_WORLD WATCH______________________________
____________________ England ________________

Archbishop of Canterbury to step down
Catholic leaders acknowledge service
The spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican church, Archbishop George Carey of Canterbury, announced on January 8 that he would step down from his post, retiring at the age of 67. His actual retirement will become effective later this year.

The Anglican leader explained in a public statement: “By the end of October I shall have served 11 and a half years in a demanding yet wonderfully absorbing and rewarding post. I feel certain this will be the right and proper time to stand down.” Under Archbishop Carey’s leadership, the Church of England ordained its first women priests, grappled with the issue of homosexuality, and faced declining church attendance and financial crises.

In response to the announcement, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Christian Unity issued a statement thanking the Anglican leader for his years of service. The statement said that the Vatican “remembers with gratitude his commitment to fostering and deepening Anglican-Catholic relations.”

The Pontifical Council also alluded to the Anglican leader’s close relationship with Pope John Paul II, fostered by a series of private talks in Rome. Archbishop Carey had made five visits to the Vatican during his term as the worldwide leader of the Anglican communion; his most recent meeting with Pope John Paul was in June of last year. Ecumenical dialogue between the Holy See and the Anglican church has been active and regular since 1970, when it began at the initiative of Pope Paul VI and the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.

In Britain, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster led the tributes for the retiring Anglican leader. The cardinal praised Carey’s achievements and said he would be greatly missed. “Archbishop George Carey and I are good friends and I have appreciated very much our collaboration in ecumenical endeavor,” he said.

Marriage: minority status?
A sobering demographic trend
Married people will soon become a minority in Britain, according to a report from the office of national statistics. Its latest survey of households found that the proportion of women who were married had tumbled from 74 percent in 1979 to 51 percent in 2000. Almost half of the men surveyed reported that they had lived with a woman to whom they were not married during the past decade —compared with a mere two percent when the same question was asked in the 1960s.

The statistics also showed a decline in the proportion of households in which dependent children lived with a married (or cohabiting) couple. In 1971, 92 percent of the households with young children were headed by a couple; that number dropped to 78 percent in 1993, and 74 percent last year. At the same time, the proportion of households in which a single mother cared for young children rose from seven percent in 1971 to 23 percent in 2000.

The survey also showed that the proportion of adults who live on their own has almost doubled in the past 30 years. Some 32 percent of British “households” consisted of just one person in 2000, compared with 17 percent in 1971.

Prelate seeks change in anti-Catholic laws
Cardinal backs legislative proposal
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has called for a change to the British legal system so that Catholics will no longer be barred from marrying into the royal family or ascending the throne.

The cardinal told a BBC audience:

I think the question of whether one of the royal family can marry a Roman Catholic is something that should be addressed, certainly. It is rather odd. A member of the royal family can marry, probably anybody except for Roman Catholics. So I think there are some anomalies there.

The cardinal’s comments come less than a week after Labor MP Kevin McNamara introduced a private member’s bill in Parliament to repeal the 300-year-old Act of Settlement, which bars Catholics from succession to the British throne and prohibits members of the royal family from marrying Catholics.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said these laws should be recognized today as “an unnecessary bar and anomaly which should be removed.”

“Designer babies”
Embryos created to serve older children
Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has cleared the way for the creation of “designer babies”—embryos produced in order to provide healthy cells for their seriously ill brothers or sisters.

The HFEA decision means that a number of embryos can be created using eggs and sperm taken from a mother and father. A few of the healthiest embryos are selected and implanted into the womb, while the rest are left to die. Blood from the new baby’s umbilical cord can then be used in bone marrow transplants, and tissues from the embryo can be used in various medical treatments for a sibling.

Announcing the decision, Ruth Deech, the chairman of the HFEA, said: “We have considered the ethical, medical, and technical implications of this treatment very carefully indeed.” She added, “Where pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is already being undertaken, we can see how the use of tissue typing to save the life of a sibling could be justified. We would see this happening only in very rare circumstances and under strict controls.”

Pro-life groups argued that it is wrong to bring a child into the world solely for the purpose of medical treatment. Josephine Quintavalle, from the Pro-Life Alliance, told BBC News, “The HFEA has to take the welfare of the child into account when they are making decisions like this. We dispute whether it is in the best interests of the child to be created as a tissue match for somebody else.”

New office of religious liaison
Secularists protest Blair’s initiative
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has created the country’s first “faith czar” to head up government relations with Britain’s religious communities. Blair had already created the positions of “drugs czar” and “homelessness czar.” Now he has appointed John Battle, a Labor MP, to reassure the churches that they have the moral support of the Prime Minister.

Battle, a practicing Catholic who was a seminarian for a time, told the London Times: “The job is to be out and about in Britain, creating that space, looking at the impact of inter-faith communities and feeding that back into the power center.” He continued:

The question I ask is, are we making space for faith traditions or is the culture shutting them down? Do they feel they have enough space to breathe and live? It might be tensions between them or within them or it might be the faith traditions feeling all the rest of the world is against them.

The appointment immediately met with opposition. Keith Porteous Wood, the executive director of the National Secular Society, said: “The Prime Minister ought to be appointing a czar to represent the growing number of non-believers who are feeling increasingly alienated by the government’s pro-religious policies, particularly over religious representatives in the House of Lords and faith schools.”

Back to Catholic World Report February 2002 Table of Contents