2026 may be a turning point in Anglican-Catholic dialogue
Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury on March 25, the first woman ever to hold the post. On the surface of it, there was a great deal of good feeling around the historic occasion. Beneath the surface, however, there are rumblings suggesting tensions between the Holy See and Canterbury may be coming to a head.
First, the good feeling.
The installation service was attended by Archbishop Richard Moth of Westminster. The next day, Mullally and Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, celebrated morning prayer in the Chapel of Our Lady Martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Common Declaration by Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey, which was signed on March 24, 1966.
A message from Pope Leo XIV was given to Mullally, which said “we have continued to walk together” and stressed the need to continue “recognizing one another as brothers and sisters in Christ by reason of our common baptism.”
It was also announced that the new Archbishop of Canterbury will meet with Pope Leo in the Vatican when she visits Rome, sometime between April 25 and 28.
We need not doubt the sincerity of all those expressions of good fellowship to see how long simmering tensions may be getting ready to boil over. For that, however, a little history is in order.
The Archbishop of Canterbury is both the head of the Church of England and the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. This protestant body is an association of independent churches, including the Episcopal Church in the U.S., that together have more than 100 million members.
Anglicans are often seen as being divided into three major groups: High Church Anglicans, who in many ways are similar to Catholics, many calling themselves Anglo-Catholics; Low Church Anglicans, who are more similar to Calvinists and are less liturgical; and Broad Anglicans, who are much more liberal theologically.
In the 1980s, many Anglo-Catholics became Roman Catholic, and many of them followed Pope St. John Paul II’s “pastoral provision” allowing former Anglican clerics to be ordained in the Catholic Church and creating a special “Use” of the Mass similar to the Anglican liturgy.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI established three Ordinariates – special jurisdictions – to serve formerly Anglican parishes and faithful who came into full communion with Rome and desired to maintain their liturgical traditions.
That move caused not a little friction with Canterbury.
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Just weeks before Mullally’s inauguration, the Vatican held a meeting with the leaders of the Ordinariates and published a text stemming from this meeting on March 24, the day before Mullally’s formal installation.
The Vatican document said the “Anglican heritage” in the Catholic Church included a distinctive “ecclesial ethos” marked by the broad participation of both clergy and laity in the life and governance of the Church. It also said the Ordinariates promote a pastoral culture in which divine worship and daily life are profoundly interconnected and enjoy a strong tradition of preaching grounded in Scripture, “recognizing that nourishing people intellectually is an integral part of nourishing their souls.”
In a piece for Anglican Ink, Episcopalian Father George Conger calls the Vatican’s latest move on the Ordinates a “shot across Mullally’s bow.”
“The Vatican document does not mention Mullally or the Church of England by name, and no official statement links the two events. Yet for conservative Anglicans, the calendar itself creates a commentary,” he writes.
“As Canterbury presses ahead with a model of Anglican identity increasingly at odds with what Rome understands as the Catholic and apostolic tradition, the Holy See chooses this week to say, in effect: The best of Anglicanism—its prayer, its preaching, its pastoral care, its devotion to Our Lady at Walsingham, its love of beauty and concern for the poor—has a permanent home here,” the Anglican priest says.
If Mullally’s appointment set some of the longstanding cultural and institutional problems facing relations between the Vatican and the Anglican Communion in high relief, it also illustrated tensions within Anglicanism.
The Church of England is the official religion of England, with the appointment of bishops supervised by the British government.
This problem was highlighted – humorously – in the British TV show Yes, Prime Minister 40 years ago, in the 1986 episode “The Bishop’s Gambit.”
Prime Minister James Hacker: Humphrey, what’s a Modernist in the Church of England?
Secretary Humphrey Appleby: Ah, well, the word “Modernist” is code for non-believer.
Hacker: You mean an atheist?
Appleby: No, Prime Minister. An atheist clergyman couldn’t continue to draw his stipend. So, when they stop believing in God, they call themselves “Modernists.”
Hacker: How could the Church of England suggest an atheist as Bishop of Bury St. Edmunds?
Appleby: Well, very easily. The Church of England is primarily a social organization, not a religious one.
Hacker: Is it?
Appleby: Oh yes. It’s part of the rich social fabric of this country. So bishops need to be the sorts of chaps who speak properly and know which knife and fork to use. The sort of people one can look up to.
Although most British people get this joke, it often went over the Vatican’s head. Even the establishment of the Ordinariate was fumbled. It took as long as it did to come into being largely because the Vatican liked to deal with Canterbury. However, most Anglo-Catholics lived outside of Britain, especially in the United States.
(Anglo-Catholics stemmed from the Oxford Movement in the 1800s, by the way. The young university students who joined it to become priests were often disliked by the Church leaders in England and were sent to serve outside of Britain. Many of them landed in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and the first parish using the “Anglican Use” was in Texas. Saint John Henry Newman was a leader of the Oxford Movement before becoming Catholic, and was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo last year.)
The liberal Church of England also has problems with more conservative members of the Anglican Communion, most of whom live in Africa and comprise the vast majority of Anglicans who go to church on Sunday.
At the same time the Anglican Ordinariates were meeting in the Vatican, conservative Anglicans were meeting in Abuja, Nigeria. They established the Global Anglican Council, which opposes the liberal trends in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church, including allowing same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly LGBTQ+ clergy.
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Some Catholic observers are saying the Vatican should begin focusing its dialogue with the Anglicans towards Abuja, and move away from Canterbury.
Although not mentioning the Ordinariate or the Anglican bishops meeting in Abuja in his letter to Mullally, Pope Leo acknowledged that the relationship between Rome and Canterbury is changing.
He said they “know that the ecumenical journey has not always been smooth.”
“Despite much progress, our immediate predecessors, Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, acknowledged frankly that ‘new circumstances have presented new disagreements among us’,” Leo added.
However, some are now saying these differences are creating a new environment for the dialogue between the Vatican and Anglicans.
“[The Vatican] has said, in doctrinal black and white, that the Anglican tradition at its best is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be received, purified and shared,” Conger writes in Anglican Ink about the statement on the Ordinariate.
“Set beside the spectacle at Canterbury, that claim lands with particular force. Whether conservative Anglicans receive it as an opportunity or treat it as background noise may prove decisive for the future of the Anglican story they hope to hand on,” the Anglican priest adds.
When they meet next month, Pope Leo and Mullally will have much more to talk about than which knife and fork is best to use.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome