Protestants urged to co-ordinate Rome contacts

BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
ANGLICANS and Metho dists who are currently engaged in separate dialogues with Rome are urged, in a working group's report just published in London, to start drawing them together "as soon as possible." The report was that of a high-level eight member Anglica nMethodist working group set up earlier this year to report on and clarify issues of dissension in the currently stalemated scheme for reuniting the two Churches.
This scheme, which has twice been accepted by the Methodist Conference but has so far failed to gain a sufficient 75 per cent majority in the Church of England, is due to be voted on again at the Anglican General Synod at York on July 14.
It provides for reunion in two stages—the first of intercommunion, the second of full organic union — and some Anglicans have expresed anxiety lest its implementation
should create new barriers between the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
Most of the working group's 36-page report is devoted to domestic issues of dissension, but it includes a whole two-page chapter on relations with Rome and concludes this by saying:
"It will be seen . . that both at the international and at the national levels Anglican and Methodist contacts with Rome have followed parallel courses. At stage 11 (of organic union) these two separate sets of conversations will necessarily become one. It is important that as soon as possible they should be drawn together."
Earlier in this chapter the working group says that Anglican anxiety lest reunion with the Methodists should create new barriers with the Catholic Church "has been sharpened as a closer relationship with Rome has in these last years seemed to become much more of a real possi hility."
The report recalls, howeser, that the joint Unity Commission which produced the
present Anglican-Methodist reunion scheme had Catholic observers at several of its meetings. "They concluded," says the report, "that the implementing of the Scheme was not likely to create new barriers, and the reaction of a number of Roman Catholic theologians since the Scheme was published (in 1968) has strengthened this view."
A "serious dialogue" between the Anglican and Catholic Churches was initiated when Archbishop Michael
Ramsey of Canterbury visited Pope Paul in 1966. In the case of the Methodists. world dialogue also began in 1966 when the 'World Methodist Council at a meeting in London appointed a group to meet a similar group ap pointed by the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity. The dialogues have also been conducted on a national level.