Church Leaders Open Historic Rome Talks

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29378, 3 December 1960, Page 13

Church Leaders Open Historic Rome Talks

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 11.30 p.m.) ROME, December 2. The leaders of two great Christian communities faced each other across a crimson-topped desk in the heart of the Vatican today for one of Christendom’s most historic meetings. Just after noon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, was guided to the second floor of the Vatican library, and ushered through 11 frescoed rooms to meet the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John XXIII. It was the first meeting of an Anglican Primate and the Pope since the Reformation.

The audience was a private one with none of the colourful ceremonial attending official visits to the Holy See by foreign statesmen.

Journalists were barred from the Vatican, and, according to Vatican sources, no photograph of the Pope and Archbishop together is likely to be published. The Pope greeted his guest at the threshold of a large soundproof room. The doqr"then closed on the historic meeting with only one witness, Irish-born Monsignor Thomas Ryan, of the Pope’s Secretariat of State, who acted as interpreter. A Venetian glass chandelier, bearing the Pope’s coat of arms, hung over the two religious leaders. To meet Dr. Fisher, the Pope is breaking with tradition that suspends all audiences during the

first week of Advent. The Pope normally devotes the week exclusively to special spiritual exercises. But before he received the Anglican leader, Pope John heard a special sermon. Dr. Fisher entered the Vatican after celebrating Holy Communion at All Saints’ Church. The Archbishop flew into Rome yesterday for a two-day visit after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and a call at Istanbul.

He told journalists on arrival that he looked forward to meeting Pope John “with great interest and delight.” The Archbishop told reporters when he arrived in Rome that he had visited Jerusalem “as a pilgrim" and was received by Christians of all denominations. “There was a wonderful sense of Christian unity in all com-

munities,” he said,. “Having thus laid the foundations, I went to Istanbul, which is the eastern cradle of the Christian faith,” he said. “I am now in Rome to visit the head of the whole Roman Catholic community, and I look forward with great interest and delight to talking with the Pope. Sometimes I am asked what we will talk about. We shall talk about nothing and everything.” In Rome, the Archbishop will also have a talk with Augustin Cardinal Bea, a 79-year-old German Jesuit who heads the Secretariat for Union among Christians. The secretariat headed by the Cardinal was recently set up by the Pope to enable non-Roman Catholic Christians to follow developments concerning the Ecumenical Council which it is intended to hold in 1962.