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The Anglican Communion, since its separation from Rome, dem-
onstrated a sporadic interest in the Orthodox, “who had succeeded in
retaining their catholicity without being papalist.”10 It was important
for the Anglicans to verify their existence through an ancient church,
which was not Rome, papalist, and this could only be found in the East-
ern Christian Church. Anglicans easily observed that the Orthodox
Church had “preserved the Creed, the Sacraments, the Hierarchy, and
the life of Catholic devotion, in spite of the most protracted dangers
and di?culties, without Roman addition and Protestant subtraction.”11
Thus, it was the Church of England that initiated the matter of reunion
between the Churches, feeling the need of reinforcing her Catholic and
Apostolic traditions through closer communion with Orthodoxy, and of
attaining, if possible, a recognition by the Orthodox Church of the va-
lidity of Anglican Orders, contested by the Latin Church. Archbishop
of York, Michael Ramsey, during an Anglican-Orthodox Conference, on
September 1st, 1960, expressed the Anglican sentiments towards the
relations with the Orthodox, paraphrasing them as follows:

“Hurray, we are not alone in maintaining on this globe the
existence of a non-papal Catholicism…There is another in
another part of the globe, and this it is all the more appar-
ent that non-papal Catholicism is a reality and not an Eng-
lish device invented by John Henry Newman…Non-papal
Catholicism is something that exists in its own right, dou-
bly attested by the existence of another great Church in
Christendom which, like us maintains a continuity with the
ancient, undivided Church.”12

10 Zernov, Nicholas, Zernov, Militza, Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, A Historical Memoir, (Ox-
ford, Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1979), p. 1.
11 Moss, C.B., Our debt to the Eastern Churches, (London, Published for the Anglican and Eastern
Churches Association, 1935), p. 16.
12 Ramsey, Michael, Archbishop of York, “Holiness, Truth and Unity”, Sobornost, Series 4, No. 4,
Winter-Spring 1961, p. 161-162.

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