Liberal Catholic Church

LIBERAL CATHOLIC CHURCH. - Two sects bore this name: one in Italy, the other in England.

1) In Italy, for some time this name was borne by a kind of little church that certain 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 requests made on behalf of his sect to Minister Mancini have remained famous. Among them it is stated how the election of pastors should be claimed for the clergy and the people, beginning with the parish priest and going all the way up to the pope; how subsidies should be assigned from the ecclesiastical assets for the benefit of priests persecuted on account of their liberal opinions; how one of the many temples, formerly conventual, existing in Naples should be handed over to his Church, endowing it with the property deriving from the confiscatory laws of 17 February 1861; how the lower clergy should be effectively guaranteed against the arbitrariness of the episcopate, etc. As can be seen, it was an openly schismatic Church. It is rather better known under the name of "Italian National Catholic Church." Unlike the "Old Catholics" of Germany, it did not claim to link itself with the schismatic Jansenist Church of Utrecht, nor did the three so-called bishops (Panella, Trabucco and Prota-Giurlea) ever receive episcopal consecration. Condemned by the Church, and with its head and his followers excommunicated by a brief of Pius IX to the cardinal archbishop of Naples of 3 July 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 little church disappeared.

2) Under the name of L. C. C. is now known that sect formed in 1915-16 from the Old Catholic movement in Great Britain. Although deriving its Orders from the schismatic Jansenist hierarchy of Utrecht, it nevertheless did not wish to be called "Old Catholic," since it did not wish "that the Old Catholic Churches of the continent should be charged with principles of liberalism in religion, which would be welcome to the Church of Utrecht and to the majority of the Churches in communion with it" (cf. Dichiarazioni di principi, p. 4).

It retains the seven Sacraments, but "grants its lay members entire freedom in the interpretation of the Creed, of the Bibles, of the traditions as well as of its liturgy and its summary of doctrine"; it asks only that every difference of opinion be expressed courteously. It admits Anglican Orders as valid, but "Anglican priests who wish to enter among the Catholic-Liberal ministers must submit to a form of new ordination to the priesthood." As for the Holy Scriptures, it teaches that they are inspired "only in a general sense," and professes that there are passages "that are dictated by fantasy." To the books of the Old Testament it acknowledges a value "quite unequal." Confession is free, as is likewise the marriage of its priests.

The famous Indian convert J. B. Ghosal, in the story of his conversion, speaking of the L. C. C., writes that the idea of a Church that would allow its adherents the greatest individual freedom combined with the ancient form of worship was precisely what he wanted, but that, such a Church not being found in India, he could not join it. After his conversion to Catholicism he confessed that the L. C. C., by allowing so much freedom to its members, must logically become like the divided and discordant house of Protestantism. The so-called L. C. C. is one of the many offshoots of Old Catholicism, such as the American Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Church in America, the North America Old Roman Catholic Church, etc., which nearly all acknowledge their illegitimate apostolic succession from the Old Catholic bishop Arnoldo M. Mathew, and from another, equally illegitimate, J. R. Vilatte, who converted to Catholicism in 1915, who appear to have had a veritable mania for consecrating illegitimate bishops. At present it numbers a dozen bishops scattered in various parts of the world, but with very few followers.

Camillo Crivelli