"For our Church, it is not a pleasure to see the tensions existing in your communion. We pledged to make a journey towards unity, and the new tensions, though concerning very important questions, just slow down the progress we can make", thus Card. Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, primate of the five million Catholics in the United Kingdom, talked to the Anglican bishops and archbishops meeting in Canterbury for the Lambeth Conference. Murphy-O’Connor, protagonist from the beginning of the eighties of the dialogue between the Catholic and Anglican Churches taking place in the "ARCIC" commissions, recalled the initial enthusiasm, culminating in the historical visit of John Paul II in the English islands, the first visit of a Pope from the Reform of Henry VIII. Then, there were the difficulties of the nineties with the ordaining of woman pastors. Behind this problem, and behind moral issues, too, there is a deeper question, recalled Murphy-O’Connor: the ecclesiology question. "How do we interpret the Church? Where is it? Is it a simple federation with a common history and family ties? Is it a more compact body with well-developed authority structures? Above all, through which instruments will the Holy Spirit enable churches to take the most important decisions?".
