Anglican and Roman Catholic delegations have gathered in Rome this week for the historic meeting of the Archbishop and the Pope and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Anglican Centre in Rome.
The delegations have visited the Sistine Chapel today, 22 November 2006, for prayers to mark the visit of Archbishop Michael Ramsey to Pope Paul VI in 1966.Cardinal Kaspar and the Archbishop of Canterbury will meet today for "informal talks" and then worship with the St Egidio community at St Bartholomews Church, an Anglican Communion statement has announced.
Archbishop Rowan Williams addressed a congregation at St Anselmo Church and Religious Community last night, 21 November. Dr Williams has said that modern civilisation needs to discover a proper sense of the values of time, authority and participation if it is to renew its sense of purpose and enable communities to cope with modern pressures.
In a lecture delivered in St Anselmo, a Benedictine institution in Rome, Dr Williams drew from the sixth century Rule of St Benedict to illustrate how societies might consider ways in which they served a common purpose.
He stated, "What the Rule distinctively does is (at least) two things. It asks what the rhythm of life is that will best set human beings free to advance towards the joy for which they are made, how the priority of praise may be embodied in a responsible adult common life that is fully located in the material world. And it asks what the style of authority is that will enable 'faith beyond resentment'."
He said that modern life, particularly in the West, was sometimes lived as though only two things mattered:
"...we live in a climate where both work and leisure seem to be pervasively misunderstood; where both appear regularly in inhuman and obsessive forms. Time is an undifferentiated continuum in which we either work or consume. Work follows no daily or even weekly rhythms but is a twenty-four hour business, sporadically interrupted by what is often a very hectic form of play. It seems we are either producing or being entertained by a vast industry that purports to guess our wants before we ask and leaves us in so many ways passive."
In addition, the Anglican spiritual head said that the focus on economic stability left an important question unanswered: "We have to ask what it is that economics sustains - its own business or an environment of human development, intelligence and awareness? ... The pressing issue is how we sustain a civilisation capable of asking itself questions about its purpose and its integrity; only a civilisation that can do this will generate people - citizens - who can turn away from individual instinct and self-protection, whether in adoration of God or in compassion for the needy, because they know what sort of beings they are, mortal, interdependent, created out of love and for love."
