The continuing work and achievement of the Colloquia whereby Anglican and Roman Catholic canon lawyers meet to deepen an understanding of the regulatory instruments which govern their Churches has been well documented in the pages of this Journal. A lengthy summary of the first ten years of fellowship and study appeared in 2009 under the title ‘A Decade of Ecumenical Dialogue on Canon Law’.Footnote 1 The methodology previously adopted in successive Colloquia had been to evaluate a series of discrete subjects by breaking them into their component parts and then preparing paired papers, one from an Anglican perspective and the other Catholic. Subsequent discussions produced a distillation in which the points of similarity generally outnumbered the points of difference.
The eleventh Colloquium departed from this tradition and instead focussed on two substantial papers produced in advance, each considering the utility of canon law in ecumenical dialogue. The Colloquium benefited greatly from the wisdom of Professor Brendan Leahy and Canon Nicholas Sagovsky and for the quality, clarity and thoughtfulness of their papers. These two papers, revised in the light of wide-ranging seminar discussion, are reproduced in full elsewhere in this issue.Footnote 2
The Twelfth Colloquium, to be held in Rome in March 2011, will focus on particular areas where canon law is of practical application in specific ecumenical situations. The theoretical knowledge gained at the meeting in Walsingham will prove invaluable in this task. A lasting debt is owed to our two distinguished ecumenical scholars, whose work will reach a wider readership through the pages of this Journal.
