THE
P RTAL
February 2013
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in turn wrote to Cardinal Mercier. Viscount Halifax, a from Rome are equally inadmissible”.
devout layman in Yorkshire, an enthusiastic ecumenist
with a chapel in his manor house where he attended
This later morphed into the mantra beloved of
mass every day dark and early, got on with the practical Anglicans, “United but not absorbed”. Cardinal
arrangements.
Mercier died of cancer in 1926, leaving his ring to
Lord Halifax; it finally ended up in one of the chalices
Five Conversations took place between 1921 and of York Minster. A signed photograph of Mercier hung
1926. Anglican participants were Gore, Frere, Lord in the Cloister at Mirfield.
Halifax, Dr Armitage Robertson, Dean of Wells
Cathedral, and Dr Beresford Kidd, Warden of Keble unity but not yet
College,Oxford. Catholic participants were Fr Van
The Conversations got nowhere at the time. Both
Roey, vicar general of Malines, and three priests from churches took fright, “Lord give us unity but not yet”,
France, Frs Portal, Pierre
to misquote St Augustine
Batiffol, and Hemmer.
of Hippo. But in October
2010 the Congregation
publications
for the Doctrine of
In
1930
Halifax
the Faith issued a
published
The
statement
preparatory
Conversations at Malines
to the publication of
while Frere published
Anglicanorum coetibus.
Recollections of Malines in
1935. In 1996 Fr Bernard
The statement said:
Barlow, a Catholic priest,
“Throughout the more
wrote A Brother Knocking
than 450 years of its
at the Door: The Malines
history the question
Conversations
1921
of the reunification of
- 1926. In 2011 there
Anglicans and Catholics
appeared a collection of
has never been far from
essays called Walter Frere: Scholar,
mind. In the early 20th century
Monk, Bishop which covered
Cardinal Mercier of Belgium
many aspects of his multi-faceted
entered into well publicised
life, historian, liturgist, musician
conversations with Anglicans to
and one of the founders of CR,
explore the possibility of union
though curiously enough there
with the Catholic Church under
is no chapter about his love of
the banner of an Anglicanism
Orthodoxy. To this collection of
“reunited but not absorbed”. Since
essays Fr Barlow contributed a
the Vatican Council, Anglican-
chapter on Malines.
Catholic relations have created a
much improved climate of mutual
One of Arc