In 1845, the Passionist Fr Ignatius Spencer CP, Edward Pusey, the leader of the Anglican Tractarians, and the future Cardinal Newman won a measure of official approval for a scheme of parallel prayer for unity between Anglicans and Catholics, based on a similar scheme of Spencer's in France and Germany. It was based on the Rosary; and where Catholics recited the Hail, Mary Anglicans offered the Our Father. Remarkably, this scheme attracted the support of the future Cardinal Manning and came to be sanctioned by the English Catholic bishops. Of course, in those days the underlying assumption was that Anglicans would abandon their separation and seek reconciliation with the Catholic Church. But this still marked the beginning of the idea that the reconciliation of Christians is corporate as well as personal and that prayer is the first point in which Christians of separate communions can begin to meet. It is the ground-breaking first occasion on which prayer for unity and reconciliation in common with other Christians was commended by the Catholic Church.
In a spiritual parallel, from 1846 the Evangelical Alliance, too, was suggesting the first Sunday of the New Year as a day of prayer for Christian Unity. This built on foundations in the preceding century laid by the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, urging prayer for unity in Christ above all confessional divisions as the aim of all who embrace the Gospel, and the 'concerts of prayer' for the outpouring of the Spirit proposed by Jonathan Edwards and, later, James Haldane Stewart. This call to prayer for unity, from 52 separate Protestant denominations from across the world, had a considerable psychological effect for promoting consciousness of the need for unity among Christians.
While plans for reunion were not developed, it is interesting that standards of doctrine for membership of the Alliance were, and remain, rigid. There was a unity of spirit and, to some degree, of mind; but there was lacking a unity of body, signified by a lack of central leadership and organisation. Despite this need for deeper communio, it paved the way for ecumenical organisations, such as the YMCA, YWCA and the Student Christian Movement which, in the twentieth century, would lead directly to the formation of the World Council of Churches itself.
In 1857, with the encouragement of Cardinal Wiseman, a small group of Anglicans, Catholics and Orthodox founded the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, to work and pray for the corporate reunion of churches and church bodies in East and West. They were led by Ambrose Philips de Lisle, a distinguished Anglican layman who as a Roman Catholic founded Mount St Bernard's Abbey. Wiseman had been influenced by fresh thinking on the nature of the Church by Fr Johann Adam Möhler, the first to propose the notion of unity in diversity as a possible pathway for reconstructing communion between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches to the East, as well as with the historic Churches arising out of the Reformation period in the West. Grounded in deep scholarship of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, this approach in turn influenced Cardinal Newman amd subsequently, through Fr Yves Congar OP, the formulation of Lumen Gentium at Vatican III. Wiseman's Letter to Lord Shrewsbury, a leading Victorian Catholic peer, explored these ideas and resulted in a pamphlet by de Lisle, The Future Unity of Christendom. Its constructive and eirenic proposal hoping to create the conditions and the will for corporate reunion saw de Lisle, Augustus Welby Pugin (the famous Catholic architect) and the Anglicans, Dr Frederick Lee and Bishop Forbes of Brechin found the Association with the express approval of Cardinal Wiseman. This was the first organisation to be established expressly to work and pray for Christian unity according to Catholic ecumenical principles.
Its ideas would have been very much in tune with modern Catholicism's ecumenical movement since Vatican II, but in the 1860s it was too far ahead of its time. Because of imprudent letters in APUC's periodical, The Union Review, from Roman Catholic priests at odds with their bishops, as well as misleading translation of the Basis of the Association into Latin and French, which seemed to compromise on Cactholic teaching, the Association was condemned. In 1864 Manning secured a letter from the Holy Office, Ad omnes episcopos Angliae, forbidding Catholics to continue as members. It was left to Anglicans and Orthodox to carry forward the Association and its ideals, one of the fruits being the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius, founded in 1928 as a society encouraging encounter and unity between Anglicans and Orthodox.
Nevertheless, also in 1870, in Massachusetts a priest of the Protestant Episcopal (Anglican) Church, William Reed Huntington, published an essay on the nature of the Church and the urgent need for the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican-Episcopal 'branches' to come together.
The trouble with the 'branch theory' of Christendom's evolution into a collection of separate bodies is, first, that it assumes that divisions between Christians are somehow the result of the growth of the Church. But clearly a correct understanding of the Church's growth, in obedience to the will and prayer of Jesus in John 17 on the night before he died, is that it becomes ever more one with him and within itself. Secondly, branches never can grow organically back into each other.
The theory may partially account for origins; and it has been used to advance the claim, especially within the Anglican Communion, to be inseparable from the same trunk as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and to share the same roots. It tends however to exclude Christians of Reformed and other Protestant traditions and also fails to recognise that far from there being a division into several branches, the Church is to be visibly one: to press the analogy, the Church is to be identified in the one trunk, the single vine. Neither the Catholic nor the Orthodox Churches conceive of themselves as 'part of' the Universal Church of Christ, or a branch of it. Famously the Catholic Church understands itself to be that within which the Universal Church 'subsists' in fulness - not to deny other Christians a place within the Church, but to assert that the Catholic Church will be found lacking in nothing of that which belongs to the Universal Church.
The inadequacy of the 'branch theory' as an account of the wide variety of Christian ecclesiologies lies in its not being really scriptural, whereas the understanding of the Church as the communion of the baptised in union with Christ and in union (however imperfectly in this world) with each other richly sets forth the teaching of Jesus himself and of the letters of the apostles Paul and Peter.
Reed Huntington partly discerned this and, rather than examining distinctive but comparable features in the Churches, he took up William Wake's and Shute Barrington's suggestion of converging on points of faith and order that all held in common and which could serve as the basis for discussions leading to unity with other Christians. He listed four: the Old and New Testaments, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, the 'dominical' sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the 'historic' episcopate. By 1886 the American Episcopal Bishops meeting in Chicago had come to elaborate on the proposal and orient it firmly toward the reunion of 'Catholic Christendom' in organic unity. The third Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops in 1888 pragmatically adopted the 'Quadrilateral' in Reed Huntington's less ambitious form. As the Lambeth Quadrilateral it has become the basis of union between the different Churches and provinces of the Anglican Communion, as well as a simple definition of its understanding of its catholicity and apostolicity. But it is worth remembering that it was not devised as a summary of Anglican ecclesiology, but as a starting point for dialogue with non-Anglican Christians towards bringing about Christian unity. It is interesting how it is a point to which dialogues return, whereas it more truly represents part of a process from which, like the stages of ARCIC and even the Decree on Ecumenism, there has been a movement forward.
Despite the way in which the Holy Office and Cardinal Manning in Westminster had distanced Rome from officially sponsored and individual initiatives on union between Anglicans, Catholics and others, in 1878 the second Lambeth Conference recommended the observance of a special season of prayer for reunion on or near Ascension Day.
In 1889 Charles Lindley Wood, Viscount Halifax, haunted by the earlier disappointed hopes of Anglican-Roman reunion, met Fernand Portal, a French priest interested in overcoming the obstacles preventing it. Portal identified the root problem as the Roman Catholic position that Anglican orders were invalid. The discussions excited the interest of scholars on both sides and Halifax became hopeful that the matter could be resolved in favour of the Anglicans, pressing for a re-examination of the issue and a positive outcome.
But a number of English Catholics, led by Cardinal Vaughan of Westminster, and influential figures in Rome such as Merry del Val, did not share Leo's interest in other Christian bodies and his desire to examine difficulties on as open and positive a spirit as possible. They opposed moves that could lead to corporate reunion, not least as they believed no scheme could in the end command the support of Anglicans in general. And Cardinal Manning had earlier written, 'Rather than being a rampart against irreligion, the Church of England must be recognized as the mother of all intellectual and spiritual aberrations which today cover the face of England.'
The Commission established by Pope Leo was inconclusive, with opinion divided. In the end, the Pope accepted the view that the case for affirming the validity of Anglican orders had not been made and that reunion could thus not find a basis, to use Möhler's principles, in an existing unity of spirit, mental unity of doctrine and rite, or unity of body in terms of the two Churches' respective structure and organisation. In 1896 he published the famous letter, Apostolicae Curae, to determine the issue. Some have seen this as a devastating rebuff; others as one foundation on which the future could build an authentic unity from first principles. The Anglican Archbishops answered with a Letter, Saepius in Officio, contesting the judgment and the arguments on which it rested. This appears to have been highly regarded by Leo. Arguably the absence of a response signals respect for its argument; and certainly Leo did not wish the controversy to be sustained with an inconclusive and increasingly pained disputation. Perhaps it can be said that there was a tacit agreement to disagree Furthermore, Cardinal Rampolla, who had presided over the commission of investigation, encouraged Portal to continue with his private contacts and encounters with the Anglicans. That he was shortly afterwards appointed rector of the seminary in Nice and then to leadership at the University Seminary of St Vincent de Paul in Paris, which thus became a propitious place for informal ecumenical contacts, indicates the continued confidence of Rome and the French hierarchy in his endeavours. He continued to meet Lord Halifax. Both were disappointed with the outcome of the Rome commission, but not discouraged. Halifax went on to be a leading figure in the Malines Conversations in Belgium under the auspices of Cardinal Mercier twenty-five years later.
But meanwhile, after the investing of such deep prayer and high hopes in imminent mutual recognition and reunion by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the shock of so negative an outcome to the examination of Anglican faith and order, official Anglican interest looked instead for more positive contact with the Eastern Churches. it also began to look more positively at reunion with Congregationalists and Presbyterians in England.
Anglicanism nurtured a growing and resurgent sense of itself as being a legitimate non-Roman form of Catholicism, a sense given definition by F.D. Maurice's increasingly authoritative 1838 examination on the Church of England's catholicity and apostolicity, The Kingdom of Christ. To some extent, this distinctively Catholic-Anglican take on ecclesiology continues to shape Anglicanism's attitudes to its ecumenical dialogues and especially the very terms and categories in its discussions with the Roman Catholic Church. The continuing significance of this book and its nuances to meanings of words used in common, but often with subtly different senses, should not be overlooked or underestimated, when assessing Anglican-Roman Catholic relations and the history of the dialogues.
And as for the Roman Catholic Church, even after Pope Leo's concluding judgment on the Anglican question at the time, the cause of Catholic unity as the ecumenical path for English Christians was not entirely extinguished at the close of the nineteenth century. In 1897, in the encyclical Divinum illud munus, Leo XIII formally established the novena from Ascension Day to Pentecost as a season of prayer for the Unity of Christians - arguably a signal of hope in response to Saepius Officio - in perpetuity.