IN 1864 Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, 80 propositions which were condemned as incompatible with the Catholic faith. The last was the most notorious, condemning any suggestion that the Pope could and ought to reconcile himself with “progress, liberalism and modern civilisation”. “No sentence,” it has been said, “ever did more to dig a chasm between the pope and modern European society.” And yet, though tactless and undiplomatic, there was a sense in which the condemnation was absolutely right — the only obligation on popes, bishops and indeed all faithful Christians, is fidelity to the Gospel. The Church must question and test all political ideologies and cultural trends, by the understanding of human nature and human destiny revealed in Jesus Christ.

In the past month much of the world’s attention has been focused on Rome, for the death and funeral of Pope John Paul II and for the election and inauguration of Pope Benedict XVI. All of us in the Anglican delegation attending both the funeral and the inaguration found the great liturgies of farewell and welcome deeply moving. They were symbolic markers questioning some of the prevalent simplistic assumptions about contemporary secularism and revealing, as never before, the coming together of Christians. Not only was it the first time that an Archbishop of Canterbury had attended any such occasion, it was surely the first time that representatives of the Salvation Army, and the Billy Graham evangelists had been there for a pope. It was as though Pope John Paul’s great encyclical, Ut unum sint (That they all may be one), had opened up before us like a fan, and the Church of Peter showed how it could preside in love. What was true for Christians was true more widely in the presence at one act of worship of statesman and leaders politically divided — who else could have drawn together the presidents of Syria, Israel, Iran and the US?

The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI predictably provoked anxious comment in the Western media because of his role as a defender of orthodoxy. Was he not someone who had said that non-Roman Catholic churches were not churches in the fullest sense? Yet in a fascinating conversation I had with him some three years ago he said that an ecclesial community, because it is ecclesial, must have the marks of the Church, and that Anglicans had them in a very deep way. Faced with the challenge of secularism in Europe, Christians needed each other for the work of mission: “No one of us can do it alone.” In answer to my question about how he understood the celebration of the Eucharist in churches — ecclesial communities — whose orders the Catholic Church did not recognise as valid, he replied that in such celebrations there was indeed a true feeding on Christ, and therefore there was a real and transforming grace.

I remembered that warm conversation when I studied the new Pope’s first message at the end of the conclave. He spoke of the grace of Christ in the Eucharist as that which must sustain and transform. He spoke of his own “primary commitment” and “compelling duty” to work towards “the full and visible unity of all Christ’s followers”. Expressions of good feelings, he said, are not enough; concrete gestures are required, and above all “ that interior conversion which is the basis for all progress on the road of ecumenism”. All are summoned to a purification of memory to receive the full truth of Christ, whose searching judgment at the end will ask of us “what we did and what we did not do for the great good that is the full and visible unity of all His disciples.”

On the eve of His Passion Jesus prayed for His disciples that “they might be one, that the world might believe”. The urgency of Christian unity lies here — it is for the sake of the divided world which God so loved that He gave His only Son. That self-giving love which is the very life of God is the heart and source of unity. The love of God sustains the love of our neighbour.

We glimpsed something of what the global unity of the human family might mean in the great gatherings in Rome. The crowds of young people showed us that the deep things of the Spirit still touch hearts and minds. The Gospel of the love of God has deeper and truer things to say about our human flourishing than the mocking cynicism of much journalism, and political campaigns — even in the present election — which seem more concerned with appeals to human selfishness than with a genuinely transforming vision for society with all that that costs. The Lord told Peter that when he was converted he was to strengthen his brethren. Our prayer for Pope Benedict, and which he would surely want us to offer, is that he may do just that.

Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe