On the “Dutch Touch” and the Dismissal of Old Catholic Orders

Bp. Grafton of Fond Du Lac

By Bp. Joseph Boyd and Fr. Steven Macias

"On The Invalidity of Schismatic Authority: We affirm that the claim of any such schismatic person or body to act against any Church member, clerical or lay, for his witness to the whole Faith is with no authority of Christ's true Church, and any such inhibition, deposition or discipline is without effect and is absolutely null and void." - The Affirmation of St. Louis

When Albert Chambers consecrated bishops for the "ACNA," what would later become the Anglican Continuum, the Anglican Church chastised him. Bp. Howe of the Anglican Consultative Council claimed, "You consecrate on the authority of the church as a whole." Implicit in Howe’s statement was their allegiance to radical protestant revisionism rather than a commitment to the Catholic order of the church. “The Church as a whole” for Howe had ceased to be the undivided church of the seven ecumenical councils and had become the Anglican Communion itself, or worse, only the Bishops of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church likewise had not only abandoned their own tradition according to the Prayerbook and 39 Articles, but wholly had abandoned any claim to apostolicity by their heresies and gross apostasy.

Many within the Continuum argue that Anglican orders are sufficient in and of themselves, and that Old Catholic orders permeated the Episcopal Church by 1960s, therefore, the question of the influx of Old Catholic orders is irrelevant to our validity. They point to the fact that since, obviously, the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion have invalidated themselves through disobedience to Scripture and Tradition and extreme unholiness of life, there is no proof of the presence of the Holy Spirit, which would lend credence to a charismatic, slavific element within canonically Catholic orders added to Anglican lineages by Anglocatholic Fathers. Recently, with the sexual scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, there has also been an added impetus amongst our clergy to focus on the invalidity of orders administered to and by active-homosexuals, who disbelieve in the teachings of the Church, and who administer the Flock of God for immoral advantages without repentance or proper fear. Certainly, there is a demonic, damning element at work within the Roman Church that we pray will be revealed and removed by the Power of the Holy Spirit and the faithful among the clergy and laity of Rome. In comparison to the chaos of the Papal Church, the Anglican Continuum looks petty, but clean by comparison. However, this focus does not deal with the increased pressure upon our communities by conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, or the valid issues of canonical inconsistency that they constantly present. At one point, it was easy to allow physical and cultural distance to protect our faithful from "sheep stealing" by Eastern Churches, but now, it is absolutely essential that we both answer these questions and re-state our Apostolic identity, confidently, without convolution, and with explicit clarity. Our canonical identity does depend, in part, upon the Anglican rediscovery of Catholic Tradition, and upon the repairs that the Fathers of the Oxford Movement and the Anglocatholic Continuum wrought for the glory of God in the West over the last 180 years, but it is not the source of our unbroken, lawful and apostolic orders: those orders were only restored from outside, after the Anglocatholic Fathers found them lacking in both form and intent.

In recognizing this restoration of apostolicity, we must take a hard stance against the validity of contemporary Anglican orders, a move that will certainly be unpopular and branded as "Donatism." But, this is absolutely essential for our obedience to the canonical structures and precedents of the Undivided, Conciliar, Catholic and Orthodox Church of East and West for the first 1000 years of Christian History. At what point do holy orders cease to be valid? They cease at the point where bishops willfully go against the Tradition of the Whole Church (rebellion against ordinal vows, disregard for the Ten Commandments, disregarding the Scriptural and Canonical law regarding fornication, adultery, homosexuality, idolatry, the ordination of women, symbolic interpretation of sacraments, self-confident divergence from received meanings of Scripture and the Fathers of the Church in self-satisfied and smug individualist and modernist interpretation), and when they have stopped the process of salvation themselves, refusing to repent, confess, and faithfully administering the Whole Council of the Word and the profound and fearful mystery of the Holy Sacraments. The cure of souls cannot be administered by those who are outside of the faith, or who refuse the process of God's grace in the Sacraments towards salvation and sanctification. Bishops who do not personally practice these sins, but allow their brother bishops to do these things without warnings, without calling them to repentance and the suspension of communion with apostates are also consenting with such evil, and do excommunicate themselves from the Apostolic Church and thereby cease to be valid bishops as well. The faithful cannot recognize them or submit to them. When this happens, the Glory of the Lord has left the Temple, and there is merely a liturgical play, a "lip-service," left in its place, which God rebuked in both the Old and New Testaments. There is a point where churches can "lose their salvation." As a Church and as individuals, we must always be working this process out "with fear and trembling."

The Anglican dismissal of Old Catholic Orders uses a scholastic paradigm on the single issue of valid orders, considering if  proper intent was demonstrated in the matter of episcopal consecration. This does not reflect the East's Patristic requirements for validity, which are canonical continuation (a circuit) and continuity of Orthodox Faith (defined by submission to and canonical/practical fidelity to the Conciliar Mind of the Church in the Seven Councils). We agree with condemnation of the Episcopal Church, and agree with our critics, that no one cares if they have the "Dutch Touch." They are obviously apostate, and have excommunicated themselves. But, those who have kept orthodoxy and who have a canonically unbroken circuit can maintain through the earliest definitions that they are truly apostolic, according to the self-understanding of the Ancient Church. This is seen in the 1987-97 agreements between the Polish National Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox, and the Roman Catholic Church’s continued recognition of Old Catholic orders as “valid but illicit.” Both Rome and Constantinople were able to establish that they held the same faith as the Old Catholics, with the barrier of Communion occurring over a married episcopacy or lack of submission to the Pope, both of which the Eastern Orthodox must admit is historically valid and apostolic, and which the Roman Church considers important points of disagreement, but also see as unable to erase the indelible and ontological spiritual marks of priesthood. Thus, from an ecumenical perspective, the Old Catholic canonical regularity and infusion is absolutely necessary to the validity of our orders, as is the fidelity and practice of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. It allows us to be comprehensible to other, local Catholic Churches, and not a Protestant Church. It allows us to be “part of the whole,” or “Kata Holos/Katholikos.”

The “Dutch Touch” is also the only connection that the Eastern Churches, both Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian recognize, and is the reason why the East Syriac Church allows its members to take Holy Communion in PNCC churches (and used to allow communion in Anglocatholic parishes with this  apostolic lineage, until Bp. Pike forced his heresy through the Episcopal Church). The Oxford Fathers were extremely concerned with this issue, especially after the Roman Church declared Anglican orders invalid and the Eastern Orthodox finally ruled against accepting Anglican orders due to doctrinal infidelity (even if the forms were kept, the substance had changed). This is why many of the leaders in the Oxford Movement went to India for consecration from Orthodox and Miaphysite Churches, illustrated by the extremely successful “Episcope Vagante” Joseph Rene Vilatte and Vernon Hereford. The Reformed element outright rejected both the form and the substance of an Orthodox Faith, replacing it with a contrived, artificial narrative of Calvinism or Lutheranism, unfortunate departures from the Catholic Faith that was "once and for all received by the saints." The renowned Bp. Grafton invited the PNCC bishop, Orthodox, and Catholic bishop all to his successor Bp. Weller's consecration, but the Episcopal Church prevented him for having any of them participate with laying on of hands. Which shows us that the Episcopal Church of 1900 did not see itself as an Apostolic Church. So, with the exception of those who "fixed their orders," due to the rediscovery of Catholic Faith and practice by the Oxford Fathers, we have no problem with saying they were invalid and a Protestant shadow of the Apostolic original.

We strongly disagree with dismissal of Old Catholic orders. If what they says is true, we should submit our churches to either Eastern Orthodoxy or to Rome. Without the influx of Apostolic Succession from the outside, from a canonically independent and fully and recognizably catholic episcopacy, there would be no mutually comprehensible canonical basis for Anglocatholic claims. Anglicanism forfeited this claim and held in contempt the Faith, Discipline and Praxis of the Ancient Church. There are no ways around this issue canonically, from the perspective of the Seven Councils. One would have to reject the authority of those Councils first, and then the canonical vacuum created implodes the teaching authority of the Church and its Moral Tradition. One cannot just reaffirm the authority of the Bible to counteract this structural implosion, which is what Anglicanism attempts, because the Church and the Bible are joined in an indivisible union. The history of the Canon of Scripture and the doctrinal interpretation of Scripture hinges on the ecclesiological and canonical problems of history, as the Church gave the Canon of Scripture and the Trinitarian and Incarnational hermeneutic for its interpretation as well. There can be no dividing and balancing act between Scripture and the progression of the Holy Spirit within the Church.

If we are to be consistent, we also hold in suspicion anything of "development" in Anglican history from 1552 to Continuing Realignment. The Anglican Church of North America's "conservative position" that elevates the 1662 Prayerbook and the 39 Articles, etc. should also be completely jettisoned. We must be absolutely consistent in our faithfulness to the Apostolic Tradition. We must return to the rite and praxis of the Pre-Schism Western Church, unmoved by the political machinations of Eastern Patriarchates in an attempt to annex our communities under Eastern Bishops, and unmoved by the Pope's attempt at creating “Ordinariates.” Our catholicity is marked by the two definitive points of canonical and charismatic regularity, 1) fidelity to the form and intent of Apostolic Ordination, and 2) obedience to the Seven Councils, the Fathers of the Undivided Church, and Holy Scriptures. This marks our membership in the unbroken continuum, which is the Local Catholic Church, and is the unshakable foundation upon which all else is built, and our dialogue with other local churches is established. Therefore, we must hold that we are in communion with the East and with the Roman Churches that reject papal innovation - the PNCC, SSPX, etc. - and whether or not they return the recognition is irrelevant, because it is communion and obedience to Christ, Councils, Scriptures and Fathers that determines our membership in the Catholic Church, and not the nationalism, cultural boundaries and linguistic alienation that currently defines our physical borders and institutional brokenness.

The infusion of Old Catholic orders represents the beginning of a process of repentance that was sorely needed. No one in the Continuum or Realignment movement should be surprised at the consequences of the apostasy of the Episcopal Church. As we point out above, our Anglocatholic party has attempted to steer our Communion toward a more humble posture of Apostolic Conciliarity from the time of the Caroline Divines, Non-Jurors, Tractarians, and now in the Continuing Church Movements. We are not behaving as the Donatist and asking for a special higher standard of doctrine or holiness, but rather pleading for a deferential return to the Undivided Tradition. Such deference is an opportunity to continue the work of Anglican Fathers like John Jewel who sought the “primitive church of the ancient fathers and apostles.”