Rome And Canterbury Through Four Centuries

"A Crossroad book." Bibliography: p. 388-403.

Rome and Canterbury tells the story of the determined but little known work being done to end the nearly five hundred year old divisions between the Roman Catholic and the Anglican/Episcopal Churches. The break was never intended, has never been fully accepted and is experienced, by many, as a painful and open wound. It is a personal account that begins the story by reviewing the relevant history and theology, looks at where we are today, and concludes with some reflections on faith and belief in the US.

Six pen-portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury during Queen Victoria's reign show how the Church of England and the Anglican Communion became what they are today.

This book discusses the different understandings of 'catholicity' that emerged in the interactions between the Church of England and other churches - particularly the Roman Catholic Church and later the Old Catholic Churches - from the early 1830s to the early 1880s. It presents a pre-history of ecumenism, which isolates some of the most distinctive features of the ecclesiological positions of the different churches as these developed through the turmoil of the nineteenth century. It explores the historical imagination of a range of churchmen and theologians, who sought to reconstruct their churches through an encounter with the past whose relevance for the construction of identity in the present went unquestioned. The past was no foreign country but instead provided solutions to the perceived dangers facing the church of the present. Key protagonists are John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, as well as a number of other less well-known figures who made their distinctive mark on the relations between the churches. The key event in reshaping the terms of the debates between the churches was the Vatican Council of 1870, which put an end to serious dialogue for a very long period, but which opened up new avenues for the Church of England and other non-Roman European churches including the Orthodox. In the end, however, ecumenism was halted in the 1880s by an increasingly complex European situation and an energetic expansion of the British Empire, which saw the rise of Pan-Anglicanism at the expense of ecumenism.

When the British thought of themselves as a Protestant nation their natural enemy was the pope and they adapted their view of history accordingly. In contrast, Rome's perspective was always considerably wider and its view of Britain was almost invariably positive, especially in comparison to medieval emperors, who made and unmade popes, and post-medieval Frenchmen, who treated popes with contempt. As the twenty-first-century papacy looks ever more firmly beyond Europe, this new history examines political, diplomatic and cultural relations between the popes and Britain from their vague origins, through papal overlordship of England, the Reformation and the process of repairing that breach.

From St Augustine in the sixth century to Rowan Williams in the twenty-first, the archbishops of Canterbury have provided leadership for the English Church. Those called to the office have included saints and scholars, men of faith and men of action. More than a hundred archbishops of Canterbury have offered spiritual leadership and political influence, whether in co-operation with the secular power or as its critics. Royal dynasties have come and gone, but the succession of the Canterbury primates has provided a remarkably continuous thread running through the history of England. The Mitre and the Crown draws upon a wealth of recent scholarly literature to relate the story of the archbishops against a backdrop of more than fourteen centuries of English ecclesiastical history. It examines the social and cultural experiences that shaped the holders of the archiepiscopal office, together with the personal talents they brought to the service of both Church and State.