HALIFAX, Charles Lindley Wood, Viscount of. - English politician, b. 7 June 1839 in London, d. 19 Jan. 1934 at Doncaster, Hickleton Hall. From his youth he had a lively sensitivity to religious questions, to which he devoted himself throughout his life. As early as 1866, in a letter to Father Doussot, whom he had met some years earlier during a stay in Rome, he traced in clear lines the task he had set himself: to work tirelessly to bring about once again the unity of all Christendom and particularly 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 re-establish unity within the Church of England. H., however, understood that national unity was not true unity, which instead had to consist in the «visible union with the Latin Church from which the Anglican Church had separated after the 16th century». In 1890 at Funchal, on the Island of Madeira, H. made the acquaintance of the French Lazarist Portal.
Between the two men conversations on union began, conversations that widened until they came to include even the Holy See. H. himself later went to Rome, where he was received by Leo XIII. Union seemed near, but it was shattered over the question of the validity of Anglican Ordinations. The Bull Apostolicae curae of 1896 put an end to these first attempts of H., who nevertheless did not despair of the possibilities of bringing about union. Indeed, after the Lambeth Appeal of 1920, H. opened a broad exchange of ideas, of an unofficial character, between the Catholic and Anglican Churches: in the Malines Conversations (1921-25) a Catholic delegation presided over by Card. Mercier and an Anglican one headed by H. established theological identity on many points, but agreement failed on the definition of the primacy of the Pope.
He set down his thoughts and also his inner torment in Leo XIII and Anglican Orders (London 1912),
A call to reunion (ibid. 1922), Reunion and the Roman Primacy (ibid. 1925), Further considerations on behalf of reunion (ibid. 1926), The conversations at Malines 1921-25 (ibid. 1927), The conversations at Malines: documents (ibid. 1930).