The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, a group originally set up by Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI, and re-established by Archbishop Robert Runcie and Pope John Paul II has published its latest report Mary: Hope and Grace in Christ.
The publication was celebrated on Monday in Seattle by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Seattle, Alexander Brunett, and the Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Peter Carnley.
ACNS has placed a summary introduction to the report by the Revd Canon Donald Bolen, Roman Catholic Co-Secretary of ARCIC on its website.
Update 20 May
The Church Times has published a lengthy article by Rachel Boulding summarising the document: Anglicans and Roman Catholics reach agreement about the Virgin Mary
“In view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One (Luke 1:35), *we can affirm together* that Christ’s redeeming work reached ‘back in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings. This is not contrary to the teaching of Scripture, and can only be understood in the light of Scripture. Roman Catholics can recognize in this what is affirmed by the dogma – namely ‘preserved from all stain of original sin’ and ‘from the first moment of her conception.’” The problem w/ this dogma (Immaculate Conception) is not WHAT is says about Mary.… Read more »
All the other ARCIC documents are readily available on the web. Why is this nice new one not? 🙁
“All the other ARCIC documents are redily available on the web. Why is this nice new one not? :(“
Don’t know, but it is published in book form by Continuum/Morehouse. Ironic that it was probably supplied by the group to the publisher in an electronic format that we all could have downloaded and read for nothing. A real disappointment.
What’s the matter? Don’t you enjoy reading a bunch of documents about an unavailable document? 🙂
According to John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter at
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/
“Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ will be available on-line by the end of May on the Vatican Web site.”
This is broadly consistent with what Thinking Anglicans has been told, from the Anglican side of the discussion, about the publication of the full text.
In addition to the Vatican site, the document is also available in both English and French on “Ecumenism in Canada / Oecuménisme au Canada” at http://www.ecumenism.net/archive/arcic/mary_en.htm
I have posted this document online by permission of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. As far as I know, the text will eventually appear on the site of the Centro Pro Unione http://www.prounione.urbe.it/ which has an excellent resource on the ARCIC dialogue.