Canterbury Meets Rome: The Women Clergy Fault Line

Archbishop Sarah Mullally traveled to Rome this past weekend to meet Pope Leo XIV — and she called the visit a pilgrimage. That word choice matters more than it might seem at first.

A pilgrimage is not a diplomatic mission. It is not a negotiation or a summit. It is a journey you take to mark something, to stand in a place and let the weight of it settle on you. Mullally reportedly used the same word to describe the trip she took before her installation at Canterbury, which suggests it is language she reaches for when something feels genuinely significant — spiritually significant, not just institutionally so.

But the institution she walked into in Rome has its own posture, and that posture points in a very different direction on the question that makes this particular pilgrimage so loaded. Sarah Mullally is a woman. The Catholic Church teaches that women cannot be ordained. The Archbishop of Canterbury is ordained. And yet there she was, received by the Pope.

What do you do with that pairing? That is the question this visit puts on the table, and it is one the formal language of ecumenism is not especially well-equipped to answer.

What the Visit Actually Signals

The visit marks the first time a female Archbishop of Canterbury has met a sitting Pope in person — a symbolic collision of two institutions that could not disagree more sharply on whether women should lead them. That is not a small thing, and it is worth sitting with before reaching for reassuring phrases about shared mission and mutual respect.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, a body of roughly 85 million members across 165 countries. The Pope leads the Catholic Church, with approximately 1.3 billion members worldwide. These two traditions have been engaged in formal dialogue since the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) was established in 1970, producing 13 major agreed statements on topics ranging from the Eucharist to ministry to moral theology. And yet the ordination of women — which the Church of England formally adopted for priests in 1994 and for bishops in 2015 — remains what many theologians describe as the most concrete structural obstacle to any deeper reunion between the two traditions.

The visit signals, at minimum, that dialogue continues. What it cannot signal, at least honestly, is that the divide is narrowing. The relationship is warmer than it has been at various points in history. The theological gap on this specific question has not moved.

Where the Two Churches Actually Stand

The divergence on women clergy is not a disagreement over emphasis or pastoral practice. It is a disagreement about whether the question is even open — and that makes it different in kind from most of the things ARCIC has managed to find common ground on.

The Anglican Communion began ordaining women to the priesthood in England in 1994 — the same year Pope John Paul II issued Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, declaring the Catholic Church's exclusion of women from ordination to be a matter definitively settled and beyond further debate. That timing is either a remarkable coincidence or something more like an institutional mirror: two major Western Christian bodies arriving at exactly opposite conclusions in the same calendar year, each with a conviction of finality.

Across the 165 countries of the Anglican Communion's approximately 85 million members, the question of women's ordination has been resolved for decades — while for the Catholic Church's 1.3 billion, it remains, officially, not a question at all.

Why "Pilgrimage" Is the Interesting Word

Diplomacy has its own language, and that language tends to smooth things over. "Milestone," "dialogue," "mutual respect," "shared mission" — these are words institutions reach for because they require so little of anyone. They can mean almost anything, which is precisely their utility.

Pilgrimage is different. It's a word that carries intention and cost. You go on a pilgrimage to encounter something you cannot fully control, to place yourself in relationship with something larger than your own agenda. Mullally's choice of that frame places the visit inside a spiritual register rather than a diplomatic one. She is not there to negotiate. She is not there to announce progress on some agreed statement about the nature of holy orders. She is there to be present to a relationship that she treats as spiritually real.

In my view, this is the more honest framing available to her given where the formal dialogue actually stands. Because the honest truth is that on the specific question of women's ordination, the institutional ecumenical channel has nowhere left to go. ARCIC's work on ministry has been careful and extensive, but the Catholic Church's official position is that the ordination of women is a matter on which the Church itself has no authority to act differently — which means it cannot be renegotiated, because it is not framed as a policy at all. It is framed as a theological limit.

You cannot dialogue your way past a limit that one party holds as definitional. What you can apparently do is keep showing up. And there is something worth paying attention to in that decision.

You can read more about how institutions manage questions they cannot officially answer over at christiancounterpoint.com.

The Long History Behind This Moment

Anglican-Catholic relations have improved substantially since the Reformation rupture — which is a low bar but a real one. The 1966 meeting between Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI, the first such encounter in 400 years, launched the modern ecumenical era between the two communions. ARCIC followed four years later and has continued, in various forms, ever since.

What ARCIC has achieved is genuinely significant in the narrow world of formal ecumenism. Thirteen major agreed statements on the Eucharist, salvation, the nature of the church, and moral discernment — this is real theological labor, and it has narrowed the distance between the two traditions on questions that once seemed entirely intractable. Many Catholics and Anglicans reading those documents are often surprised by how much agreement was actually there, buried under centuries of polemical history.

But what ARCIC has not been able to achieve — and arguably cannot achieve within its current structure — is movement on the questions where the Catholic Church's position is stated as definitively settled. Women's ordination is one of those. Papal primacy and infallibility is another. The irony is that the more carefully ARCIC has done its work, the more precisely it has identified where the remaining disagreements lie. And the disagreements that remain are not peripheral issues. They are, for the Catholic Church, constitutive — part of what it means to be the Church it believes itself to be.

That puts the Canterbury-Rome relationship in an unusual position: two communities that pray in largely overlapping ways, share a sacramental theology with more in common than most people realize, and hold many of the same moral convictions — but separated by differences that, on the Catholic side at least, are not described as open questions waiting for the right conversation.

What This Means for the People Inside These Institutions

Here is what I keep coming back to: the people most affected by this divide are not the theologians working on agreed statements. They are the ordinary members of both traditions who feel the friction in ways that are harder to name.

For Anglican women in ordained ministry — priests, bishops, now an Archbishop — the Catholic Church's position is not an abstract theological disagreement happening somewhere in Rome. It is a specific judgment about their calling, their orders, their identity as ministers. The Catholic Church does not deny that Anglican women serve their communities faithfully. It simply does not recognize their ordinations as valid. That is a pointed kind of statement, and it lands with weight regardless of how carefully it is worded.

For Catholics — particularly Catholic women — who feel a genuine pull toward ordained ministry, the official closing of the question is its own weight. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis did not end that conversation among Catholics. It drove it underground, or sideways, into theology faculties and religious communities and quiet personal anguish where it continues to surface. The question did not go away because it was declared closed. It just became harder to ask openly.

And for the millions of ordinary members of both churches who simply want to worship together, to share Communion, to recognize each other as genuinely part of the same Body — the formal ecumenical divide can feel increasingly abstract compared to the lived reality of their friendship and faith. That gap between institutional position and lived experience is one of the persistent tensions that formal ecumenism never quite resolves, and this visit does not resolve it either.

What Pope Leo XIV Brings to This Moment

Pope Leo XIV — Cardinal Robert Prevost before his election in May 2025 — arrived at the papacy with a background in religious order leadership and a reputation for theological seriousness. His first year has not produced dramatic moves in any direction on the contested questions. He has not closed doors that John Paul II and Benedict already closed, nor opened windows that Francis had left only slightly ajar.

What matters about this particular visit is less what was said in the room and more what the meeting itself communicates. The fact that Pope Leo XIV received Mullally — by all accounts warmly — does not close any theological gap. But it does signal something about how the current papacy intends to hold the relationship: with personal regard, not merely institutional courtesy.

That is not nothing. The history of Anglican-Catholic dialogue shows that genuine personal relationships between leaders sometimes open conversational space that formal institutional processes cannot create on their own. Whether this one does anything of the kind remains, for now, an open question. I think it is honest to hold it as an open question rather than preemptively calling it a breakthrough.

The Question That Doesn't Go Away

There is a version of ecumenism that measures progress by the number of agreed statements and the warmth of joint communiqués. That version can always find something to celebrate. And there is a version that asks: what would it actually take for these two communities to recognize each other fully, and is anyone prepared to move toward that?

The second version requires honesty about the fact that the ordination of women is not a miscommunication that dialogue can dissolve. It is a genuine theological disagreement about the nature of priesthood, the authority of tradition, and what the Church has the power to decide. The Anglican Communion answered that question one way. The Catholic Church answered it another way and declared the question closed.

What Mullally's pilgrimage to Rome actually demonstrates is that Christian communities can sustain a relationship across a divide that serious — that the relationship itself carries value even when resolution is not on offer. I think that is probably right, and I think it is worth something. But the institutional tendency to describe visits like this one as "milestones" softly papers over what the milestone actually marks: not movement toward unity on the question that most concretely divides them, but a deepening of a relationship that must exist in the shadow of that question.

That is a harder thing to celebrate honestly. But it might be more true.

You can explore how religious institutions navigate questions they cannot officially resolve on christiancounterpoint.com.

FAQ

Why does the Archbishop of Canterbury visiting the Pope matter?

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion's roughly 85 million members in 165 countries, while the Pope leads the Catholic Church's 1.3 billion. These are the two largest Western Christian traditions, and their formal ecumenical relationship has been active since 1966. The current visit matters because it sustains that relationship — and because the fact that Canterbury's Archbishop is now a woman makes the encounter a direct, visible expression of the deepest unresolved theological divide between the two churches.

Why can't the Anglican and Catholic churches simply agree on women clergy?

It is not primarily a matter of negotiation. The Catholic Church's official position, stated in Pope John Paul II's 1994 document Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, is that the Church "has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women." This is framed not as a policy that could be revised, but as a theological claim about the limits of Church authority itself. The Anglican Communion, by contrast, ordains women to all orders including the episcopate, and regards this as a legitimate development of Christian ministry. These are genuinely incompatible positions, not misunderstandings that better communication would resolve.

What is ARCIC and what has it actually accomplished?

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission was established in 1970 to conduct formal theological dialogue between the two traditions. It has produced 13 major agreed statements on the Eucharist, salvation, church authority, and moral theology — narrowing the theological distance on questions once considered entirely intractable. ARCIC has not resolved, and likely cannot resolve within its current structure, the issues where the Catholic Church holds a formally definitive position, including women's ordination and the nature of papal primacy.

Does this visit signal any movement toward unity between the two churches?

Probably not on the structural questions that most concretely divide them. The women's ordination question represents a formal theological barrier that neither church is moving toward resolving with the other — the Anglican Communion because it settled the question decades ago in the other direction, and the Catholic Church because it has declared it definitively closed. What the visit does signal is that the relationship between Canterbury and Rome remains personally engaged and institutionally sustained, even when doctrinal convergence is not available.

What does it mean that Archbishop Mullally called the visit a pilgrimage?

It means she is framing the visit in spiritual rather than diplomatic terms — as a personal act of seeking rather than an institutional negotiation. She reportedly used the same word to describe a trip she took before her installation at Canterbury, which suggests it carries real weight in her own self-understanding as a leader. Calling a visit a pilgrimage is a way of saying: I am here not to advance an agenda but to be in relationship. Whether that framing produces anything different from a standard diplomatic meeting is genuinely uncertain, but it is a more honest account of what is actually available when formal dialogue has reached its structural limits.

Source: This analysis draws on reporting from The Christian Century and publicly available records of Anglican-Catholic ecumenical dialogue.

Last updated: 2026-06-30

Jared Clark is the creator of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry.