James Hawkey

Ormond Rush

Walking Together on the Way is the first agreed statement of the third phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and the first ARCIC agreed statement since 2005.

The language of 'walking together' is used by both Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis to describe our ecclesial life and the ecumenical journey. Both have also, in different ways, endorsed the approach of receptive ecumenism: that we have much to learn and much to receive from each other.

In Walking Together on the Way the Commission asks what Anglicans and Catholics can learn from one another to make us better able to walk together in the way of communion. Both our communions have an understanding that all the baptized share in the threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest and king. The document considers how this common understanding is lived out in our processes of governance and discernment at the local, regional and global levels.

The Commission not only examines our respective ecclesial processes of discernment, but also seeks to identify the tensions and difficulties we experience; it asks where Angicans and Catholics can look to one another for wisdom. In this way, the Commission proposes, we can grow together through a journey of mutual enrichment. As the text affirms, 'We are pilgrims together walking on the way of penitence and renewal towards full communion.'

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