Chairmen of ARCIC announced

Archbishop Longley and Anglican Archbishop David Moxon of New Zealand.

Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham and Archbishop David Moxon are to chair the third phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), which will begin in May with a meeting of 18 bishops and scholars in Italy.

The Vatican released a statement yesterday announcing that the dialogue commission would meet on May 17 to 27 at the ecumenical Monastery of Bose in northern Italy.

Several women will be involved in ARCIC III; the Anglican bishops and theologians named to the dialogue commission include Paula Gooder, a biblical scholar and professor at several British universities; and Bishop Linda Nicholls, the area bishop for Trent-Durham in the Diocese of Toronto. Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, a Canadian ecumenist and director for Unity Faith and Order at the Anglican Communion Office, is one of the ARCIC III co-secretaries.

The Catholic women named to ARCIC III are Janet Smith, a moral theologian at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, and Sister Teresa Okure, a professor of New Testament studies at the Catholic Institute of West Africa in Nigeria and a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.

When Pope Benedict XVI and Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, met in late 2009, they pledged to continue the formal dialogue even as the ordination of women as priests and bishops, the blessing of gay unions and the ordination of openly gay clergy threatened the unity of the Anglican Communion and made it more difficult for Catholics and Anglicans to see a way for their communities to draw closer together.

Shortly after the Pope and archbishop met, the Vatican announced that a new round of dialogue, referred to as ARCIC III, would deal with “fundamental questions regarding the Church as communion local and universal, and how in communion the local and universal Church comes to discern right ethical teaching”.

ARCIC was established after Pope Paul VI and Anglican Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury met in 1966. The first round of talks, known as ARCIC I, met from 1970 to 1982 and reached agreements on baptism, Eucharist and ministry, and began work on issues related to authority in the Church. ARCIC II met from 1983 to 2005 and reached agreements on papal authority, salvation and the church, the church as communion and on a variety of beliefs about Mary.

The other Anglican members are:

• Paula Gooder – canon theologian of Birmingham Cathedral; visiting lecturer at King’s College, London; associate lecturer at St. Mellitus College, London; honorary lecturer at the University of Birmingham; and senior research scholar at the Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, England;
• The Rt. Rev. Christopher Hill – bishop of the Diocese of Guildford, England; and chair of the Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England;
• The Rev. Mark McIntosh – Van Mildert canon professor of divinity in the department of theology and religion at the University of Durham in England;
• The Rt. Rev. Nkosinathi Ndwandwe – bishop suffragan of Natal, Southern Area, in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa;
• The Rt. Rev. Linda Nicholls – bishop for the episcopal area of Trent-Durham in the Diocese of Toronto, Anglican Church of Canada;
• The Rev. Michael Poon – director and Asian Christianity coordinator of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia at Trinity Theological College in Singapore, Province of South-East Asia;
• The Rev. Canon Nicholas Sagovsky – retiring canon theologian at Westminster Abbey in the Church of England (served on ARCIC II);
• The Rev. Peter Sedgwick – principal and warden of St. Michael’s College in Llandaff in the Church in Wales, where he teaches theology and social ethics; and
• The Rev. Charles Sherlock (a consultant to ARCIC III) – recently retired registrar of the Melbourne College of Divinity, Australia.

The other Roman Catholic members are:

• The Rt. Rev. Arthur Kennedy – auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of Boston, Massachusetts, and rector of St. John’s seminary;
• Professor Paul D. Murray – professor in the department of theology and religion at Durham University;
• Professor Janet E. Smith – professor of moral theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan; and a consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family;
• The Rev. Vimal Tirimanna CSsR from Colombo, Sri Lanka – professor of systematic moral theology at the Alphonsianum University in Rome;
• The Very Rev. Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB, from Ampleforth Abbey, England – a biblical scholar, and former general editor of the New Jerusalem Bible;
• Sister Teresa Okure SHCJ – academic dean and professor of New Testament studies at the Catholic Institute of West Africa, based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria;
• Fr. Adelbert Denaux – professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where he taught biblical studies and ecumenism (served on ARCIC II).

ARCIC III is supported by three co-secretaries: Monsignor Mark Langham of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; the Rev. Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, director of unity, faith and order for the Anglican Communion; and the Rev. Canon Jonathan Goodall, the archbishop of Canterbury’s secretary for ecumenical affairs.