I’m praying Pope Leo will bring Catholics and Anglicans closer together

I’d never seen Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost before until he stepped out onto his balcony in St Peter’s Square, Rome, as Pope Leo XIV. But he looks like the kind of Pope, as did the last one, who could make me want to convert.

He is moderate - by which impartial observers mean liberal - having nodded in his choice of name to Leo XIII, leader of the Catholic Church for much of the 19th century and known for his intellectualism and political sociology; he is steeped in the Catholic social gospel, from the US to Peru and now to Rome.

If the new Pope Leo does that to me, what’s he likely to mean to other Anglo-Catholics? Maybe we can do business together. I dearly hope his elevation is followed by a similarly impressive new Archbishop of Canterbury, though the runes aren’t comforting. Perhaps the conversion traffic will again be predominantly towards Rome, as it was when Leo XIII sat on St Peter’s throne.

A second spring

Cardinal JH Newman remains one of our most famous Anglican converts to Rome, despite a more recently crowded political field that includes Ann Widdecombe, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Charles Moore. Newman, who lived very nearly the entirety of the 19th century, spoke and wrote of a “Second Spring” in the life of the Church, a quiet revival of Roman Catholicism that, he hoped, would eventually re-embrace the Anglican Church.

The Sees of Canterbury and Rome are being filled at the same time for the first time in a millennium. We should be curious of coincidences

He may not have anticipated that it would be so quiet as to take well over a further century to become apparent. Now, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the evidence of sap rising is at least apparent in young churchgoers, with more than one in three of Gen Z (teenage-to-34) attending Roman Catholic services, outstripping their peer-group Anglicans in their return to faith.

That’s a source of encouragement for the new Pope, but we shouldn’t get carried away. The “sea of faith” written about in Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, is on a low, slack tide, “its melancholy long, withdrawing roar, retreating” and it’ll take a while for ebb to turn to flow, let alone flood. But it appears that there are opportunities being presented to the Church that could reasonably be interpreted as providential.

Curious coincidence

The Sees of Canterbury and Rome are, we live in hope, being filled at the same time, the former because of the extraordinary happenstance of the incumbent’s resignation for the first time in a millennium. We should be curious of coincidences.

The expectation – more than a hope, since the late Pope Francis packed the cardinal electors with his liberal supporters, including Cardinal Prevost – is that the new Pope Leo will continue his predecessor’s reformational programme.

The next Archbishop of Canterbury is charged with getting a grip on the chaos of schism between Anglican factions that produced the absurdity of compromise that is Living in Love & Faith.

Here’s a radical notion: If a compatible person is anointed as Archbishop of Canterbury, why don’t they get together? By which I mean some form of reunification of Anglo and Roman Catholics into one universal Church – there is, after all, a clue in the name.

Actually, it’s not that radical. The objections, ecclesiological and constitutional, are stumbling blocks that have either been kicked aside historically or we’re now sufficiently grown-up to step over.

More in common

Take the ecclesiology first. Being schismatic since the Tudors rather than heretical, like protestant Churches of the continental European Reformation, the Church of England shares the means of revelation with Rome through scripture, reason and tradition. We really have more in common with Roman Catholics than evangelicals, with their personal relationship with Jesus and informal liturgies.

Doctrinally, Anglicans were said to have slain any vestigial hopes of reunification with the ordination of women to priesthood 30 years ago. But it turned out surprisingly, under Francis, that the Vatican moved towards us on sexuality – “Who am I to judge?” he said - and while ultimately, he disappointed on women’s ordination, Leo could pick up the ball where it was dropped.

It appears that there are opportunities being presented to the Church that could reasonably be interpreted as providential

In any event, a model for reunification was established under Francis’s predecessor, when Benedict parked his tanks on the Church of England’s lawn with the ordinariate, which allowed married Anglicans into full communion with Romans while bringing their liturgical practices (and wives) with them. The ordinariate simply needs imaginative extension.

King and Christ

Constitutionally, it’s historically been claimed that it would be an absurdity for our monarch, who is barred from being Roman Catholic under the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), to preside over a Church that in part owed allegiance to Rome. But actually, it’s no sillier than the anomaly of a head of state who presides over a secular legislature which celebrates same-sex weddings, while simultaneously being Supreme Governor of his established Church, which doesn’t.

The King is a self-declared pluralist. There remains some debate over whether, in his younger days as Prince of Wales, Charles said he would like to accede to the throne as “Defender of Faith” or “Faiths”, but either way his instinct for inclusivity, apparent in his coronation wishes, is more than capable of envisaging a repealed Act of Settlement.

And, again, there is the vehicle of compromise that is the ordinariate. If two popes (and now presumably a third) can bless a model that contains confessing Anglicans, it can’t be beyond the reach of constitutional imagination for our state Church to contain Roman Catholics.

The legal disbarring of Roman Catholics from high office has fallen to bits anyway. The Catholic Relief Act of 1829 supposedly prevents prime ministers of the UK being Roman Catholic, but Boris Johnson (a divorcee to boot) married in the RC rite in Westminster Cathedral while PM. For once, it is the law, rather than Johnson, that is an ass.

The tide has turned. In the affairs of the new primate of Rome and the one expected for the Anglican Communion it can be taken at the flood, or not. But if Leo and the new Canterbury go with it, in the words of Matthew Arnold, that sea of faith could, for new generations, once again “round earth’s shore lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.”