Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI will receive the Church of England’s spiritual leader for the first time since inviting disaffected Anglicans to become Roman Catholics, a move that has led critics to accuse the pontiff of poaching priests.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, will hold a private meeting with the pope tomorrow, his spokesman said. The Anglican leader will be at the Vatican to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Dutch Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, a leader of the movement to unite Christianity.

The visit comes at a delicate time for relations between the churches, which split in 1534 when King Henry VIII’s request for a divorce was denied by Pope Clement VII. Benedict last month unveiled a special structure to allow traditionalist Anglican ministers, including married ones, and lay people to join the Catholic Church.

“The pope has exposed himself to the charge of poaching,” said Thomas Williams, a theology professor at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University. “It was a bold move, though the issue of celibacy will have to be carefully managed.”

The Roman Catholic Church, which has 1.1 billion members, opposes same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay people, as do the traditionalist Anglicans. Catholic priests, unlike Anglicans, must be male, unmarried and celibate. Some Eastern rite churches that answer to Rome also allow married priests.

Hans Kueng, a Roman Catholic theologian who has questioned the dogma of papal infallibility and celibacy, told Italy’s la Repubblica newspaper that the Vatican’s offer was akin to “fishing” and a “non-ecumenical piracy of priests.”

‘Catholic Response’

Not everyone agrees. Paul D. Murray, a theology professor at Durham University in northern England, said Pope Benedict’s offer wasn’t “an act of aggression.” He said, in a telephone interview on Nov. 19, “This is a Catholic response, which has some precedent, to Anglican initiatives.”

The Vatican, in a Nov. 4 document outlining the conversion process, said it acted because the “Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion.”

Even so, welcoming married Anglican clerics may help offset the decline in the number of priests in Europe, where there were 2,260 fewer in 2007 than a year earlier, according to the most recent Vatican figures. Gains in Africa, Asia and the Americas led to an increase by 762 to 408,024 priests worldwide.

While married Anglican clerics can become Catholic priests, they can’t become bishops, because of the celibacy rule.

Estimate of Converts

As many as 1,000 Church of England priests could convert, according to Forward in Faith, a group representing traditionalist Anglicans whose members lobbied the Vatican. The group, which opposes female bishops and same-sex unions, has 8,000 members and 300 parishes in England.

“There is a great deal of enthusiasm” for the offer, said Stephen Parkinson, director of the group in England. Forward in Faith members will probably make their decisions early next year, he said, in a telephone interview on Nov. 17.

“This is both an exciting and dangerous time for Christianity” in England, said Bishop John Broadhurst, a Forward in Faith leader, in a statement on his Web site.

Anglicans may also be struggling under the leadership of Williams, a Cambridge and Oxford scholar with a doctorate in divinity, who has at times been elusive on the role of sexuality and gender within the Church of England, according to author Rupert Shortt’s “Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop” (Hodder & Stoughton, 480 pages, 25 pounds ($42)).

Gene Robinson

Williams has had to quell disagreements among the world’s 80 million Anglicans over issues such as same-sex marriages and female clergy during his term. In 2003, the ordination of gay bishop Gene Robinson in New Hampshire caused some U.S. parishes to place themselves under the jurisdiction of Anglican churches in Africa that also opposed his selection.

The archbishop, in a speech yesterday on Christian unity, questioned “how far disunion and non-recognition are theologically justified” among churches.

It will be at least the third meeting of Williams and the pope since the pontiff was elected in 2005. The Catholic leader will come to the U.K. next year in what will be the first papal visit since 1982. Pope Benedict helped to bring forward the canonization of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a Briton and Victorian thinker who converted to Catholicism, in July by recognizing a miracle.

To contact the reporters on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in Rome at fjackson@bloomberg.net; Brian Lysaght in London at blysaght@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 20, 2009 03:21 EST