Anglican leader, pope meet amid tensions

Pope Benedict XVI and his Anglican counterpart, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, had "cordial discussions" Saturday, the Vatican said amid tensions between the two churches.

The strictly private meeting came just two weeks after the Vatican made it easier for disgruntled Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, a move that caught Williams off-guard, saying he had been informed of it "at a very late stage."

The two leaders "focused on recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion," the Vatican said in a statement, adding that they vowed to "continue and to consolidate the ecumenical relationship."

"Attention turned to the challenges facing all Christian communities at the beginning of this millennium, and to the need to promote forms of collaboration and shared witness in facing these challenges," the brief statement said.

The British press has painted Williams' visit, though scheduled long before the controversy, as a "showdown" between the two churches, but observers expected a show of unity.

The Vatican's new framework for Anglicans to become Roman Catholics "is not going to halt ecumenical progress," said Reverend Doctor R. William Franklin, associate director of the American Academy in Rome.

"People are saying they are not being prevented from going forward," he told AFP.

The two church leaders will "want to demonstrate good will and show that ecumenism is going forward on other issues," agreed veteran Vatican watcher Bruno Bartoloni, referring to theological questions and the issue of papal primacy.

The Vatican unveiled on November 9 what was described by The Times of London as "potentially the most explosive development in Anglican-Catholic relations since the Reformation."

The move, which could attract hundreds of Anglicans from around the world who oppose women and openly gay clergy, was a response to what the Holy See called "repeated and insistent" petitions.

"What has happened in reality is that both sides have recognised that ecumenism has failed," Bartoloni told AFP. "The Catholic Church has made clear that they will never agree on the question of women priests and bishops."

As a result, he said: "The Anglican reactionaries will go over to the Catholic Church. It actually suits both sides."

At a conference at Rome's Gregorian University on Thursday, Williams spoke of the "ecumenical glass (being) genuinely half-full" while acknowledging they had "unfinished business" to resolve.

The event "did a lot to help defuse the situation," said Franklin, who is also an academic fellow at the Anglican Centre in Rome.

While appearing conciliatory, Williams also laid down what he called a "challenge to recent Roman Catholic thinking" on women priests.

The archbishop asked: "Is there a way of recognising that somehow the corporate exercise of a Catholic and evangelical ministry remains intact even when there is dispute about the standing of female individuals?"

Ironically, Saturday's meeting came during long-planned events to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Johannes Willebrands, a Dutch cardinal who was a pioneer in Catholic ecumenism.

The Anglican Communion split from Catholicism in the 16th century, when Pope Clement VII refused to grant King Henry VIII a divorce.

The Church of England is the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has about 77 million followers. The Catholic Church counts some 1.1 billion faithful.