Cardinal Kurt Koch will lead the Catholic delegation to the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion this summer.
The Swiss prelate, who heads the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, will address a plenary meeting of the assembled bishops, as will Cardinal Luis Tagle, the pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation.
This will be the first Lambeth Conference since 2008, with 658 bishops expected to attend from across the world. The conference normally meets every ten years, but divisions within the international Anglican communion over teachings on sexual ethics led to a postponement in 2018, with further delays caused by Covid. This is the first conference most bishops have attended, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who is hosting the event.
The Catholic delegation will include the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, and two bishops from Canada and India, countries which will both have strong Anglican representation: the Archbishop of Regina, Donald Bolen, and the Archbishop of Delhi, Anil Couto. The Irish bishop Brian Farrell, who has been secretary to the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity since 2002, will also join the delegation to the conference, which runs from 26 July to 7 August.
No bishops from Nigeria, Rwanda, or Uganda will attend, after the primates of the three Anglican provinces rejected the invitation to the conference earlier in June. Archbishops Henry Ndukube of Nigeria, Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda and Stephen Kaziimba of Uganda accused attendees of going against Biblical teaching, particularly on homosexuality.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Archbishop Welby, said that he “regretted” their absence, but emphasised that it was “nothing new that people don’t come to the conference”, citing absentees from other conferences since the first in 1867.
“The idea that however many millions of people will agree on everything is an illusion,” he said.
The Nigerian bishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council, suggested that the archbishops’ decision was not representative of their congregations: “If they consulted their dioceses it might well be different.”
Although the Lambeth Conference votes on resolutions, these are not binding on the wider Anglican Communion. To clarify this, any decisions reached will now be termed “Lambeth calls” rather than “resolutions”.
Archbishop Welby was unable to confirm whether there would be delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church at the conference, but said that they had invited representation from both Russia and Ukraine. Russian Orthodox representatives at previous conferences have included Metropolitan Hilarion, who was recently removed from his post as the Moscow Patriarchate’s “foreign minister”.
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