ANGLICAN ORDINATIONS. - 1. Background. - The question concerning the validity of Anglican ordinations, 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 to the schismatic Eastern bishops and priests, stirred up many controversies, especially in the second half of the 19th century, to which Pope Leo XIII's bull Apostolicae curae of 13 September 1896 put an end.
As is well known, in any Sacrament there must necessarily be matter and form; the matter in itself is undetermined and must be determined by the form. Thus, for example, the imposition of hands is the common matter of the order of the presbyterate and of the episcopate: to it must be added the form, that is, the words that determine and signify the charism bestowed and specify what power is conferred. When such determination does not occur, a defect of form arises. During the schism of Henry VIII (1534-47), all ordinations were performed according to the Roman Ritual and all were considered valid; the same may be said of the ordinations performed during the first three years of Edward VI, from 1547 to 1550. But in 1550 the Book of Common Prayer (v.) of Edward VI came into force, in which the Roman Pontifical was replaced by the Edwardine Ordinal, which, both in the ordination of priests and in the consecration of bishops, 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 Order, the consecrator has a completely erroneous and false idea of what the Church does, and intends to do it in the way he thinks and not as the Church does, this intention does not exist and the sacrament is invalid. Now, in the Prayer Book of 1550 not only was the Sacrament of Order denied, but every idea of sacrifice and of the consecration of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Our Lord was eliminated from the celebration of the supper, which replaced the Mass. There was therefore a defect of intention.
During the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58), Cardinal R. Pole, sent as pontifical legate to England, took care to examine the individual ordinations, declaring invalid for defect of form and of intention all those performed according to the Edwardine 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 priest according to the Edwardine Ordinal and therefore invalidly. The validity, moreover, of his ordination as bishop has always been the object of serious doubts. From Parker other Anglican bishops were then consecrated, all according to the Ordinal of Edward VI, from whom, through successive invalid consecrations, the present Anglican episcopate derives. More than a century later, that is, 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 attach a legitimate meaning to the formulas, but they came too late, since, after a century, the legitimate hierarchy and therefore the power to ordain had certainly died out.
2. The bull « Apostolicae curae »
From the legation of Cardinal Pole until about the middle of the 19th century, some Anglican ministers passed over to the Catholic Church, such as the Anglican bishop Gordon in 1704. The Catholic Church considered them as simple laymen. Toward the middle of the 19th century, once the theory of the three branches had developed among Anglicans, the futility of such a theory immediately appeared, if Anglican ordinations were not considered valid by the other two branches, that is, by the Catholic and the Eastern schismatic. Therefore the Anglican ministers wished to be considered as true priests and true bishops. The Catholic Church and the Eastern Churches rejected this claim. A tenacious controversy thus arose, in which, assuming the validity to be certain and indisputable, the Anglicans strove to demonstrate it with various and manifold arguments.
The benevolence of which the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII (1878-1903) had always given proof toward the English, a benevolence shown, 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 pontifical declaration regarding Anglican ordinations. The Pope then appointed a commission of learned ecclesiastics, belonging to various nations, to study the question thoroughly, with the faculty of examining all the documents of the Vatican Archive. The commission presented its reports to the Congregation of the Holy Office, the cardinals composing that supreme tribunal gave their judgment, and the conclusions were examined by the Supreme Pontiff himself. Two worthy Anglican ecclesiastics, Drs. Puller and Lacey, were called to Rome and were able to present to the commission all the arguments and documents they deemed appropriate.
After such work, accurately done, after diligently examining all the documents for and against, after comparing the formulas of ordination of the various schismatic Churches, the Supreme Pontiff published the bull Apostolicae curae, which declared Anglican ordinations invalid. Having mentioned the disputed question of the validity or invalidity of Parker's ordination, from which the entire Anglican hierarchy derives, the Supreme Pontiff insists on the two principal points already indicated, namely that Anglican ordinations are invalid for defect of form and for defect of intention.
3. After the bull « Apostolicae curae »
The impression produced by the bull was different, according to the groups interested in the question. English Catholics felt great relief, because they saw in it the solution of a grave problem, which held back from conversion those Protestants who in good faith believed they could, in the Anglican Church, enjoy the grace of the sacraments conferred by true consecrated ministers. The Anglicans, especially of the Low Church, of distinctly Protestant sentiments, triumphed because they viewed with great displeasure the defense, on the part of other Anglicans, of the real presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist, and the attempts to re-establish the priesthood, in which they did not believe.
For the ritualists and the Anglo-Catholics the bull was a hard blow, because it destroyed their theories and their ideals. The two archbishops of Canterbury and York, a few months later, published their famous Responsio in Latin to Leo XIII, which, celebrated by Birbeck in a letter to Lord Halifax, satisfied neither the ritualists nor the Anglicans of Protestant tendency. The Anglo-Catholics, moreover, ever more tenacious in their ideal of possessing the true priesthood, sought in drawing closer to the schismatic Churches, with null or very precarious results, a compensation for the adverse and decisive Roman sentence.
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Camillo Crivelli