CHRISTIAN CHURCHES
Church of England: Rowan Williams to the Synod During a difficult meeting of the General Synod, the national assembly of the Church of England, which met in London from 8 to 12 February, the Primate Rowan Williams gave a wide-ranging speech, touching on all the issues on the Synod’s agenda. With regard to the Equality Bill, against discrimination, in particular discrimination against homosexuals, and on assisted suicide, the Archbishop said that “it is a mistake to grant to governments authority that could impact in other and even weightier areas” of life. On the question of assisted suicide he warned: “Once the possibility is there, it will not only be utilized by the smallish number of high-profile hard cases, but will also create an ethical framework in which the worthwhileness of some lives is undermined by the legal expression of what feels like public impatience with protracted dying and ‘unproductive’ lives”. With regard to the “Anglican Communion Covenant”, the document recently endorsed by Williams himself to seek to safeguard the unity of the Anglican Communion, Williams said with regard to the debate on women bishops: “Whatever we decide, we need to look for a resolution that allows some measure of continuing dignity and indeed liberty to all. It isn’t enough to brush aside the problems some [people] find”. The Archbishop of Canterbury thus invited the members of the Synod to try to see things in a “three-dimensional” spirit: that “requires us to take time”. “It will deepen out desire to be fed and instructed by each other, so that we are all the more alarmed at the prospect of being separated”.CEC: work group for reform The work group that the assembly of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) appointed in Lyons last July to prepare the way for the reform of the CEC met for the second time in Berlin on 6-7 February. The 15 members have been asked to deliver to the Central Committee, by 31 December 2011, a document that formulates a plan for the “reform of the CEC as a whole, its basic objectives and general outlook”. The timetable for the work had been defined in November: now the work group is preparing a document to be shared with the churches to analyse the situation in which the CEC is now operating with a view to defining its mission, vision and priorities. At its meeting in Berlin the group held a long meeting with the chairmen of the Church and Society, Migrants and Dialogue Commissions, as well as with the CEC’s director of finance. These talks, says the press release, “had a strictly confidential form and were aimed at offering the work group a deeper understanding of the challenges, external and internal, that the European organization is facing”. These challenges include not least the crisis that is also affecting the churches and having inevitable repercussions on the CEC itself, with the result, for example, that it cannot permit the replacement in the immediate future of Pastor Luca Negro who ended his term of employment as head of communications at Geneva in December. But there are also some “problems of authority”, as Charbonnier defined them, which have to do with “difficulties between persons”, but also “difficulties in defining priorities”. An internal debate within the CEC has in fact long been opened on whether the offices in Brussels (the Church and Society Commission chaired by the Rev. Rudiger Noll), which follow the European institutions and ‘lobby’ on behalf of the churches, should magnetize the main economic and structural weight of the CEC, involving a transfer of the offices in Geneva as a whole to the European capital, or whether the priority should rather be in the dialogue between the churches on more strictly ecclesial and theological questions (now under the scrutiny of the Churches in Dialogue Commission, chaired by the Romanian Orthodox Viorel Ionita). The work group in Berlin “decided to continue the preparation of the two documents of analysis”, says the communiqué, and in its forthcoming meetings “will discuss the question: why ought the CEC to exist in 2020?”. A major concern for the group is the question of “transparency”; this has led it to open a website (www.cecrevision.dk) to provide a space for the suggestions of the churches on the CEC reform. The next meeting of the work group will be in Hungary in October. Lent: the message of BartholomewChristians are called to live the time of the Great Lent with “a joyful attitude”. For Lent is a “precious gift” given by God to “detoxify the soul” and liberate the body from everything that “is superfluous and harmful”. So writes the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I in his message for Lent 2010. “Fasting, temperance, moderation, the curbing of desires, fervent prayer, confession and the other factors that characterize the period of the Great Lent – writes Bartholomew – must by no means be regarded as onerous duties, unbearable burdens, or a kind of forced labour that lead to discouragement or sorrow”. Lent, after all, “teaches us to walk daily with a little bit less”. It teaches us to eliminate “waste” and “ostentation”. It calls us to ignore “the provocations of advertising” and to gain a better understanding of other people’s needs. For this and for other reasons, we must live this period as a time of “genuine festivity and jubilation”.
