Damian Thompson notices the deep convergences between Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and Pope Francis:
The similarities between Archbishop Welby and Pope Francis are almost spooky — once you get past the fact that one is an Old Etonian evangelical Protestant and the other a South American Jesuit who prays in front of garlanded statues of Mary. Archbishop Welby was enthroned two days after Francis was inaugurated. That’s simple coincidence, but the other parallels tell us a lot.
Both men were plucked from senior but not prominent positions in their churches with a mandate to simplify structures of government that had suffocated their intellectual predecessors, who also resembled each other in slightly unfortunate ways. Rowan Williams and Benedict XVI seemed overwhelmed by the weight of office; both took the puzzling decision to retreat into their studies at a time of crisis in order to write books — Dr Williams on metaphor and icon-ography in Dostoevsky, Benedict on the life of Jesus. When they retired, early and of their own volition, their in-trays were stacked higher than they had been when they took office. Their fans were disappointed and the men charged with replacing them thought: we’re not going to let that happen again.
Pivoting off the essay, James Mumford grapples with what the elevation of these two Christian leaders might portend:
Emerging there, [Thompson] argues, is an extraordinary thing: a new ecumenism centred around evangelism. ‘The alliance between Catholics and evangelicals is the most important and surprising development in global Christianity for decades,’ he writes.
This is indeed remarkable – that an Archbishop of Canterbury enamoured with Catholic Social Teaching and devoted to Ignatian spirituality and a Latin American Cardinal who likes reading the bible with Protestant ministers were appointed within weeks of each other; that American evangelicals love ‘our’ Pope Francis and conservative Catholics increasingly find common ground with Protestants around hot-button moral issues.
I don’t think it’s exaggerating to see this development as the twenty-first century church’s ‘perestroika’ (‘reconstruction’) and ‘glasnost’ (‘openness’). A sea-change in attitudes. An almighty paradigm-shift. An opening out onto the ecclesiastical other, rooted in a conviction that what unites Christians of different denominations is far greater than what divides them.
The Dish 