Archbishop of Canterbury visits Pope Francis in Rome

In a visit that has been widely covered in blogs and the media, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby traveled to Rome to visit with Pope Francis and to pray at the tomb of St. Peter. Rocco Palma has a very full story which you can read at his blog Whispers in the Loggia. Mr. Palma includes in his report the official Vatican translation of Pope Francis' address, which reads in part:

Your Grace, Dear Friends,

On the happy occasion of our first meeting, I make my own the words of Pope Paul VI, when he addressed Archbishop Michael Ramsey during his historic visit in 1966: "Your steps have not brought you to a foreign dwelling ... we are pleased to open the doors to you, and with the doors, our heart, pleased and honoured as we are ... to welcome you ‘not as a guest or a stranger, but as a fellow citizen of the Saints and the Family of God’" (cf. Eph 2:19-20).

I know that during Your Grace’s installation in Canterbury Cathedral you remembered in prayer the new Bishop of Rome. I am deeply grateful to you – and since we began our respective ministries within days of each other, I think we will always have a particular reason to support one another in prayer.

The history of relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church is long and complex, and not without pain. Recent decades, however, have been marked by a journey of rapprochement and fraternity, and for this we give heartfelt thanks to God. This journey has been brought about both via theological dialogue, through the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and via the growth of cordial relations at every level through shared daily lives in a spirit of profound mutual respect and sincere cooperation. In this regard, I am very pleased to welcome alongside you Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster. These firm bonds of friendship have enabled us to remain on course even when difficulties have arisen in our theological dialogue that were greater than we could have foreseen at the start of our journey.

I am grateful, too, for the sincere efforts the Church of England has made to understand the reasons that led my Predecessor, Benedict XVI, to provide a canonical structure able to respond to the wishes of those groups of Anglicans who have asked to be received collectively into the Catholic Church: I am sure this will enable the spiritual, liturgical and pastoral traditions that form the Anglican patrimony to be better known and appreciated in the Catholic world.

Hat tip to, among others, Charles Gilman for pointing out the stories.

The Prefect of the CDF & the Ordinaries

Here is the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Müller, flanked by Mgr Keith Newton, Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, and Mgr Jeffrey Steenson, Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, celebrating Holy Mass in St Peter's basilica on the morning of the Holy Father's resignation.

Hat tip to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham on Facebook.

Former Anglicans make thanksgiving pilgrimage to Rome

by David Kerr

Monsignor Keith Newton and other members of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham pose in St. Peter's Basilica

Rome, Italy, Feb 24, 2012 / 05:17 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Over 100 former Anglicans from the British Isles concluded a pilgrimage to Rome Feb. 24 in thanksgiving for the creation of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

“It has been quite poignant because almost all of the people who are with me were not Catholics until Easter last year,” Monsignor Keith Newton, the head of the U.K. ordinariate told CNA on Feb. 24.

The ordinariate was established last year by Pope Benedict XVI to give Anglicans the possibility of entering into communion with the Catholic Church while still preserving their “distinctive Anglican patrimony.”

“Now they have come to the center of Catholicism, they’ve come to the tombs of Sts. Peter and Paul to pray and to give thanks, and I think they’ve been genuinely moved by this, really,” Msgr. Newton said of his fellow pilgrims.

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham already has 57 priests and over 1,000 members throughout England, Wales and Scotland. This Easter it will receive another 200 lay people and 20 priests into the Church...

Read the full story on the site of the Catholic News Agency.

See also this video from Catholic News Service on the Ordinariate pilgrimage.

Festival of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran

The Papal Basilica of St. John Lateran is the Cathedral Church of the Pope, the Bishop of Rome (despite St. Peter's oft-mistaken identity thereas). Today, the feast of its dedication is a feast of the whole Latin Church, because this Church is the Mother Church of all Latin Christendom. It is also, of course, the one year anniversary of the publication of Anglicanorum coetibus.

Fr. Hunwicke has an Illuminating post the reveals the connections between Rome and Canterbury, which I quote below:

When S Augustine came to Canterbury, he built a cathedral church In honore Sancti Salvatoris. In other words, he gave it the same dedication as that of the papal cathedral church in Rome, the Lateran basilica, the Mother Church of the world. Later, just as Rome had the basilicas of Ss Peter and Paul, outside the walls because they were built on the sites of the cemeteries where the Apostles were buried (Roman burials were always outside city walls), so Canterbury was to have the great monastery of Ss Peter and Paul (vulgo S Augustine's), outside the city walls, where burials took place. And, to represent Great S Mary's in Rome, to the East of Ss Peter and Paul was the church of our Lady.

Nostalgia, nostalgia. Today's commemoration of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica is marked surely with tears for Anglican Catholics as we lament the ruin of the great Ecclesia Anglicana which, from her beginning, was a beacon and monument of Romanitas in these damp and misty islands of the North, at a time when distinctively Roman Christianity had not yet spread much further that Rome herself. As Blessed John Henry put it, Canterbury has gone its way, and York is gone, and Durham is gone, and Winchester is gone. It was sore to part with them. We clung to the vision of past greatness, and would not believe it could come to nought ... but the vivifying principle of truth, the shadow of S Peter, the grace of the Redeemer has left it. That old Church in its day became a corpse (a marvellous change!) and then it did but corrupt the air it once refreshed and cumber the ground which once it beautified.

Romanitas is, of course, still in the news. The Ordinariate will be directly under the Bishop of Rome himself; the Ordinary will be a Vicar of the Sovereign Pontiff. There may be those who see this as a sign of the Romanitas of Augustinian Canterbury in the centuries of its greatness and of its now departed glory, when the Primate was Legatus natus Sanctae Sedis. Another sentence of Newman's springs to mind: "A pledge to us from Rome of Rome's unwearied love".

The Vatican web site now has links to sites for all the Papal Basilicas, and so for those who can't be in Rome itself for this festival, here is the Virtual Tour of the Lateran Basilica.