A Christmas Sermon
SIR,—Mr Hugh Ross Williamson, an ex-Anglican clergyman, like so many converts from what he would call Protestanism to the Roman obedience, is plus royalism que le roi (Letters, January 27).
On a previous incursion into your correspondence columns he explained that any person who rightly claimed to be a Catholic in virtue of a valid baptism, for example in the Anglican Communion, neverthe- less forfeited that claim by 'receiving Confirmation at the hands of a layman,' that is, an Anglican bishop.
Now he is at it again: 'the Archbishop of Canter- bury remains technically a layman.'
However, we should be grateful to Mr Williamson for setting out so clearly five points from the Pope's decree on ecumenism. For he has shown, as did Mr Waugh in his notorious sermon which started this correspondence, how utterly impossible it is to imagine any organic coming together of the Church of Rome with Protestants (including Anglicans); Rome cannot change her claims or her doctrines. She will take all, and give nothing.
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