HALIFAX, CHARLES LINDLEY WOOD, Viscount.—English politician, born on 7 June 1839 in London, died on 19 January 1934 at Doncaster, Hickleton Hall. From his youth he showed a keen sensitivity to religious questions, to which he devoted his entire life. As early as 1866, in a letter to Father Doussot, whom he had met several years earlier during a stay in Rome, he clearly outlined the task he had set himself: to work tirelessly to restore the unity of all Christendom, and especially that of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The following year, in 1867, H. was appointed president of the English Church Union, the association founded in 1859 to restore unity within the Church of England. H. nevertheless understood that national unity was not true unity, which instead had to consist in «visible union with the Latin Church from which the Anglican Church had separated after the sixteenth century». In 1890, at Funchal on the island of Madeira, H. met the French Lazarist Portal.
Between the two men conversations began concerning union; these conversations expanded to include the Holy See as well. H. himself then went to Rome, where he was received by Leo XIII. Union seemed near, but it foundered on the question of the validity of Anglican Orders. The bull Apostolicae curae of 1896 brought H.’s first attempts to an end; he nevertheless did not despair of the possibility of achieving union. Indeed, following the Lambeth Appeal of 1920, H. initiated an extensive unofficial exchange of views between the Catholic and Anglican Churches: in the Conversations at Malines (1921–25), a Catholic delegation presided over by Cardinal Mercier and an Anglican delegation headed by H. established theological agreement on many points, but agreement was lacking on the definition of the Pope’s primacy.
He set forth his thoughts and also his inner torment in Leo XIII and Anglican Orders (London 1912),
A call to reunion (there 1922), Reunion and the Roman Primacy (there 1925), Further considerations on behalf of reunion (there 1926), The conversations at Malines 1921-25 (there 1927), The conversations at Malines: documents (there 1930).