CATHOLIC LIBERAL CHURCH. — Two sects bore this name: one in Italy, the other in England.
1) In Italy, for some time, this name was given to a sort of little church which certain apostates, following in the footsteps of the “Old Catholics” of Germany, attempted to establish. Its principal founder and propagator was the former priest Luigi Prota-Giurlea, of whom the petitions submitted on behalf of his sect to Minister Mancini have remained famous. Among other things, they stated that the election of pastors, beginning with the parish priest and extending up to the pope, should be reclaimed for the clergy and the people; that subsidies from ecclesiastical assets should be assigned for the benefit of priests persecuted on account of their liberal opinions; that one of the many former conventual churches existing in Naples should be handed over to his Church, together with the assets deriving from the subversive laws of 17 February 1861; that the lower clergy, etc., should be effectively protected from the arbitrariness of the episcopate. As can be seen, it was an openly schismatic Church. It is better known by the name “Italian National Catholic Church.” Unlike the “Old Catholics” of Germany, it did not claim any connection with the Jansenist schismatic Church of Utrecht, nor did the three so-called bishops (Panella, Trabucco, and Prota-Giurlea) ever receive episcopal consecration. Condemned by the Church, and its leader and followers excommunicated by a brief of Pius IX to the cardinal archbishop of Naples dated 3 July 1875 (cf. Cronaca contemporanea, in Civ. Catt., 9th series, 7 [1875, III], pp. 609–12), after a few years, despite Prota-Giurlea’s efforts and the protection of the Italian government, this little church disappeared.
2) The name C. c. l. is now applied to the sect formed in 1915–16 from the Old Catholic movement in Great Britain. Although deriving its Orders from the Jansenist schismatic hierarchy of Utrecht, it nevertheless did not wish to be called “Old Catholic,” since it did not want “principles of liberalism in religion, which would be agreeable to the Church of Utrecht and to the majority of the Churches in communion with it, to be imputed to the Old Catholic Churches of the continent” (cf. Dichiarazioni di principi, p. 4).
It retains the seven Sacraments, but “grants its lay members complete freedom in the interpretation of the Creed, the Bibles, the traditions, as well as its liturgy and its summary of doctrine”; it asks only that every difference of opinion be expressed courteously. It accepts Anglican Orders as valid, but “Anglican priests who wish to enter among the Catholic-Liberal ministers must submit to a form of a new ordination to the priesthood.” As regards the Sacred Scriptures, it teaches that they are inspired “only in a general sense,” and professes that there are passages “dictated by the imagination.” It assigns to the books of the Old Testament a “very unequal” value. Confession is optional, as is marriage for its priests.
The celebrated Indian convert J. B. Ghosal, in the account of his conversion, speaking of the C. c. l., writes that the idea of a Church which would allow its adherents the greatest individual freedom combined with the ancient form of worship was precisely what he wanted, but that, since no such Church existed in India, he was unable to join II. After his conversion to Catholicism, he acknowledged that the C. c. l., by allowing its members so much freedom, logically had to become like the divided and discordant house of Protestantism. The so-called C. c. l. is one of the many bodies derived from Old Catholicism, such as the American Catholic Church (American Catholic Church), the Old Catholic Church in America (Old Catholic Church in America), the North America Old Roman Catholic Church (North America Old Roman Catholic Church), etc., almost all of which trace their illegitimate apostolic succession to the Old Catholic bishop Arnoldo M. Mathew and to another equally illegitimate bishop, J. R. Vilatte, who converted to Catholicism in 1915; these men seem to have had a genuine mania for consecrating illegitimate bishops. At present it numbers a dozen bishops scattered throughout various parts of the world, but very few followers.