A DECLARATION of friendship between the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) and the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland was signed last Friday afternoon, on the second day of the meeting of the SEC’s General Synod in Edinburgh.
The statement, generally known as the Saint Ninian Declaration after the eighth-century missionary to what’s now Scotland, acknowledges that the connection between the Churches “has not at all times been a pleased one, even including violence done within the name of faith; but we also see that there was friendship and cooperation up to now.”
It sets out quite a few areas of shared tradition and creed, including respect for the saints and the authority of the primary 4 Ecumenical Councils.
The Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane, the Rt Revd Ian Paton, spoke of his experience because the SEC’s delegate at an Anglican-Roman Catholic summit in Rome and Canterbury last yr (News, 2 February 2024).
He and his partner bishop from Scotland, the RC Bishop of Aberdeen, the Rt Revd Hugh Gilbert OSB, returned from the summit convinced that they “must be doing more together”, he said, and the Declaration had emerged from that conviction.
Quite a few Synod members including the Primus, the Most Revd Mark Strange, who can also be the Bishop of Moray, Ross & Caithness, spoke warmly of relations with the RC church of their local contexts.
“I actually have the privilege on Sunday morning if I’m in Grantown-on-Spey of walking into St Columba’s [SEC church] at 11 o’clock and coming out of St Anne’s Roman Catholic Church at three o’clock within the afternoon,” Bishop Strange said: the 2 congregations use the identical constructing.
The Saint Ninian Declaration makes a press release to the people of Scotland, he suggested, which undermined narratives of division based on religious upbringing.
The motion endorsing the Declaration was passed with 112 votes in favour, none against, and two recorded abstentions.
The RC Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, the Most Revd Leo Cushley, watched the talk play out, and welcomed its passage.
“I value friendship deeply,” he said afterwards. “It is just through friendship that we are going to come to trust one another, it is just by trusting one another that we are going to learn from one another, and it is just be learning from one another that we are going to take this forward, and the nice project that Our Lord prayed for the night before he died will come again to pass, here within the Christian West.”
Archbishop Cushley said that fruit that the declaration would bear “could be slow, it could be fast, nevertheless it gives a chance to all of us to place it before our people and to say that our two institutions have agreed to this — let’s see how we take this forward as friends together.”
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