Liberal Catholic Church
Two sects bore this name: one in Italy, the other in England.
1) In Italy, for a time, a kind of small church bore this name, which some apostates, following in the footsteps of the Old Catholics of Germany, attempted to establish. The founder and principal propagator was the former priest Luigi Prota-Giurlea, whose famous requests to Minister Mancini on behalf of his sect remain. Among these, it is stated that the election of pastors should be claimed for the clergy and the people, beginning with the parish priest and extending up to the pope; that subsidies should be assigned from ecclesiastical funds for the benefit of priests persecuted for their liberal opinions; that one of the many former conventual churches in Naples should be handed over to his Church, along with the property derived from the laws of February 17, 1861; and that the lower clergy should be effectively protected from the arbitrary power of the episcopate, etc. As can be seen, it was an openly schismatic Church. It is rather known by the name of the Italian National Catholic Church. Unlike the Old Catholics of Germany, it did not claim to link itself with the Jansenist schismatic Church of Utrecht, nor were the three so-called bishops (Panella, Trabuco, and Prota-Giurlea) ever episcopally consecrated. Condemned by the Church and excommunicated along with its leader and followers by a brief of Pius IX to the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples on July 3, 1875 (cf. Cronaca contemporanea, in Civ. Catt., 9th series, 7 [1875, III], pp. 609-12), after a few years, despite the efforts of Prota-Giurlea and the protection of the Italian government, this small church disappeared.
2) The name C. c. l. is now given to the sect formed in 1915-16 from the Old Catholic movement in Great Britain. Although its orders derive from the Jansenist schismatic hierarchy of Utrecht, it did not wish to be called "Old Catholic," not wanting "the Old Catholic Churches of the continent to be accused of religious liberal principles that would be pleasing to the Church of Utrecht and the majority of Churches in communion with it" (cf. Declarations of Principles, p. 4).
It holds to the seven Sacraments, but "grants its lay members complete freedom in the interpretation of the Creed, the Bible, traditions, as well as its liturgy and doctrinal summary"; it only asks that any differences of opinion be expressed courteously. It admits the validity of Anglican orders, but "Anglican priests who wish to join the Liberal Catholic ministry must undergo a form of new priestly ordination." Regarding Holy Scripture, it teaches that they are inspired "only in a general sense" and professes that there are passages "dictated by fantasy." It attributes "very unequal" value to the books of the Old Testament. Confession is optional, as is the marriage of its priests.
The famous Indian convert J. B. Ghosal, in the story of his conversion, writing about the C. c. l., states that the idea of a Church allowing its members the greatest individual freedom combined with ancient forms of worship was precisely what he desired, but since no such Church existed in India, he could not join II. After his conversion to Catholicism, he confessed that the C. c. l., by allowing so much freedom to its members, would inevitably become like the divided and discordant household of Protestantism. The so-called C. c. l. is one of many derived from Old Catholicism, such as the American Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Church in America, the Old Roman Catholic Church of North America, etc., most of which recognize their illegitimate apostolic succession from the Old Catholic bishop Arnold M. Mathew and another similarly illegitimate figure, J. R. V. Latter, who converted to Catholicism in 1915. These men seemed to have a genuine mania for consecrating illegitimate bishops. At present, it has about a dozen bishops scattered around the world, but with very few followers.