ANGLICAN, ORDERS. - 1. Antecedents. - The question concerning the validity of Anglican orders, that is, whether ministers ordained according to the rite of the Church of England are true priests and true bishops and therefore to be compared with Eastern schismatic bishops and priests, gave rise to much controversy, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century; this was brought to an end by Leo XIII’s bull Apostolicae curae of 13 September 1896.
As is known, every Sacrament must necessarily contain matter and form; matter in itself is indeterminate and must be determined by the form. Thus, for example, the laying on of hands is common matter for the order of the presbyterate and the episcopate: to it must be added the form, that is, the words which determine and signify the charism bestowed and specify the power conferred. When this determination does not take place, there is a defect of form. During the schism of Henry VIII (1534-47), all ordinations were performed according to the Roman Ritual and all were considered valid; the same is true of the ordinations performed during the first three years of Edward VI, from 1547 to 1550. But in 1550 Edward VI’s Book of Common Prayer (v.) came into force, in which the Edwardian Ordinal was substituted for the Roman Pontifical; in both the ordination of priests and the consecration of bishops, it did not specify the power conferred. There was therefore a defect of form. Another requirement necessary for the validity of a Sacrament is the intention of the minister, that is, the will to do what the Church does. If the minister and, in the case of Orders, the consecrator has a completely mistaken and false idea of what the Church does, and intends to do what he himself thinks rather than what the Church thinks, this intention does not exist and the sacrament is invalid. Now, in the Prayer Book of 1550 not only was the Sacrament of Orders denied, but every idea of sacrifice and of the consecration of bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Lord was removed from the celebration of the supper, which was substituted for the Mass. There was therefore a defect of intention.
During the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58), Cardinal R. Pole, sent as papal legate to England, took care to examine the individual ordinations, declaring invalid, on account of defects of form and intention, all those performed according to the Edwardian Ordinal. Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) renewed the schism and, as successor to Cardinal Pole in the archbishopric of Canterbury, chose Matthew Parker, formerly chaplain to her mother Anne Boleyn, ordained a priest according to the Edwardian Ordinal and therefore invalidly. The validity of his ordination as a bishop, moreover, has always been the subject of serious doubt. Parker subsequently consecrated other Anglican bishops, all according to the Ordinal of Edward VI, from whom, through successive invalid consecrations,
tions, the present Anglican episcopate derives. More than a century later, namely in 1662, the authorities of the Anglican Church, aware of the indeterminacy of the forms of consecration, corrected them. For priests they added: « (Receive the Holy Spirit) for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, etc. »; and for bishops: « (Receive the Holy Spirit) for the office and work of a bishop in the Church of God, etc. »; but, as the bull Apostolicae curae rightly observes, these additions might perhaps have given the formulas a legitimate meaning, but they came too late, since, after a century, the legitimate hierarchy and therefore the power to ordain had certainly become extinct.
2. The bull « Apostolicae curae ». - From the legation of Cardinal Pole until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century, some Anglican ministers passed to the Catholic Church, such as the Anglican bishop Gordon in 1704. The Catholic Church regarded them as simple laymen. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, as the theory of the three branches developed among Anglicans, the futility of this theory immediately became apparent if Anglican orders were not considered valid by the other two branches, namely the Catholic and the Eastern schismatic. The Anglican ministers therefore wished to be regarded as true priests and true bishops. The Catholic Church and the Eastern Churches rejected this claim. A tenacious controversy consequently arose, in which, taking their validity as certain and indisputable, the Anglicans endeavored to prove it by various and numerous arguments.
The benevolence which the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII (1878-1903) had always shown toward the English—a benevolence demonstrated, among other documents, by his letter Ad Anglia of 13 April 1895—induced some non-English Catholics, and especially the Anglo-Catholic Lord Halifax, to request a papal declaration concerning Anglican orders. The Pope then appointed a commission of learned ecclesiastics belonging to various nations, so that they might study the question thoroughly, with permission to examine all the documents in the Vatican Archive. The commission submitted its reports to the Congregation of the Holy Office; the cardinals who composed that supreme tribunal gave their judgment, and the conclusions were examined by the Supreme Pontiff himself. Two able Anglican ecclesiastics, Doctors Puller and Lacey, were summoned to Rome and were able to present to the commission all the arguments and documents they deemed appropriate.
After this work had been carefully carried out, after all the documents for and against had been diligently examined, and after the ordination formulas of the various schismatic Churches had been compared, the Supreme Pontiff published the bull Apostolicae curae, which declared Anglican orders invalid. Having referred to the disputed question of the validity or invalidity of Parker’s ordination, from whom the entire Anglican hierarchy derives, the Supreme Pontiff insists on the two principal points already indicated, namely, that Anglican orders are invalid because of a defect of form and a defect of intention.
3. After the bull « Apostolicae curae ». - The impression produced by the bull differed according to the groups involved in the question. English Catholics experienced great relief, because they saw in it the solution to a serious problem that was keeping from conversion those Protestants who sincerely believed that in the Anglican Church they could benefit from the grace of the sacraments conferred by true ordained ministers. The Anglicans, especially those of the Low Church (Lower Church), whose sentiments were strongly Protestant, triumphed because they viewed with great displeasure the defense by other Anglicans of the real presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist, and the attempts to restore the priesthood, in which they did not believe.
For the ritualists and Anglo-Catholics the bull was a severe blow, because it destroyed their theories and ideals. The two archbishops of Canterbury and York, a few months later, published their famous Responsio in Latin to Leo XIII; praised by Birbeck in a letter to Lord Halifax, it satisfied neither the ritualists nor the Anglicans of Protestant tendency. The Anglo-Catholics, increasingly steadfast in their ideal of possessing the true priesthood, sought through rapprochement with the schismatic Churches—without success or with very precarious results—a compensation for the adverse and decisive Roman judgment.