Bishops praise Runcie's ecumenism

THE ecumenical commitment of Dr Robert Runcie, who announced on Sunday that he will retire as Archbishop of Canterbury eight months early, was praised this week by members of the Anglican and Roman Catholic International Commission lARCIC ii).
Bishop Cormac Murphy O'Connor of Arundel and Brighton, who is co-chairman of ARCIC, said that he was sorry to learn that Archbishop Runcie is to resign in January next year. He thanked the archbishop for his work towards church unity at a difficult and sensitive time.
Bishop Murphy O'Connor stressed that the interest of the Catholic community in the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a sign of the awareness of real Christian unity already achieved. And he expressed the hope that Dr Runcie's successor would be similarly supportive of the work of ARCIC.
Speaking from Savannah, in the southern USA, Bishop Raymond Lessard, a Catholic
Leading article, page 4 representative of ARCIC. said that Dr Runcie would be greatly missed as a partner in the search for eventual church reunification.
Bishop Lessard, who was a Catholic observer at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, noted that Archbishop Runcie had displayed a genuine appreciation of the position of the Catholic church in the dialogue over ecumenism. At the same time, the bishop said, Dr Runcie had remained entirely faithful to his own Anglican communion.
Of the archbishop's ten years in office, Catholics will remember especially that Dr Runcie received Pope John Pail II at Canterbury Cathedral in May 1982, and that the archbishop himself met the Pope in the Vatican during a four-day visit in September last year.
A declaration signed by the Pope and Dr Runcie at the end of the historic Vatican meeting in 1989 said that the two had come together to "review obstacles which still impede close communion between the Catholic church and the Anglican communion".