[Episcopal News Service]
During a two-day visit to visit Pope John Paul II, Archbishop of Canterbury George L. Carey suggested that the Roman Catholic Church may one day follow the path of Anglicans and ordain women to the priesthood. He also said during an interview that the fact that the Church of England ordains women while Rome does not was 'an eternally insurmountable' problem.
The Church of England began to ordain women in 1994, despite a warning two years earlier by the pope that the move would represent a grave obstacle to unity. The pope pointed out that Christ had chosen only men as his apostles. 'I know there are lots of women in the Roman Catholic Church who would like ordination themselves,' Carey said. 'So let's see it as a problem, but not as a final break that is going to stop the unity that we want to see.'
Carey said that the Church of England's break with more than four centuries of an exclusively male priesthood meant that 'sometimes churches have to change and to go with the leading of the Holy Spirit and sometimes this takes hundreds of years.' Yet this 'doesn't mean to say one church is right and another church is wrong,' he added. 'We move in different steps, different paces. We have lagged behind the Roman Catholic Church in many directions but maybe on this issue we are leading the way.'
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