Rome ‘must lead way in defending persecuted Christians’

THE CHRISTIAN world looks to Rome to stem the tide of Islamic militancy, the Anglican former Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said, writes Liz Dodd.

Bishop Nazir-Ali told clergy of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham at a plenary meeting in London that non-Catholics, including Evangelicals who would not once have heeded Rome, now looked to it to speak on behalf of persecuted Christians worldwide.

“So the Catholic Church has both a great opportunity and also a great responsibility,” he said.

The Pakistani-born bishop, who has both a Christian and a Muslim family background and is now president of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue, spoke to members of the ordinariate at St Patrick’s in Soho, London, about global Christianity, the rise of Islamic militancy and the ideologies that led to the persecution of Christians in areas such as the Middle East.

He urged the Catholic Church not to “capitulate to culture” nor to succumb to a weakening of discipline that he said had “caused havoc” within the Anglican Church. He said that he had watched the growth of the ordinariate with close interest.

“Allowing Anglican patrimony to flourish should not just be taken as an exception, but it could be a charter for the future,” he said.

Meanwhile the head of the ordinariate, Mgr Keith Newton, has said that it provides a model of ecumenism for the universal Church. He was speaking at St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham on the invitation of its archbishop, Bernard Longley, who co-chairs the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. He told the congregation that the Catholic Church was like a vine from which various branches had been severed. “In the ordinariate one small part of the Western Church has been grafted back on to the vine,” he said.