8. AUTHORITY

   106. Section VII of the Denver Report began with these words, "Problems connected with authority have exercised the Commission from the beginning of our conversations, and have cropped up during our discussions of other themes, e.g. ministry, eucharist. We do not feel that our direct discussions on this theme have been more than exploratory... discussions on this subject will be a necessary item on any future agenda of Roman Catholic/Methodist conversation"⁴³.

   107. Since Denver we have not been oblivious of this necessity, but unfortunately this field is the one in which we suffered most delay in enlisting the kind of cooperation on which our general plan of work depended⁴⁴. It is perhaps understandable that no one should be eager to embark lightly on so difficult a subject, but in the end it was yet again the English joint commission that came to the rescue. By the time they did so, it was too late to have any reasonable expectation of material in a form suitable to be included here, though what we have seen (especially a paper on "Authority in Doctrine", by the Rev. Rupert Davies) suggests that yet another valuable contribution to the dialogue is in prospect. This paper and section VII of the Denver Report both justify the hope that Roman Catholic/Methodist discussion has a distinctive contribution to make to a crucial subject - a distinctiveness which will not be compromised if attention is given to parallel discussions elsewhere. Examples of these are the discussions in progress in the Anglican/ Roman Catholic International Commission and the national Lutheran/Roman Catholic dialogue in the U.S.A. It seems clear that the next stage of our conversations will have to take this subject as a principal one on its agenda.

ENDNOTES

43. Proceedings, § 99, p. 60.

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44. Professor Norman Young, to whom the Commission has been indebted for generous help in several fields, did supply us at our 1973 meeting with an interesting reflection on the question From the background of Australian dialogue.

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