The Edwardine Ordinal & Anglican ordinations.

Catholics involved in ecumenical discussions have a serious obligation to know the basic fundamentals about the parties they are dealing with. This requires, on the part of both clergy and laity, a clear idea of what the Church is and how the other party relates to her.

With respect to the Anglican community, Catholics have to shed some ideas which have crept in since the close of the Second Vatican Council. The following essay concerns the validity of Anglican orders.

Many people in the Church, lay, religious and clergy, are seemingly unaware of the true position of the Church regarding the nature of Anglican priests and bishops. Some believe that there is no difference between them and Catholic clergy. Others are aware of the difference but out of ecumenical charity feel they must play this down. Eyebrows were raised, for example, by the Canadian bishops' remark in response to the Final Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission in 1986:

"We would wish to add to other pertinent data our own spontaneous recognition of the genuine character of the Episcopal ministry and priestly commitment of our Anglican counterparts in Canada (CCCB response to ARCIC Final Report, Ottawa, 1986, p. 12)."

The bishops may have simply meant to encourage the Anglican clergy for the good work that many of them are doing, but in the light of the Catholic Church's doctrinal position, the statement is highly ambiguous. What went unreported, perhaps, was the fact that in the final draft of their response the bishops had to acknowledge that there were still unresolved questions regarding the Sacrifice of the Eucharist and the nature of the Anglican priesthood. The latter is usually referred to as the question of (priestly) Orders.

Let us place the problem in the clear light of day for our own information and in the cause of true ecumenism. It is not only theologically incorrect to recognize the "genuine character" of the Anglican episcopacy, but such a position runs counter to the teaching of the Magisterium over the past four centuries. This teaching is clearly reflected in the law of the Church. The Church has consistently insisted that ministers who come to her fold from non-Catholic groups which owe their origin to the so-called Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, and who wish to become Catholic priests, must be re-ordained absolutely, not just conditionally. Anglicanism is one of these groups.

It is well to remember that the difficulty is encountered mainly with Anglicans and Lutherans, since other non-Catholic Christian groups do not make a pretext of having a ministry that would approximate the Catholic priesthood. Given the fact that the Church teaches that the Sacrament of Orders imparts an indelible character upon the soul of the one receiving it, it is not conceivable that the Church would ordain, modo absoluto, everyone who comes into the fold and wishes to be a priest because he has received "orders" in his own particular previous expression of Christianity. We do a disservice, therefore, to the Catholic community when we give non-Catholic ministers of religion the impression that their orders are valid.

One other pitfall besets the path of those Catholics who are of the "unity-at-any- price" variety. They tend to give the impression to non-Catholics that the papal bull of Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, 1896, which declared Anglican Orders "null and void," may possibly be subject to revision.

Historical background

The history of Anglican orders begins with the Ordinal used in the reign of Elizabeth I (Queen of England, 1558-1603). The Ordinal is the Book of Service used by bishops to ordain priests or bishops. It was first used in the reign of Edward VI (King of England, 1547-1553), hence its name, the Edwardine Ordinal. With very few changes it remains the Ordinal of the Anglican Communion to this day.

Some basic facts

Here we must recall a few basic facts. The Catholic priest Martin Luther (1483-1546) fired the opening shot in Germany in 1517 in what later became known as the "Protestant Reformation." Luther originally intended to reform the Catholic Church. By 1520, however, he had broken with the Church and the Church with him. From there on, he and his followers wanted nothing to do with "the Romish Church."

From the beginning, the focus of Luther's attack was the Sacrifice of the Mass. The following description is from Francis Clark, S.J., Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation, 1960:

"'At no point was Luther so violently opposed to the mediaeval system,' says Dr. Brilioth, 'as in his repudiation of the Romish doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass. This was the spear-point of his assault' (Eucharistic Faith and Practice, p. 137). However much they differed from one another on other questions, all the Reformers were agreed on this. They did not claim to be discarding only a late-mediaeval error or a mere popular superstition, for they allowed that the Romanists' doctrine of the Mass-sacrifice, in the form that confronted them, had been prevalent in the Church for long centuries. 'What I am attacking,' declared Luther in 1520, 'is something deep-rooted and seemingly impossible to eradicate, since it has been established by the practice of so many centuries and approved by the consent of all men. We shall have to cast out the greater part of the books now in honour, and to change almost the whole face of the Church.'"

Almost at once other "reformers" such as Zwingli in Switzerland went further. In 1523 he declared the Lord's Supper to be a memorial only, and not a sacrifice, which he now called a "blasphemy." John Calvin (1509-1564) matched both Luther and Zwingli in the vehemence of his language. "This horrible abomination," he wrote in the Institutes of the Christian religion, "took its origin ... when Satan blinded almost the whole world with the pestilential error of believing that the Mass is a sacrifice and oblation for obtaining the remission of sins" (Ibid., pp. 101-102).

Henry and Edward

Henry VIII, King of England from 1509 to 1547 and the father of Edward, did not attempt to tamper with the Ordinal the Church had used in England for centuries. He broke with the Pope in 1533 and declared himself head of the Church in England when the Pope refused to grant his request for a divorce, but he did not change the liturgy. Men were ordained in his reign for what--from 1533 on--was basically already a schismatic, though not heretical, church. The ordinations were not licit, but no question has ever risen surrounding their validity.

However, before Henry's death in 1547 Protestant tendencies were beginning to manifest themselves in the governing circles of England. More and more the theories and practices of John Calvin and the more fundamentalist Ulrich Zwingli were finding favour among the gentry and in the great universities of Cambridge and Oxford. The first and most artful practitioner of leaving the externals of the liturgy intact so as not to upset the people too much while subtly changing the doctrinal content, was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed by Henry in 1532 because he favoured Henry's divorce. On the death of Henry he was given a free hand.

Under Henry's son, the sickly child-King Edward VI, the Dukes of Northumberland and Somerset undertook to make England a Protestant country. They knew only too well that in order to abolish Catholicism in England they had first to abolish the Mass. Thus there began a tremendous publicity campaign, enhanced by the arrival of continental reformers who were given positions of influence. The Book of Prayer and the Book of Homilies were carefully changed, leaving the externals but changing key theological terms. Meanwhile a number of protestantizing bishops grew bolder, began to destroy statues and images, and gave orders to remove altars (meant for sacrifice) and replace them with tables (meant for meals). Kneeling for communion was also denounced because, after all, the Catholic notion of receiving the body and blood of Christ was no longer held but replaced with sharing bread and wine in commemoration of Christ.

The key change among these alterations came in the ritual for the ordination of priests and bishops. It substituted a "minister of the Word" for a priest with power over the Body and Blood of the Lord. The latter was suppressed and this suppression was brought about in the wording of the Edwardine Ordinal.

Edwardine Ordinal

First published in 1550 as the work of Archbishop Thomas Crammer and his associates, the Ordinal saw a change in the rite of ordination which--from then onwards--can be considered no more than a commissioning service to preach the Word of God. The idea behind it was that preaching the Word of God is more in keeping with the Gospel than is the Sacrificial Mass of the Roman Missal. Shortly thereafter a revised version was published, just in time to ordain some people before the death of Edward VI in 1553.

The revisions which were made in 1552 did not change the essential anti-Catholic bent of the 1550 Ordinal. The clauses which were added in 1552 were only a further delineation of the powers that were to be conferred. The 1552 edition had the following formula for the ordination of "priests:"

   Receive the Holy Ghost,
   whose sins you shall
   forgive, they are forgiven
   them ... and
   be a faithful dispenser of the Word of God
   and of His Holy Sacraments.

This Ordinal was discarded when the Catholic Mary Tudor ascended to the throne in 1553. But it was re-introduced under the Prostestant Queen Elizabeth in 1559, and with additions of 1562, it is the Anglican rite of ordination to this day. That revision of 1562 added, after the words, "Receive the Holy Ghost," the following words:

   ... for the office and work of a priest
   in the Church of God now committed
   un to
   thee by the imposition of our hands.

The question of Anglican Orders is therefore linked to the nature of this Ordinal, and the question to be resolved is one of its sufficiency or insufficiency to confer Orders as understood by the Catholic Church, the sole custodian of the Sacraments of Christ.

Elizabeth and her new hierarchy

Under Elizabeth the first occasion for the use of the Ordinal occurred in 1559 when she shopped around for a suitable candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer had been deposed in 1553 and his Catholic successor died before 1559. At the time of Elizabeth coming to the throne all Catholic bishops were either dead, or she had them deposed and imprisoned.

It was unthinkable and intolerable that the Primatial See of England, Canterbury, should remain vacant, but who was to fill it? Elizabeth chose Matthew Parker (1504-1575), but encountered a problem in finding anyone to consecrate him. Eventually she chose four men, three of whom, William Barlow, John Scory and Miles Coverdale, had been deprived of their Episcopal Sees by Queen Mary because of irregularities in their ordinations under Edward. The fourth, John Hodgkins, was ordained under Henry but was a renegade Catholic bishop who was content to serve every religious whim expressed by monarch or parliament. Barlow was the chief consecrator of Parker at a private ceremony in Lambeth Palace on December 17, 1559. Four days later, the new "archbishop" and his three co-consecrators, Barlow, Scory and Hodgkins, consecrated four other Protestant confessing priests at Bow chapel in London; on January 21, 1560, another four, and on March 24 another three (Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, Vol. III, p. 45). It is from this group of Anglican bishops that the present Anglican "episcopacy" is descended. Be it noted that the ritual used in these "ordinations" was the Edwardine Ordinal of 1552.

During the rule of Mary Tudor, Elizabeth's older Catholic half sister and Queen from 1553-1558, Edward's Ordinal was set aside. Mary acted under the instruction from Rome, which insisted on the absolute rather than a conditional re-ordination of those priests who now wished to come back to the full Catholic Church and who had received Holy Orders under Edward. The new priests, of course, were ordained under the traditional Catholic Ordinal.

It is worth mentioning that Queen Mary's instructions regarding the treatment of those who wanted to become priests or bishops, but who had received orders under the Edwardine Ordinal, came from two Popes, Julian III and Paul IV. In each case it was a Pope teaching in virtue of his authority as the Magister of the Church, and in each case the result was the same--the absolute invalidity of the Edwardian Orders.

Furthermore, it must be remembered that when serious doubts about the nature of their orders began to make themselves felt in the Anglican communion, it was too late to rectify the situation short of adopting the practice of being ordained either by an Eastern Orthodox bishop or later on, after Vatican I (1869-1870), by a bishop of the Old Catholic Church in the Netherlands or Germany which were schismatic but still had valid orders.

The historical argument against the validity of the orders conferred under the Edwardine Ordinal relies on the fact that, given the invalidity of those orders conferred under Edward VI, and the subsequent questionable "consecration" of Matthew Parker on the one hand, and the lapse of time which occurred before serious doubts were entertained about the validity of their Orders, any vestige of validity that Anglicans might have adduced had long since vanished.

Book of Common Prayer

There is another argument, historical and dogmatic, which can be gleaned from the Book of Common Prayer. It must be recalled that until recently this book served the Anglican communion as its sole book of worship. The BCP, first altered by Cranmer in 1549 and again in 1552, contains the Thirty-Nine Articles drawn up by Matthew Parker and proclaimed first in 1563 and, in final form in 1573. It constitutes the basic Anglican profession of faith. In these Articles the Sacrificial nature of the Mass, and hence, by implication, the true nature of the priesthood, is denied. It requires adroitness of mind, a theological subtleness, and an altogether unreasonable approach to history, for any Anglican clergyman to call himself a priest in the Catholic sense, or to proclaim that he "reserves the Blessed Sacrament." Good intentions or a realization of the shortcomings of one's ordination ceremony, cannot supply validity, and so many well-intentioned men are locked into a system which is without solution short of reunion with Rome.

Nineteenth century

To continue the story of Anglican Orders, we must look at the 19th century. The story of the religious trends within England is a long one. It was the age of the "Second Spring" among "High" Anglicans and the conversion of Newman, Manning and others to Catholicism; it was the age of the Oxford Movement and the stirring sermons of men like Pusey; it witnessed the Revivalist Movement among Evangelical Protestants and the beginnings of agnosticism under Darwin and Huxley. It was the century of Emancipation for Catholics in the entire kingdom and the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850. At the end of the century, in 1896, came Pope Leo's Apostolic Letter on Anglicans, Apostolicae Curae.

Reunion

The advent of the so-called "Second Spring," in 1845, and the interest in 'legitimacy' created by the Anglican Oxford Movement, witnessed a revival in England of hopes for a reunion of Canterbury and Rome. It is a tale of good intentions, strong-minded men, and as usual involving the teaching authority of the Church and, in particular, that of the Holy Father.

Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852), architect and Anglican ecclesiologist, is a name that figures prominently in the history of ecumenism in England. It was he who took the first faltering steps towards the Anglicans of the Oxford Movement in 1840 and came away pleased with the atmosphere he found there. He maintained a correspondence with men like the Catholic converts Faber and Ward and he communicated his bubbling enthusiasm to Bishop Wiseman (1802-1865, first Catholic Archbishop of Westminster in 1850). Wiseman had thought, when he was in Rome, that the time had come for a reunion, and that the sincerity of the Oxford Movement could only lead its proponents back into the Catholic fold.

Others such as Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle appeared on the scene. He was a scion of a Leicester family who had converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-five. He was inflamed by a desire to reunite the Christians of England. He remained a layman and devoted himself to the spread of Catholicism, even encouraging the return of monasticism to England by founding a Cistercian monastery. To the Earl of Shrewsbury de Lisle wrote in 1841, "the Catholick (sic) movement at Oxford I certainly regard as the brightest symptom of England's reconversion, but thank God it is not the only one." He noted as proofs of his assertion that "devotion to the Mother of God is increasing rapidly, and great numbers of Anglicans now keep her blessed picture with extreme reverence." However, de Lisle's enthusiasm did not suffice to bring about that conversion which he imagined was imminent. Indeed, there was still pressure against Catholics on the part of the government and jealously on the part of the lower classes who saw Catholics as a threat to themselves.

It was common knowledge in England in the late 1850's that those who foresaw the growth of the Catholic Church as imminent in that country thought this would be made possible by a large influx of Anglicans. Naturally in this frame of mind they were more easily sold on the idea of a reunion of the two churches. Phillipps de Lisle saw the Anglican communion as a branch of the Catholic Church but one that was in schism. On the other hand, Cardinal Wiseman not only opposed the "branch" theory but regarded the Anglicans as not constituting a "church" in any sense of the word. De Lisle was not to be stopped, and he openly proclaimed himself as a "prophet sent as it were by God to proclaim the coming of things invisible to the grosser eye" (Purcell, E.S., Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, I, 349).

The idea of reunion surfaced again in the 1890's under the aegis of Lord Halifax and the Abbe Fernand Portal. As President of the English Church Union, a group representative of the Anglicans who saw reunion as a possibility, Lord Halifax persuaded Portal that such a union could come. Lobbying began in Rome and in 1895 pressure from Cardinal Merry del Val, Cardinal Gasquet and Cardinal Vaughan plus a sympathetic approach by anglophile Pope Leo XIII gave rise to an international commission charged with the responsibility of examining the validity of Anglican Orders. The findings of the commission were published in the earlier mentioned Bull, Apostolicae Curae. Perhaps to the surprise of some, Anglican Orders were declared "null and void"--a judgment which, the Letter stated, was "now and forever in the future valid and in force." In this decision, the nature of King Edward's Ordinal, and its suppression of all references to Christ's sacrifice and priestly oblation, played the central role.

It is impossible, therefore, to contemplate how the findings of the commission, stated so clearly in the Bull, and backed with a phrase that would seem to indicate that the statement of invalidity borders on faith, faith in the Pope's ability to make a statement regarding the validity of a sacrament, could be reversed today. There is no way around the findings of Apostolicae Curae.

PART TWO

Whither ecumenism?

When we consider the implications of the Bull, we are faced with a problem. How far can we pursue "church unity" before we have to break the news to those who consider themselves priests, that we don't share their opinion? One of the flaws in much of the Catholic approach to Anglican clergymen today is that at least tacitly we treat them as our equals in the priesthood, thereby giving the impression that we condone, nay even approve, their beliefs. This can confuse many. To the Anglican minister who says to a Catholic priest, "Father, do you accept me as a priest?" the only fair and effective answer has to be, "No."

There are those who have sought to argue from the approach of Vatican II to non-Catholic Christian groups, that the Church's thinking has changed, and that in the near future a solution will be found to the hurdles expressed in Apostolicae Curae. But this is not so. The Catholic Church cannot change her position in matters of Sacramental theology. Catholics have to accept that fact. No "sanatio in radice"(healing the roots) would be effective in bestowing validity where that validity was excluded deliberately by the actions of the party concerned. The Edwardine Ordinal is not capable of being used for ordaining priests since the reason for its introduction in the first place was to exclude what Catholics understand to be the essence of the priesthood, namely the celebration of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Some argue that some form of "sanatio in radice" is possible. This is a misunderstanding of the nature and application of a "sanatio. "The process is used in the case of a marriage where, for some reason, there was a defect in the consent of a partner, or an undispensed impediment was present at the time of the marriage. The partners persevere in the marriage under the impression that all is well. Upon the discovery of the defect, it is then possible for it to be remedied by one of two methods, either by simple convalidation where the consent is renewed, or by the "sanatio in radice" which is a juridical act, usually by Rome or the local ordinary, which validates the marriage without any renewal of consent on the part of the couple.

It is impossible to see how this could work in the question of validating Anglican Orders. Whereas the married couple have lived in a putative marriage situation, and by so doing have signified their intention of being in the married state, this cannot apply to Anglican Orders. Why not? Because there never was any intention of having a sacrificing priesthood in the Anglican communion. A cursory examination of the Book of Common Prayer makes this obvious. The notion of the sacrificial nature of the Mass is denied; and in its place was substituted a communion service. So the contradiction implicit in the situation is apparent. To attempt to validate Anglican Orders by a "sanatio in radice," would be an attempt to confer validity on a ceremony which was never intended to be an ordination in the Catholic sense.

There is still another factor which requires our attention. Many Anglican ministers do not want to be thought of as priests. They think of themselves as ministers. Evangelical (Protestant) Anglicans reject the whole idea of the re-enactment of Jesus' sacrificial death. Moreover, even many Anglicans who think of themselves as priests still have no clear doctrine on the Sacrifice of the Mass or Eucharist. In Cardinal Newman's time there were those who, after the communion service, fed the remaining bread to the birds, and poured the unused communion wine back into the bottle--so much for any belief in the Real Presence!

In more recent days, in 1990, the Vatican was unable to approve the Final Report of the Anglican-Catholic Committee because the Anglicans would still not accept a sacrificial priesthood.

And so the problem remains. The Church searches for ways in which those outside her visible fold can be once more joined with her, but the road is not an easy one, and it is not made any easier by those who presume to speak in the name of the Church by involving themselves in situations which compromise her teaching. Truth is the object of our search for a visible Christian unity; truth cannot be replaced by mere humanistic goodwill that is not based on Christ.

Fr. Brendan McCarthy, M.A., is a retired parish priest in the diocese of Grand Falls, NL. He lives in Cupids, NL.