Malines Conversations

A series of meetings between Anglican and Roman Catholic theologians at Malines (Mechelen), Belgium, extending over five years from 1921. The prime movers were D.J. Cardinal Mercier* and Lord Halifax, a High Church Anglican. Two such groups inevitably found substantial areas of agreement after the manner of ecumenical exchanges. Mercier did, however, raise the possibility of the Church of England's uniting with Rome as a uniate body with a patriarch. The conversations petered out with Mercier's death in 1926. It was he who had engendered much of the warmth on the Roman side, and in 1928 indications from the Vatican confirmed that the talks had been quietly dropped. Low Church Anglicans had always entertained grave suspicions about the exchanges.