Ecumenical Crossroads: Why the time for actual Eucharistic sharing has arrived

Joint Liturgical Studies 101

After a century of ecumenical discussion between Anglicans and Roman Catholics — especially since Vatican II in the early-1960s — there is still no formal shift in the Roman Catholic position from what it was in 1900 with regard to officially sanctioned practice. This is not only a denial of all the work in dialogues between the two churches, and of the many other dialogues between Roman Catholics and the churches of the Reformation, but a failure to recognize the developments in Roman Catholics’ own self-understanding of the Eucharist, ordained ministry and the surrounding symbols in the light of the liturgical movements and what is inherent in the reforms of the liturgy since Vatican II. This compilation of short essays argues, collectively, that we have achieved communion in understanding — to the extent that is possible in any religious discourse —and that authenticity now requires changes in practice reflecting our shared understandings. When we say, ‘Let us pray,’ and do so, we are, in effect, standing as ‘one body’ before the Father, and as that one body we can see ourselves in sharing ‘the one loaf.’ Likewise, as the People of God on a pilgrimage, we drink the one cup of our common destiny in the Lord.

This collection of essays is unusual in that all the contributors are scholars who have contributed significantly to their own churches’ practice at the grass-roots level as well as their self-understanding of how their ‘law of prayer’ is central to their ‘law of belief.’ However, it is further unusual in that all the contributors have a long-standing commitment to ecumenical endeavours of theologians. Their coming together here as theologians and liturgists is, in a way, a modelling of the new relationship between theology and practice that they advocate.

Edited by Tom McLean and Thomas O’Loughlin.

List of Contributors

Stephen Cottrell has been Archbishop of York since 2020.

Margaret Daly-Denton lectured at Trinity College Dublin, and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.

Tom McLean is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth.

Bridget Nichols is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.

Thomas O’Loughlin is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at the University of Nottingham.

Karen Papellero is a doctoral candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Keith F. Pecklers SJ is Professor of Liturgical and Ecumenical Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

David Stancliffe was Bishop of Salisbury from 1993 to 2010.