years ago.  Archbishop Hepworth wrote:

“We are profoundly moved by the generosity of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI…  May I firstly state that this is an act of great goodness on the part of the Holy Father. He has dedicated his pontificate to the cause of unity. It more than matches the dreams we dared to include in our petition of two years ago. It more than matches our prayers… I have made a commitment to the Traditional Anglican Communion that the response of the Holy See will be taken to each of our National Synods. They have already endorsed our pathway. Now the Holy See challenges us to seek in the specific structures that are now available the “full, visible unity, especially Eucharistic communion”, for which we have long prayed and about which we have long dreamed. That process will begin at once.”

What do you think? Will large numbers of Anglicans switch to Rome?

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The Church of England could restrict the powers of some women bishops under a plan designed to end a rift between traditionalists who want to keep the all-male senior clergy and liberals demanding equality.  The proposal has reignited the long-running debate over a supposed ecclesiastical “stained-glass ceiling” that stops women from attaining the most senior roles in the church.

The Church of England body reviewing the law on women bishops, the Revision Committee, has voted to change the rules to remove certain powers from female bishops in dioceses where they face opposition from traditionalists. Specially-appointed male bishops would assume those powers and the new system would be written into British law, the committee said in a statement.

(Photo: Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the U.S. Episcopal Church, 4 Nov 2006/Jonathan Ernst)

While Anglicans in the United States, Canada and Australia already have women bishops, conservatives in many other parts of the Communion strongly oppose them. They say there is nothing in the Bible or church history to support women bishops. Liberals, who argue that women should be treated equally, said the latest proposals to allow women bishops, albeit with reduced powers in some areas, risked creating a two-tier church.

“Where there are parishes who don’t recognize women bishops and want to look to another bishop, that diocesan bishop’s duties and responsibilities to those parishes would be reduced automatically,” a Church of England spokesman said. “Those duties would pass to this other bishop.”

Read the whole story here.

Church of England statement “Revision Committee on Women in the Episcopate”

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(Photo: L’Aquila’s Santa Maria of Collemaggio Basilica, 13 April 2009/Daniele La Monaca)

They came, they prayed, they appealed.

Religious leaders from around the world held their own not-so-mini “G8 summit” in Italy on June 16-17. The “Fourth Summit of Religious Leaders on the occasion of the G8,” as the meeting was officially called,   started with a visit to L’Aquila, the central Italian city severely damaged by an earthquake on April 6. That will be the venue in July of the actual summit of the G8 club of industrial nations.

Nearly 130 religious leaders and diplomats then moved to Rome where they held two days of talks under the auspices of the Italian foreign ministry. This was the religious leaders’ fourth annual meeting, following those held in conjunction with earlier G8 summits in Moscow, Cologne and Sapporo.

They were hosted by Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, the bishop of Terni who is one of the founders of the Sant’ Egidio community and a member of the Italian bishops conference commission for ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue.

Apart from the Catholic hosts, the participants including high-level Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox, Hindus, Anglicans, Zoroastrians, Jews, Shintoists and Buddhists.

Their final appeal, which will be published soon on the Italian Catholic Church’s website, was sent to reporters in advance. It is posted on the next page.

(more…)

One passage in Pope Benedict’s letter today about the Williamson affair particularly stood out — the part where he confessed to almost complete ignorance of the Internet. There can’t be many other world leaders who could write  the following lines without blushing: “I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.” This made it look as if the world’s largest church was ignorant of the world’s liveliest communications network.

That’s not the case, of course. The Vatican runs a very full website of its own, www.vatican.va, as do Vatican Radio (in 38 languages), Catholic bishops conferences, dioceses and parishes as well as Catholic publications all around the world.

In fact, somebody in the Vatican seems to be following the Internet far more closely that the mainstream media (including ourselves), which missed an interesting little nugget now popping up on tech blogs and some Catholic sites mostly in Europe. The Holy See’s representative to the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently warned against the tensions that could be caused if ICANN created new top-level domain names (so-called gTLDs) for religions.

In a letter to the president of ICANN dated February 20, its representative Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani spoke of “the possible perils connected with the assignment of new gTLDs with reference to religious traditions (e.g., .catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam; .muslim, .buddhist, etc…). These gTLDs could provoke  competing claims among theological and religious traditions and could possibly result in bitter disputes that would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition.”

ICANN President Paul Twomey responded on February 24 that ICANN was indeed considering new faith-based gTLDs but “an objection may be filed if there is substantial oppostion to the gTLD application from a significant portion of the community to which the gTLD string may be explicitly or implicitly targeted.”

Imagine a group of technicians and managers having to decide who gets to use the domain name “.islam”? What could they tell the Vatican if they ignore Polvani’s plea and let “.catholic” domain names proliferate out of control? What about that “.orthodox” domain name — orthodox what?

Is this a good idea?

With the financial crisis erupting around the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Protestant theologian John Calvin, many people in the Netherlands — where his thinking played an important role in forming the local culture — are looking back at his influence and what he might say of the current crisis and the people involved.

(Photo: Dutch Old Masters used skulls and stubby candles to portray the Calvinist idea of the vanity of greed/Robin van Lonkhuijsen/United Photos)

Several of the issues are described in my feature “Moral rebound finds Dutch exploring Calvin.” One of the most interesting elements was an online survey by the Protestant newspaper Trouw called “C-Factor.”

“Test how Calvinist you are, in your convictions, at work and in your love life,” it said in its challenge to readers. It asks 25 questions (sorry, only in Dutch) such as:

“I should really work harder.”

“Making exceptions to rules weakens the rules.”

” I like to dine in luxury.”

“Other people are more important than me.”

“I borrow money for nice things even when I don’t really need them.”

Tests like this are amusing, but you have to wonder about the results. A Dutch reporter in our Amsterdam bureau, who grew up in the Dutch “Bible Belt” and went to a high school in Kampen named after Calvin, got an unexpected 47 percent. A Catholic colleague with a solid Jesuit education got 58 percent. I’m a Brit with no links to Calvinism in my background, and I ended up scoring 75 percent.

Have you ever taken these “test your religion” tests? Were you surprised?