Reflections: ecumenical leader steps down

Sydney
2 June 2002

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Reflections: ecumenical leader steps down

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Reflections: ecumenical leader steps down

By Sr Trish Madigan

Plans by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, to retire in October, just before his 67th birthday, give his successor a useful lead-up time to prepare for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the world-wide consultative assembly of Anglican bishops, which meets every 10 years.

His retirement also creates an opportunity for the Anglican Church to restructure the Canterbury See which in recent years has developed a much clearer identity as a focus of unity at the heart of the Anglican Communion.

Although Archbishop Carey’s record in internal Anglican affairs is best left to Anglicans themselves to assess, his leadership in ecumenical relations could be said to have spanned one of the most eventful and productive periods in Anglican Church history.

George Carey was appointed in 1991, the year the seventh assembly of the World Council of Churches took place in Australia. This assembly, in a document known as the Canberra Statement, charted the challenges facing the ecumenical movement as Christians approached the third millennium.

It called on Churches to recognise the apostolic faith present in each other, to endeavour to give common witness to the Gospel and to express more clearly at the local level the degree of communion that already exists.

Under Dr Carey’s leadership the Anglican Church has taken these challenges seriously. The international Porvoo Agreement (1996) was finalised between the Anglican and Lutheran Churches. It led very quickly to the two Churches coming into full communion in the US (January 2001) and Canada (July 2001) with steps to unity also being discussed in such places as Brazil, Africa and Australia.

He helped initiate - and co-chaired with Cardinal Edward Cassidy - the high-level meeting of Anglican and Catholic bishops in Mississauga in 2000 which resulted in the setting up of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission. There is now a growing impetus towards the creation of more visible structures of unity between Anglicans and Catholics at diocesan and parish level.

In some places this has occurred as part of a formal Covenant relationship involving other local Churches as well.

Archbishop Carey has had a close personal relationship with Pope John Paul II and visited the Bishop of Rome on several occasions - more often than any of his predecessors.

He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to walk in procession beside the Pope in full episcopal regalia. Together with an Orthodox leader, he was invited to join John Paul II in opening the Holy Door to begin the Jubilee Year.

George Carey gained a reputation as a ‘reforming archbishop’. A hallmark of his ministry has been his wise leadership in a period of immense change and re-alignment for the Anglican Communion.

People with differing views have acknowledged the insight and sensitivity he brought to issues around which there has been much diversity of opinion, and to people who passionately held opposing convictions. A measure of his success might be that both Catholic and Anglican could recognise in him a man whose commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is uncompromising.

Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen has called him a ‘convinced evangelical’ and Catholic Archbishop Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has described him as a person of ‘integrity, zeal and courage’.

Sr Trish Madigan is liaison officer for the Archdiocesan Commission of Ecumenism