Plenary Meeting in Melbourne, 5-11 October 2025
The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC III) held its annual plenary meeting in Melbourne, Australia, from 5 to 11 October 2025. The meeting had originally been scheduled for May 2025 but was postponed following the death of Pope Francis. The meeting was hosted by the Commission’s Anglican co-chairman, Archbishop Philip Freier, the recently retired Archbishop of Melbourne.
This was the final in-person plenary meeting of the Commission. The Commission has been working since 2019 on the second part of its mandate to examine how the Church local, regional and universal discerns right ethical teaching. The Commission’s drafting sub-committee had held two in-person meetings in London since the 2024 plenary meeting in Strasbourg, France, and had circulated a number of drafts and solicited feedback from members during that period. During their week together, members of the Commission reflected in detail on a third draft of an Agreed Statement for this phase of the dialogue. When published, this Agreed Statement will complement the document published by ARCIC III in 2017, Walking Together on the Way: Learning to be the Church. Local, Regional and Universal.
Since the beginning of this third phase of ARCIC, the Commission has consciously adopted an approach of receptive ecumenical learning, whereby each dialogue partner seeks to identify elements of church life found in the other tradition which might be gifts for the enhancement of its own tradition. Also in this phase, ARCIC III included two case studies as part of its work. These case studies, on Enslavement and Contraception, are intended to be a lens for moral learning from our different histories and a mirror for looking at our respective traditions’ own woundedness and failures.
The Commission devoted a great deal of its time in Melbourne seeking first to engage more intentionally in receptive ecumenical reflection on what each of our traditions can learn from the other regarding ethical discernment, and secondly to reflection of the experience of the Commission itself over the past six years of shared study and discussion of moral reasoning. The Commission’s work in this regard was enriched by re-engaging with the recent work of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches on Churches and Moral Discernment, and the analytical tool developed in the third volume of that work. This intensive work undertaken in Melbourne led members to the view that further refinement of the draft should be carried out so as to highlight these themes more fully. Further drafting work will be carried out in the coming months, which the full Commission will review in early 2026.
The members of the Commission prayed together every morning and evening, alternating between Anglican and Roman rites. In doing so they experienced both the joy of shared prayer and the pain of eucharistic separation. The Commission is grateful to Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock and the team at St Peter’s Eastern Hill for providing spaces for its meeting and for its Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist, and to Mons. Stuart Hall and the team at St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral for providing the space for its Roman Catholic celebrations.
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