Foundations of the Anglican Church, CX

William Juxon, Archbishop
of Canterbury from 1660
until his death in 1663.

All good things must come to an end—and so too the Cromwellian dictatorship over the Commonwealth. In this posting, we will look at the restoration of Crown and Bishops in England after the Civil War and the Commonwealth. 

Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth by his son, Richard.  Richard lacked his father’s resolve and in the face of conflict between the Army and civilian government, resigned.  The majority of the English people had grown very disillusioned with Puritan government.  The draconian laws that restricted any games or pleasure on the Sabbath, the abolition of holydays—including and especially Christmas, the wordy and drab forms of worship in the churches, the excessive Calvinistic moralism all combined to wear down even the dour English.  With the resignation of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector and the aimless policies of the Council of State—the group that had served as the “Privy Council” to Cromwell Senior and Cromwell Junior, the administration of government began to implode.  The office of Lord Protector was replaced by a seven (later eleven) member “Committee of Safety.” This arrangement lasted only two weeks.  Fighting broke out in England as the Royalists under George Booth began to push against Parliamentarian government.  General John Lambert defeated Booth’s army and tried to put down the rebellion but Cromwell’s governor of Scotland, George Monck, saw the inevitable end of the Commonwealth and led his forces to defeat Lambert.  Monck entered into secret communication with Charles II, son of the “martyred” Charles I, who issued the Declaration of Breda from his exile in the Spanish Netherlands.  This declaration promised a general pardon for all involved in the rebellion against the monarchy, assured all who had purchased or legally obtained property during the Cromwell years that they would retain ownership, and finally promised payment of back pay to the army and guaranteed all officers that they would continue to serve under the monarchy as they had under the Commonwealth.  Eight weeks later Charles was back in England and on the Throne. 

One of the first concerns was to restore the Church to its former status.  In 1662 Parliament passed an act of Uniformity imposing a new Prayer Book and requiring ordination by a bishop for all clergy.  Those who had been ordained according to Presbyterian polity during the Commonwealth were required to submit to re-ordination by a bishop.  Approximately 2000 clergy refused and lost their livings.  The Act of Uniformity also imposed a new Book of Common Prayer upon the English Church.  Anglicans and Presbyterians had met for the Savoy Conference in 1661 but in the end were unable to agree on a liturgy acceptable to both sides. The failure to agree on a liturgy and the disenfranchisement of those clergy who would not accept Episcopal Ordination (or re-ordination in the case of those already ordained during the period in which the episcopacy was abolished from 1646 until 1660) led to a final separation of the Presbyterian/Congregationalist faction in the Church of England from the Anglican/Episcopal faction.  Those who broke with the Established Church were referred to as non-Conformists (because they would not “conform” to the official rites) and included Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists.  (The Methodists, originally a 18^th century movement within the Church of England also joined the non-Conformists when it broke with the Anglican Church.  More will be written on that in later posts.)

The Episcopacy was restored in the Church of England in 1660 and William Juxon, who had been Bishop of London before the suppression of Episcopacy in 1646 was named Archbishop of Canterbury, thus guaranteeing continuity in lineage and Apostolic Succession (at least according to Anglican perspectives) with the pre-Civil War bishops.  Similarly Accepted Frewen (yes, his first name was ‘Accepted’—that is the sort of things evangelicals do to their children), one-time bishop of Litchfield and Coventry before the Civil War, was named to York guaranteeing the succession in the Northern Province as well. 

In doing some background for this entry I found out that George Montaigne who served briefly as Archbishop of York before the Civil War and previously held the sees of Lincoln, London, and Durham had, among his consecrators when consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln in 1617, one Marco Antonio de Dominis who himself had been the Catholic Archbishop of Split in Dalmatia.   De Dominis had apostatized when caught in a political dispute between Venice and the papacy.  He later returned to the Catholic Church, and he was still later tried for heresy.  Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that Catholic lineage was re-instated into the Anglican line as early as 1617. De Dominis also was co-consecrator for Nicholas Felton who served first as Bishop of Bristol and later as Bishop of Ely.  Montaigne had little chance to consecrate bishops himself when Archbishop of York—he only held the see a few months before his death, but as Bishop of Durham he probably would have been a co-consecrator for a number of bishops in the Northern Province and as Bishop of London for a number of bishops in the Canterbury province.  

Of the Titanic, Cardinal Burke. Crabs, And Where the Church is Headed for the Next Millennium

I don’t publish all the comments that come in.  Some are personal messages.  Some are redundant.  Some contain information that is factually inaccurate.  Some are incoheret.  Some are from Katholik Krazies and some I just don’t like.  It’s my blog and I get to publish what I want.  As I said to one of my correspondents recently: if you want to see your stuff on the blogosphere, start your own blog.   Then you can make your own rules. 

That being said, I did receive some messages recently from one John Drake.  I published one message and then received a second.  The first was fine; the second was a bit odd.  Mr. Drake was not happy with my making fun of Cardinal Burke for his remark that “men should dress and act like men.”  I know I should not make fun of His Eminence; it is the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel.   He is just too easy a target.  If I could only muster a firm purpose of ammendment, I would even confess it.  Alas, I can’t even find imperfect contrition much less firm purpose of ammendment.  But that is not my point.  Mr. Drake went on to chide me because he has seen “your (meaning my) heroes” such as Cardinal Roncalli (later John XXIII) and Cardinal Montini (later Paul VI) in cappae magnae.  Of course he has.  It was standard dress for Cardinals at the time.  We were working with a different model of Church: still in the monarchial model with a royal court.  People wear all sorts of unususal things in royal courts.  Have you ever seen Prince Charles decked out as a Knight of the Garter? Even the indisputably heterosexual Prince Andrew gets frocked out like his grandma, the late Queen Mother, when it is time to put on the Garter robes.  The problem is that Paul VI abolished the papal court in 1968, eliminating many of the offices and reorganizing and retitling his remaining retinue as the Papal Household.  The following year he made drastic revisions in the costume of prelates.  The only rank that is explicitly mentioned as still having a right to the cappa magna are Cardinals; the protocols are somewhat ambigious regarding its use by Patriarchs, Archbishops, or Bishops. Presumably it is not to be worn by Abbots as even in the old rules, it had to be granted as a privlege to an abbot and was not an automatic privelege of rank.  Even for Cardinals, however, the winter cappa—that is with the fur hood—was definitively and totally abolished.  Cardinal Burke and several other prelates seem not to have gotten this message but that is probably the fault of Gamarelli’s as they can make some bucks of sewing dead rabbits into capes.  Also the cappa is not permitted—even to Cardinals—in Rome itself.  Pope Paul’s reforms of prelatial dress was an attempt to simplify the costume of prelates and move away from the princely model of the defunct royal courts.  Of course farm boys from Richland Center Wisdconsin appear to dream of growing up and becoming either cowboys out on the range or Princes of the Church in all their finery.  Chacun à son goût as the French say, but it does put His Eminence in a somewhat different camp, so to speak, from where Paul VI was leading the Church forty-some years ago and where Francis is pushing it today.  Cardinal Dulles (curse these Jesuits and their influence) made an important observation in his book The Catholicity of the Church (1985).  Dulles said that the for the papacy—and by that he meant the Church—the first thousand years were about spreading the Gospel; the second thousand were about power; and the third millennium will be about service.  In other words, we are at that shift of the Church’s tectonic plates where we move from the model of power to the model of service.  This is a difficult paradigm shift for many to accept and I think resistance to the Church adopting the service model is the chief gripe of Francis’ critics. 

All that being said, let me come back to Mr. Drake.  He loves Cardinal Burke.  He loves the yards and yards of scarlet watered silk.  And then he makes a curious shift.   He praises the Traditional (what I would call “neo-traditional”) and the Anglo-Catholic clergy for their retaining the trappings of the bygone era and concludes with the puzzled admission that he wonders that the whole world isn’t Anglican.  Isn’t Anglican?  Why doesn’t he write Cardinal Burke and get Burke’s insight on why we don’t all become Anglicans?  I sincerely doubt that for all his being enamored of a level of ecclesiastical foppery that would make the Highest Churchman in the world blush, Cardinal Burke would have any sympathy for the opinion that we should all float our boats down the Tiber and across the Channel. 

But I will give you one reason for not becoming an Anglican.  As the American Catholic priest, Father Joseph Goetz, allegedly said to his Cambridge mentor Anglican Bishop J.A.T. (Honest to God) Robinson when Robinson asked the anglophile (actually Anglophiliac) Goetz why he didn’t just become an Anglican: “Your Lordship, I am not one to desert a sinking ship for a sinking lifeboat.”  I am a great admirer of the Anglican Tradition.  We are treating in this blog the Caroline Divines.  You have the stellar Lancelot Andrews and you don’t get better than Jeremy Taylor.  I even admire Thomas Cranmer—for his command of the English language, not for his theological eclecticism or his moral ambiguities.  In the nineteenth century you get Pusey and then later there was Benson and Randall Davidson.  But alas, save for a few bright stars such as Rowan Williams or Desmond Tutu the picture has become bleak.  Good heavens, when you have John Shelby Spong as your theological wunderkind you had might as well just close up shop.

I was at a cocktail party in some brownstone down on Capitol Hill some years back and there was a former Catholic raving about his new parish: Saint Mark’s Capitol Hill.  Episcopalian;  American for Anglican.  “Oh,” it’s wonderful he gushed.  “Every August we have ‘Crab Sunday.” (You have to understand the place of the Maryland Blue Crab in the Chesapeake culture; somewhat akin to the quail God sent to console the starved appetites of the children of Israel in the desert.)  “The Choir call comes in wearing crab hats.  And we give the “Crab of the Year Award” to the parishioner who has been most bothersome to the Rector that year.  And the Eucharistic bread is baked in the shape of a large crab!”  The Eucharistic bread is baked in the shape of a large crab?!?  I was willing to allow that Leo XIII may be wrong about Anglican Orders and the question should be reexamined, and I am all in favor of using real bread for the Eucharist rather than something that appears to be an anemic necco wafer, but nobody who takes the Real Presence seriously would bake the Eucharistic bread to look like a giant crab.  Or even a normal size crab.  This is the problem.  To my mind too many people today ‘play church’ and don’t understand the gravitas sacra of being Church.

I remember reading an advertisement for a Service commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic at a Unitarian/Universalist Church back in 2012.  It sounded very nice.  The music advertised was particularly well chosen.  But then, at the end it said something like “worshippers are encouraged to come in period costume.”  Years ago I read Harvey Cox and The Secular City.  I remember that I liked Cox’s approach to Liturgy.  There was an element of playfulness in ritual.  I was young then but I would still agree that drab solemnity can too easy implode into idolatry.  But worship is never frivolous.  It is never giddy, or silly or flippant. 

All that being said, there is little difference between Unitarians in corseted gowns and hats replete with feathers, fruit, and birds and Catholics dressed for the court of Louis XIV.  The TLM is often very little other than an exercise in antiquarianism.  And whether you wear a crab hat down the aisle or a galero, religion becomes not only mockable but a mockery.      

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXIII

Matthew Parker would never have

foreseen the eventuality of women 

bishops but one thing always leads 

to another  

We have had a request to move away from the Katholic Krazies and go back to the history of the Church of England and to be honest, I am ready to do that, at least for awhile.   We have a lot still to cover in both categories, and we will, but I like this Church of England theme myself.  And it is not unrelated.  One of the big issues for us Catholics looking at the Church of England is the continuity (or discontinuity) of the Apostolic Succession in the Anglican Clergy. And the various krazies at which we have to date looked have had to face the same challenge in as that they have wanted to have their bishops ordained “validly” according to the strictest of Catholic Standards and yet the historic Catholic episcopacy is closed off to them because of their rejecting papal authority.  They have had to look at various other Apostolic lineages and in several instances it has led to some sketchy choices, leading some of the sedevacantist bishops to be consecrated twice and even three times in desperate attempts to have unquestionable apostolic lineages.  But back to the Anglicans.

When we last looked at the history of the Church of England we were examining the episcopal consecration of Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I’s Archbishop of Canterbury.  Since all subsequent Anglican bishops can be traced back, at least in part, to Parker his consecration is crucial.  Was the Apostolic Succession maintained or not?

We saw that among the four consecrating bishops for Parker, two were themselves indisputably validly consecrated, having been consecrated under Henry VIII according to the old ritual.  The other two had been consecrated under Cranmer’s Edwardine Ordinal.  As only one validly consecrated bishop is required, that condition is satisfied.  The second problem is the Edwardine Ordinal itself and the rite by which Parker was consecrated in 1559.  The third problem is valid intention and whether Parker had the intention of being consecrated a Bishop in a Catholic sense.

We saw that the prayer for consecration in the Edwardine Ordinal invoked the Holy Spirit upon the candidate but did not say explicitly that it was for the office of Bishop.  Leo XIII, in his 19^th century condemnation of Anglican Orders in the Bull Apostolicae Curae would give this as one of the reasons for which the form of ordination was defective.  A careful examination of the entire rite, however, makes it very clear that the ordinand was being consecrated precisely for the office and ministry of a Bishop as differentiated from a priest or other minister of the Church.  Furthermore, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as Catholic missionaries encountered some of the separated Churches of the East, in particular the East Syrian tradition, and accorded their orders recognition as valid, it was acknowledged that all that was needed for validity was the phrase “Receive the Holy Spirit…,” a phrase found in the Edwardine Ordinal’s prayer for consecrating a bishop.   

On the other hand, Leo XIII was not the first pope to reject the validity of the Edwardine Ordinal.  Julius III and Paul IV had both instructed Cardinal Pole, their legate in England in the reign of Queen Mary, that those men who had been ordained or consecrated under the Edwardine Ordinal had to be re-ordained according to the Catholic Rite.  In other words, Rome had never recognized the validity of Anglican Orders.  The question is, and it is unclear, did they not recognize Anglican Orders for theological reasons or for polemical reasons?  Had they examined the rite and found it defective, or was it a blanket condemnation of the Protestantism that had “infected” the English Church?  And—and this is a crucial question—did Julius III and Paul IV judge Anglican Orders invalid because of  “form” or for failure of the consecrating bishops and those men being ordained or consecrated to have the correct intention?

All this does seem a bit dry compared to the exotic behavior of the katholic krazies, but we will come back to them after a posting or two on the Anglican Church.  And we have some far more interesting subjects to deal with about Elizabeth and her Catholic subjects, but the validity of Anglican Orders was and remains a pivotal question in looking at the English Church. Meanwhile, let’s look at the issue of “intention.”

The Catholic Church says that for a sacrament to be validly conferred you must have the correct minister, the correct verbal formula and ritual action, and the correct intention.  Did Matthew Parker’s consecrators intend to consecrate him a bishop in the Catholic sense and did he intend to receive the episcopacy in a Catholic sense? 

Two of the consecrators, both themselves bishops since the days of Henry VIII and validly ordained, can be presumed to have the correct intention to pass on to Parker what they themselves had received in their episcopal consecration.  They had been dragged out of retirement and recruited to participate precisely to show continuity with the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana.  Elizabeth’s officials wanted no questions about the validity of Anglican Orders and were well aware that the papacy was not impressed by the Edwardine ordinations.  Moreover the two co-consecrators who had been bishops under Henry were no theological radicals.  So the question comes down to Parker: did he intend to receive the episcopacy in a Catholic sense?

The answer is clearly no.  Parker was a convinced Protestant with nothing of the Catholic understanding of Holy Orders.  He did not intend to receive the “power” to ordain priests who would offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice because he rejected the idea that the Eucharist is a sacrifice.  Yes, he would ordain priests to preach the Word and minister the sacraments—but as for sacrifice, no.  So his intention was defective.

Or was it?  He intended to do what he believed Christ intended.  He sincerely believed that Christ had no intention of perpetuating his sacrifice every time the Eucharist was offered.  Was the Eucharist a memorial of Christ’s one eternal sacrifice? Absolutely.  Was Christ to be sacrificed anew on the altar every time the “Mass” was offered—absolutely not. 

And in that he was right.  Christ is not sacrificed again and again, although many Catholics of the day believed so.  The Protestant rejection of the concept of the “Sacrifice of the Mass” must be understood as a reaction to an exaggerated Catholic emphasis which, incorrectly, understood that Christ died over and over again in each Mass.  That is not what the Church ever taught—but was what many churchmen taught their flocks and what many believed. 

The Protestant understanding of “memorial” in which the Eucharist is a memorial of the death and resurrection of the Lord, on the other hand, is an anachronistic use of “memorial” or “memory” in which we in the present recall a historical moment in the past, in this case “on a hill far away” and a long time ago when Christ died on Calvary.  The Catholic understanding of “memory,” admittedly recovered in 20^th century biblical scholarship, sees memory as a participation in those events which we recall.  Just as devout Jews every year at Passover again participate in that Egyptian night when their ancestors await their deliverance from slavery, so too Christians, every time they break the bread of Christ’s Body and drink the chalice of his blood, stand at the foot of the Cross, proclaiming his death until he comes again. It is not that Christ dies over and over again, but that we become present to the one eternal sacrifice “in a time beyond time, and a place that knows no limitation.”  Did Matthew Parker accept this?  By no means.  It was far beyond the theological boundaries of thought in the sixteenth century.  Neither could sixteenth-century Catholics have articulated that, though Augustine and Ambrose and Chrysostom could have.  Once again, the loss of the Patristic Tradition and its replacement by “Scholasticism” had robbed the Catholic Tradition of its very integrity and we should not blame Parker and other Reformers for looking at sixteenth-century scholastic theology and rejecting it as it had devolved into an intellectual malignancy, a cancerous threat to the authentic faith of the Church as contained in the Scriptures and Patristic Tradition.  And it would get only worse in the nineteenth century with the Scholastic revival, but that is another issue.  One of the great contributions of the Ratzinger years—both as head of the Congregation of The Doctrine of the Faith and as Pope—was Josef Ratzinger’s own emphasis on a return to the Patristic sources.  But that too is topic for a posting at a future date.  As for now, let us say that while he did not intend to become a bishop to ordain sacrificing priests, Matthew Parker did intend to become a bishop to continue the work in the Church of England that Christ began and left to his apostles.  Implicit intention is sufficient for valid orders.

It does come down ultimately to the formula in the Edwardine Ordinal.  As I wrote above, Julius III and Paul IV both found the Ordinal lacking, though whether from theological or polemical reasons we cannot say.  Clement XI in 1704 would provide more of a theological rationale and say that Anglican Orders were invalid for reasons both of form and intention.  Leo XIII would reaffirm that judgment in 1896.  Cardinal Ratzinger, with the tacit support of John Paul II, would offer in 1993 to reexamine the issue if the Church of England did not go ahead with the ordination of women, but that became a mute point when the General Synod of the Church did, in fact, approve women priests.  As it stands, at this point, the Catholic Church does not recognize the validity of Anglican Orders.  It is a complicated issue, however, as not only has the ordinal been amended but also some Anglican bishops have sought to have Old Catholic Bishops (whose Orders we do recognize) among their consecrators.  So let’s move on, in our next posting, from this turgid subject of Anglican Orders to the Elizabethan “persecutions.” 

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXII

Then Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams welcomes then

Pope Benedict XVI to Lambeth

Palace, September 2010.  

Well, we have at least two validly consecrated Bishops among the four co-consecrators of Matthew Parker  on that 19^th day of December, 1559 in Lambeth Palace chapel.  But that is only our first hurdle.  There are more serious challenges awaiting us.

When Leo XIII declared that Anglican Orders were “absolutely null and utterly void” in the 1896 Bull Apostolicae Curae he did so not because there were no valid consecrators for the new Archbishop, but because there was defect in form and intention.

By “defect in form” the Pope meant that the words and ritual for the consecration of a bishop (or the ordination of a priest, for that matter) lacked in the essential content to validly convey the sacramental powers of a bishop (or, in the case of the ordination of a priest, to convey the sacramental powers of a priest). 

I must admit that I get very nervous talking about “sacramental powers,” not because I don’t believe that there is a spiritual power conveyed in the Sacrament of Orders but because that “spiritual power” has too often been misappropriated to give the priest a psychological weight by which both the sacrament itself and the people committed to his care can too easily be abused.  I think today there is a responsible reluctance to speak of “power,” but that cannot prevent us from looking objectively at the Sacrament of Orders and the fact that it conveys the rights, duties, and obligations to administer the Sacraments, particularly the Sacrament of the Forgiveness of Sins, the Sacrament of Anointing the Sick, and the Celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.  Saying that, however, over breakfast in the kitchen of Lambeth Palace that Saturday Morning, December 19, 1559 would probably have gotten an argument from the Archbishop-designate.  

At the time of Parker’s consecration, the actual “form” or words prescribed by the Anglican Ordinal for the consecration of a bishop are as follows:

 “TAKE the holy gost, and remember that thou stirre up the grace of god, whiche is in thee, by imposicion of handes: for god hath not geven us the spirite of feare, but of power, and love, and of sobernesse.”
 

Sixteenth-century spelling aside, there is, as Pope Leo pointed out, no mention of the office of bishop or the duties thereof in the prayer consecrating the new bishop and thus  Pope Leo found the form to be deficient. 

In the 20^th century Dom Gregory Dix, OSB the great Anglican historian of the Western Liturgy, would argue against Pope Leo’s conclusion, pointing out that while the prayer of consecration may not mention that the Holy Spirit is being invoked upon the candidate to confer the Order of Bishop, throughout the entire service there is a multiple mention of the fact that this was the consecration of a bishop and an outlining of the duties and responsibilities of a bishop.  

While we are at it, we should look at the ritual for ordaining a priest in the Anglican Ordinal.  It is considerably more focused and mentions specifically the duties to forgive sins, preach the word, and administer the Sacraments.  Leo judged it inadequate however because it does not specifically mention the Eucharist and in particular it does not speak of offering (the Eucharistic) “sacrifice.”

RECEIVE the holy goste, whose synnes thou doest forgeve, they are forgeven: and whose sinnes thou doest retaine, thei are retained: and be thou a faithful despensor of the word of god, and of his holy Sacramentes. In the name of the father, and of the sonne, and of the holy gost. Amen.

Dix argues here too, however, that since the rite retains the word “priest” and “priesthode” rather than “minister” or even “presbyter,” there should be sufficient context so as to understand the actual prayer of ordination as meaning to continue the ministry and office of priest in the Church as it had in times when the Church of England was in the Catholic Communion. 

Dix’s argument that the broader rite provides the context in which the prayer of consecration/ordination should be understood is somewhat validated by the fact that Leo did not only judge the form deficient because of the wording of the prayers of consecration/ordination, but because the rite lacked the “transmission of instruments.”  In the Catholic Rite, both before the Protestant Reformations and still at the time of Leo XIII, there was “the transmission” to the newly ordained of the “instruments” of his office.  The new bishop was presented with his miter, his staff, and his ring.  The new priest is presented with the chalice and paten with which he will celebrate the Eucharist.  With some minor changes, this is still part of the Catholic ritual.  (In addition in the Catholic Rite, the deacon is given the Book of the Gospels with a particularly impressive charge to believe, preach, and live the Gospel.)  In the Ordinal used for the consecration of Archbishop Parker, the only “instrument” given the new bishop is the Bible.  Leo saw the failure to transmit the instruments proper to the Office as part of the defect of form even though it was not part of the consecrating prayer, giving credence to Dix’s claim that the prayer must be viewed in context of the entire ritual.   Pius XII in 1948, however, contradicted Leo’s argument saying that the transmission of instruments is not an essential part of the Sacrament and therefore not a requirement for validity.

Defect of Intention is the second point we need to look at.  Leo argued that the authors of the Anglican Ordinals of 1549, 1550, 1552, and 1559 did not intend to convey the “power” to offer Sacrifice; that conferring a “sacrificing priesthood” was outside their intention.  Leo has a point; if one reads Thomas Cranmer on the Eucharist he certainly does not accept the idea that the celebrant of the Eucharist is offering a Sacrifice.  This idea that Christ is somehow sacrificed on every altar at every Mass was repugnant to all the Reformers from Luther to Zwingli who maintained, in accord with the Letter to the Hebrews, that Christ was sacrificed once for all. 

Unfortunately the historical/critical method of scriptural interpretation was not available to either Catholics or Reformers in the sixteenth century, and much of the Patristic Tradition which had elaborated the relationship of the Eucharist to Calvary was also either unknown or ignored.  One of the great tragedies with the rise of scholastic thought in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries was the supplanting of the rich heritage of the Church Fathers with a cold abstract Aristotelian logic that stripped our Catholic faith of its flesh like a predatory animal strips the flesh from the skeleton. (You can see that I am not a fan of scholasticism.)  Consequently many Catholic theologians had an exaggerated (to the point of heresy) understanding of the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist and many Protestants totally rejected the idea of Eucharistic Sacrifice out of hand rather than carefully nuancing it in the light of scripture and patristics.  At the end of the day Parker and his consecrators need to be given the benefit of the doubt for while they may have rejected the currently popular Catholic ideas of “The Sacrifice of the Mass” their intention was to do what Christ did and pass on to the future what the Apostles had passed on in their days and was passed on down to them.  Thus you get the conflict between “explicit intention” and “implicit intention.”  It is clear that the intention to do what Christ commands, while perhaps wrongly understood, is sufficient intention. 

Thus at the end of the day, we have valid consecrators with valid intention conferring the Sacrament of Orders (to the Order of Bishop) on a valid (though illicit, since it was without papal approval) candidate according to a formula Pope Leo determined to be deficient. Thus the matter of continuity of the Apostolic Succession depends on the validity of the Ordinal of 1552 which was used in Parker’s consecratin.  We will look more at this in a future posting.