A WEEK ago I had the great privilege of accompanying the Archbishop of Canterbury on his first visit to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. Things have changed greatly since 1960 when Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher made his historic visit to Rome — the first by an Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel went as a fugitive in 1397.

On the occasion of Fisher’s visit, conservative elements in the Curia sought to put a press blackout on the visit and insisted that the archbishop be described simply as “Dr Fisher”. Pope John XXIII, however, warmly welcomed the archbishop, and said, so Fisher recorded, that it was a joy for him that the successor of St Peter to be brought into contact with the Church of St Augustine. Pope John told the archbishop that he desired unity quite simply in Jesus’s words in St John's Gospel: “that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.”

In 1966 Michael Ramsey visited Pope Paul VI, meeting him beneath Michelangelo’s painting of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. They spoke of common prayer, and of the significance of Newman, and difficult issues between them such as the Roman condemnation of Anglican orders, and agreed to the setting up of a new joint theological commission. At a final service at St Paul’s-without-the-walls, in a spontaneous gesture when he said goodbye, the Pope took off his episcopal ring, a present to him from the city of Milan, and gave it to the archbishop. On this recent visit that ring was worn by the present archbishop and was kissed with affection by the present Pope.

These moments of meeting are significant. They have a sacramental quality about them. They open out into the careful work of theologians, and into shared mission and service. They symbolise a desire for the healing of memories without which there can be no true reconciliation.

Part of the archbishop’s visit was a tour of the excavations under St Peter’s, where the old Roman cemetery on the Vatican hill had streets running through a complex of tombs. At the heart of that complex was a simple monument standing over a grave. Today, directly above, is the great high altar of the basilica and the soaring dome. The bones found in that grave cannot be proved to be those of Peter, but they are venerated as such.

It was a moving moment when we were able to pray in that last resting place of Peter, the first to confess Jesus as the Christ, the one who denied His Lord, but who was restored to be the one who was to feed the flock of Christ. As T. S. Eliot wrote in famous words about Little Gidding, a simple country church near Huntingdon, “You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity, Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.”

Holy places, tombs of saints and places of pilgrimage, are places which are sacramental, pointing us to God, reminding us of lives transformed and given meaning by the impress of the Spirit of God upon them. At the heart of the Renaissance splendour of St Peter’s it is that reality which is there at the end. Without Peter’s confession of Christ and his faithfulness to death the history and culture of Europe would be very different. It is this that gave to Rome the title, “the Church which presides in love”.

All churches are rooted in history and distorted by history, and divisions between Christians have often started as a recall to the challenge and simplicity of the Gospel. The healing of those divisions will be rooted in Christian love and service, and in common prayer for the unity which the Spirit gives. Divided Christians share a common baptism, and that is fundamental to belonging together in the body of Christ.

The healing of memories, and the transfiguring of the wounds of history do indeed take time, but we have already come a long way. Archbishop Williams’s visit to Rome was indeed the Church of Augustine meeting the Church of Peter, and demonstrated that words expressing concern for the truth of the Gospel and for the pattern of Christian life can be, and are, words spoken in love.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe