Pope Benedict Putting Church On Path To Unity

by James G. Wiles

By coincidence, when word came of Pope Benedict’s initiative towards the Anglicans, I was re-reading Father Basset’s history of the English Jesuits.

The day before, I had viewed "A Man for All Seasons" and recalled the paintings in the London Oratory. One of my prized possessions is a beautifully printed account of the English martyrs of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem Hospitaler, a gift of Professor William Tighe of Muhlenberg University. When I took my wife to Ireland for the first time in 1994, we spent more time wandering through ruined abbeys than we did in the pubs.

For someone with that kind of personal background, it was impossible not to think of Psalm 126: “When the Lord turned against the captivity of Sion, then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter.” The music of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd played in my head.

Like the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the possibility that the Catholic church of the English might finally come home to Rome in my lifetime was paralyzing. I was struck by the notion that, like the Soviets and their allies who’d sought to kill Pope John Paul II, instead had seen their Communist empire collapse around them, the shades of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII might now be watching from hell as the Archbishop of Canterbury sat with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and listened to His Eminence announce the Holy See’s terms upon which Anglicans could return en masse to the Catholic fold. Somewhere, William Shakespeare, that recusant Catholic, was smiling... Read the whole article.