Q: An Anglican priest tells me that his holy orders are valid and that he can consecrate the Eucharist and grant absolution. I've heard the opposite is true. What is the Catholic position?



A: Although Catholics and many traditional Anglicans are now enjoying an era of unprecedented friendliness and increased mutual cooperation, there still remains the touchy subject of whether Anglican holy orders are valid. The Catholic Church continues to regard them as invalid.

In 1896 Pope Leo XIII issued his apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae, in which he upheld the Church's position that Anglican orders are "absolutely null and void." When the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, came to power under King Henry VIII, he drastically modified the rite of ordination, eliminating all references to a sacrificial priesthood.

Since to be valid the sacraments must have the proper form and matter, grave questions immediately arose as to the validity of Anglicanism's new form of holy orders. Upon further study, the Catholic Church determined that, although an ordination might be attempted by a valid though heretical Catholic bishop, because the Anglican rite of ordination had been so distorted it could no longer effect a valid ordination.

Thus, within a generation or two after the inception of the Anglican Church there were no validly consecrated Anglican bishops (the original Catholic bishops who had gone into heresy having since died). Therefore the Anglican bishops (who technically weren't bishops at all nor even priests) couldn't validly ordain men to the priesthood.

There is, though, a further complication. Some candidates for the Anglican priesthood, recognizing the sterile nature of their church's holy orders, have received ordination at the hands of validly ordained schismatic bishops (such as the Old Catholics, who broke from Rome in the nineteenth century). Assuming these bishops used the proper rite and had the necessary intention, those ordinations would be valid, though illicit. The problem is that it's extraordinarily difficult to ascertain whether an individual Anglican priest's orders are valid or not.

That's why Anglican priests who wish to become Catholic and function as priests must be ordained anew in the Catholic Church. They are always ordained "absolutely," not "conditionally"--that is, the working presumption for all of them is that they were not validly ordained while in the Anglican Church, no matter who their ordaining bishops were.

With regard to those truths connected to revelation by historical necessity and which are to be held definitively, but are not able to be declared as divinely revealed, the following examples can be given: the legitimacy of the election of the Supreme Pontiff or of the celebration of an ecumenical council, the canonizations of saints (dogmatic facts), the declaration of Pope Leo XIII in the apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations....

But what about women? Roman Catholic theologians would say that the proper "substance" is not proper in a woman, meaning that a woman by her very nature simply cannot be ordained. I always like to tell a story that Bp. Mark Dyer told us in Sacramental Theology in seminary. "When Mary knelt at the foot of the cross and was the only one in the world who could really say 'this is my body and my blood poured out for the life of the world,' she opened the way for women's ordination." Indeed, most Roman books on the priesthood will link priestly identity very closely with Mary, but then point out that Mary was not a "normal" woman (Immaculate Conception) so that it can't be applied across the board.

That's different.....

Is the main thing keeping the Anglo-Catholic from simply becoming Catholic the ordination of women?

Maybe I shouldn't even ask...   There never seems to be a simple answer, does there?

Jill

Last edited on Wed May 14th, 2008 07:54 pm by Dave Armstrong