This leader comment, intended to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, has been back and forth a couple of times between The Tablet and the Church Times. What is lost in this disunity is an opportunity to learn from each other, and the lesson most needed is how to exercise authority in the light of the gospel. Anglicans are organised through a sophisticated network of dispersed authority, meting out to individual dioceses and provinces what to Roman Catholics is a surprising degree of autonomy. As Roman Catholics begin to explore, belatedly, the concept of synodality, they may be puzzled to see that a system designed to guard against autocracy seems to encourage open dissent in a way that the utterances of a single leader do not. It is here that Christian unity has stopped being a hope for the future and has become the present reality.

Source: The Times January 18, 2024 12:28 UTC