The Conversations That Keep Churches Talking

What the Malines Conversations can teach all Christians about encounter, recognition and the patient work of Christian unity

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As County Ecumenical Officer for Norfolk and Waveney, my role is to encourage and support relationships between Christians and Churches of many traditions across our county. It is a non-denominational role that serves the whole Christian community rather than any one tradition. I write this reflection, however, as a Catholic, and there are aspects of our continuing Christian separation that I find deeply saddening. One of these is the lack of mutual recognition between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion over ordained ministry.

That particular division provides the background to this reflection, but it is not really its subject. Recently, I read Sorores in Spe (Sisters in Hope of the Resurrection), published by the Malines Conversations Group, and an article by theologian Thomas O’Loughlin explaining the work of the group and its history. Together they have reinforced some of my thinking about how Christian unity actually grows.

In my recent reflections on ecumenism, I have returned several times to three closely connected ideas: encounter, recognition and reception. The Malines Conversations offer a fascinating example of all three at work. The ecumenical journey begins with encounter. Through encounter we can come to recognise more fully what is genuinely Christian in one another; that recognition can make us receptive to what another Christian tradition has to give; and such reception can, over time, change the relationship between divided Christians.

The Malines story begins not with an ecumenical commission or an official Church document, but with a friendship. In 1890, the French Catholic priest Abbé Fernand Portal met the prominent Anglican layman Lord Halifax on the island of Madeira. Their conversations and friendship eventually contributed to the original Malines Conversations of 1921–26, when a small group of Anglicans and Catholics met under the hospitality of Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier to discuss some of the difficult questions separating their Churches. 

A century later, the conversation continues. Since 2013, the present Malines Conversations Group, an informal group of Anglican and Catholic theologians, has taken up that work again. Like its predecessor, friendship and conversation are important to the way it works. 

This is what particularly interests me about Malines. It shows what can happen when Christians who remain divided continue to meet, listen and take one another seriously. They come to know one another better, old assumptions can be questioned, and the possibility opens up of seeing something in another tradition that had previously been missed.

This, of course, does not mean overlooking the differences that remain between our Churches. Malines provides a good example. In 2021, the group published Sorores in Spe, which returned to one of the most difficult issues in Anglican-Catholic relations. In 1896, Pope Leo XIII’s Apostolicae Curae judged Anglican ordinations to be “absolutely null and utterly void”. Sorores in Spe argues that this judgement should now be reconsidered in the light of more than a century of theological development, liturgical renewal and Anglican-Catholic dialogue. 

There is substantial theology behind that argument but sadly, at least for me, Sorores in Spe has not led to a change in official Catholic teaching. That said, what particularly interests me here is the wider ecumenical question it raises: can we continue to speak about other Christians exactly as we did in the past when encounter, dialogue and friendship have changed how well we know and recognise one another?

That strikes me as an important ecumenical question far beyond this particular Anglican-Catholic disagreement. For me, it does not mean that doctrinal differences cease to matter once Christians become friendlier or understand one another better. It means that encounter can deepen our knowledge of one another, challenge assumptions we may have inherited, and sometimes allow us to see old questions differently.

Over the past sixty years, Anglican and Catholic relationships have developed not simply through theological documents but through what Sorores in Spe calls a “language of symbols”. Popes and Archbishops of Canterbury have prayed together. Gifts associated with episcopal ministry have been exchanged. Anglican and Catholic bishops have been commissioned for shared mission. Joint blessings have been given. The document suggests that such actions make visible a degree of mutual recognition which formal statements do not always appear fully to express. 

None of this makes theological dialogue unnecessary. Across the ecumenical movement, international and national dialogue commissions, theologians and study groups do work that local Churches Together groups cannot. Someone has to wrestle patiently with the difficult theological questions that continue to divide our churches. As O’Loughlin in his article observes, small groups of theologians working together can sometimes generate more “light” and less “heat” around those questions. 

But ecumenism does not happen only in theological commissions. Across Norfolk and Waveney, Christians from different traditions pray together, serve their communities together, study Scripture together and become friends. These may seem like small things, but they are where encounter becomes real and recognition grows – a point I repeatedly emphasise in my talks on Christian unity.

There is a lovely image at the end of O’Loughlin’s article. Members of the Malines group visited Reid’s Palace Hotel in Madeira, where Halifax and Portal had met more than a century earlier. Looking down its long nineteenth-century corridor, someone remarked that it was rather like ecumenism: “a long path”. 

My own experience of ecumenism certainly bears that out. Perhaps, though, we are too quick to judge ecumenical progress by what has not yet been resolved, or by the length of time it sometimes takes to reach agreement. Malines offers another way of looking at it. Christians who once spoke about one another from a distance now sit around the same table. They listen, disagree, pray and return together to difficult questions. In doing so, they sometimes discover things in one another that earlier generations could not see.

That is not Christian unity fulfilled, but it is movement towards it. Encounter makes recognition possible; recognition opens us to reception; and through reception our relationships can change.

Most of us will never sit on an international theological commission – I certainly doubt I ever will – but we can continue to show up locally. We can continue on our own ecumenical journey across Norfolk and Waveney: meeting one another, listening to one another and remaining together when differences cannot easily be resolved.

The path may be long. The important thing is that we keep walking it together.
 

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References
Malines Conversations Group (2021), Sorores in Spe Resurrectionis: “Sisters in Hope of the Resurrection”: A Fresh Response to the Condemnation of Anglican Orders (1896).
Full text and supporting material

O’Loughlin, T. (2022), ‘Catholic-Anglican group behind ongoing ecumenical explorations’, La Croix International, 26 May 2022.

Church of England (2024) - The Malines Conversations Group
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Article and image by Dr Ian Watson, County Ecumenical Officer for Norfolk and Waveney. He writes regular reflections exploring Christian unity, ecumenical encounter and the relationships between the Christian traditions.

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