The Venice Statement: Disestablishing a Church and Reforming the Papacy?

Abstract

The Venice Statement on Authority in the Church is a momentous document which it must take some years for us to digest. Starting from “the large measure of agreement in faith which exists between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Anglican Communion”, acknowledged in the Malta Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission (1968), the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has succeeded, in less than ten years, in reaching a significant consensus on the doctrine of the Eucharist (Windsor 1971) and of the Ministry (Canterbury 1973), and now on the question of the nature and exercise of Authority in the Church.This final document closes a phase. It must surely force Roman Catholics in this country to search their hearts more deeply than ever about how true this series of Agreed Statements is to what they believe, and to ask themselves how far what they believe may be illuminated and purified, in the light of faith, by study of these documents. As a community, we are not accustomed to theological argument, and the documents are in any case much more difficult to read than they appear at first sight. They are immensely rich, opening up perspectives and introducing new concepts which it would stretch the mind of theological students to understand. It has been easy enough for us to delay the effort of settling doubts and resolving difficulties raised by the first two documents because we naturally waited to see if agreement would be reached on the question of the primacy of the Pope. If agreement could not be attained on that question, so we could excuse ourselves, then we did not need to struggle with the unaccustomed language of the previous agreements.