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, known as the Saint Ninian Declaration after the eighth-century missionary to what is now Scotland, acknowledges that the relationship between the Churches “has not always been a happy one, even including violence done in the name of religion; but we also see that there has been friendship and cooperation in the past.”
It sets out numerous areas of shared tradition and creed, including respect for the saints and the authority of the first four Ecumenical Councils.
The Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane, the Rt Revd Ian Paton, spoke of his experience as the SEC’s delegate at an Anglican-Roman Catholic summit in Rome and Canterbury last year (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 “should be doing more together”, he said, and the Declaration had emerged from that conviction.
A number of Synod members including the Primus, the Most Revd Mark Strange, who is also the Bishop of Moray, Ross & Caithness, spoke warmly of relations with the RC church in their local contexts.
“I 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 in the afternoon,” Bishop Strange said: the two congregations use the same building.
The Saint Ninian Declaration makes a statement 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 debate play out, and welcomed its passage.
“I value friendship deeply,” he said afterwards. “It is only through friendship that we will come to trust each other, it is only by trusting each other that we will learn from each other, and it is only be learning from each other that we will take this forward, and the great project that Our Lord prayed for the night before he died will come again to pass, here in the Christian West.”
Archbishop Cushley said that fruit that the declaration would bear “might be slow, it might be fast, but it gives an opportunity to all of us to put 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.”