Rowan Williams made history as the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to pray and preach at Lourdes. Lourdes is where the Virgin Mary is believed to appeared before Bernadette Sobirous, an unlettered peasant girl. Bernadette's visions since then have been officially declared worthy of belief and so Lourdes has become the best known Roman Catholic shrine in the world. Rowan Cantuar preached "When Mary came to Bernardette, she came at first as an anonymous figure, a beautiful lady, a mysterious 'thing', not yet identified as the Lord's spotless Mother. And Bernardette – uneducated, uninstructed in doctrine – leapt with joy, recognising that here was life, here was healing. " By doing so, he for all intents and purposes accepted two Catholic dogmas proclaimed infallibly by the Popes, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the Virgin. These dogma are explicitly rejected by Protestants and constitute as the ecumenical stumbling blocks. The Eastern Or...
"It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved" - Galileo