'WELCOME ANGLICANS' SAYS POPE
'WELCOME ANGLICANS' SAYS POPE
(ANSA) - Vatican City, February 1 - Pope Benedict XVI on Monday urged English and Welsh bishops to give a warm welcome to Anglican clergy wanting to 'return' to Rome.
Meeting the bishops in the wake of a report that Queen Elizabeth II had been concerned by the Vatican's November move to make it easier for disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church, the pope asked the bishops "to be generous" in applying the 'Anglicanorum Coetibus' ('Groups of Anglicans') constitution set up by the Vatican on November 4.
He urged the bishops to help groups wanting to have "full communion" with the Catholic Church.
"I am convinced that, if they are given a warm and sincere welcome, these groups will be a benediction for the whole Church," Benedict said.
The pope also confirmed he will visit Britain in mid-September and told the bishops that Britain's new equal-rights legislation threatened religious freedom.
The meeting came after the Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday that the royal household's most senior official met with the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, two weeks after the establishment of the new 'apostolic constitution' in order to allay concerns.
The Telegraph said that "in a highly unusual step", Lord Chamberlain Earl Peel and Nichols met in mid-November over the move, which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had described as "a dawn raid on the Anglican communion".
Queen Elizabeth, who is the Anglican Church's Supreme Governor, was not warned of the move, which paved the way for groups of Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Holy See.
According to the Telegraph, Archbishop Nichols assured Lord Peel that Benedict had only issued the decree in response to the requests of traditionalist Anglicans disillusioned with liberal moves such as the ordination of gay priests and women bishops.
Nichols stressed that "it had not been intended as a hostile act or to in any way destabilise the Church of England," the Telegraph said.
The British daily quoted a spokesman for Nichols as confirming the meeting had occurred and had "provided an opportunity to quell concerns over the Pope's decree".
A spokesman for Buckingham Palace declined to comment and the Telegraph speculated that the pope might not be offered the full degree of royal hospitality during his state visit to Britain, expected later this year.
Three weeks after the unveiling of the Anglicanorum Coetibus Apostolic Constitution, which some observers said appeared to take the Anglican Church by surprise, Williams met the pope in the Vatican.
Little emerged about the contents of the 25-minute conversation apart from a Vatican statement reaffirming "a common will to pursue and consolidate ecumenical dialogue".
But there were widespread reports in the British press that this dialogue had been effectively stymied by the Apostolic Constitution.
The constitution aims to lay out a path for unmarried bishops, married and unmarried priests and other members of the Anglican Church to join or return to the Catholic Church.
The new section, which would allow Anglicans to keep many of their traditions and practices, was set up in response to pleas from Anglicans, whose conversions were previously assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Some leading Anglicans criticised the Vatican's move.
Ex-archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey said the Anglican Church should not be treated as a ''junior partner'' and that the Vatican had only given Williams two weeks' notice of its plan.
It is unclear how many Anglican groups will move over to Rome, with several English newspapers saying practical problems such as the conversion of churches and property.
The first initially expected to take advantage of the door opened were the some 500,000 members of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), a conservative group which broke away from the international Anglican Communion in 1991.
But no TAC members have taken the plunge yet, reports say.
A conservative Anglican group called Forward With Faith has said many of its members are eager to convert because the Church of England was becoming ''the church of political correctness''.
The Church of England is regarded as the 'mother' of all the other churches in the worldwide Anglican Communion, which considers itself to be both a product of the Reformation and also in many ways Catholic.
With some 77 million members, the Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
The English church was under papal authority for nearly a thousand years before splitting from Rome in 1534 when King Henry VIII was refused an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn.
Benedict will visit Britain on September 16-19, the Catholic news agency Sir reported in December.
It will be the first UK trip by a pope since John Paul visited in 1982.
The visit has yet to be officially confirmed by the Vatican.
