Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXVI

John Henry Newman

Even before John Keble’s famous sermon “National Apostasy” which triggered the Tractarian movement, Newman had immersed himself in the study of the Fathers of the Church and had in 1833 produced his first major work, The Arians of the Fourth Century.  This led, in turn, to a study of the heresy on the other end of the theological spectrum from Arianism, the Monophysites.  But he became deeply troubled as he got further and further into his studies, perceiving similarities between the Monophysites and his Anglican Church when it came to questions of ecclesial authority.  He then came across a quote from Saint Augustine that shook him to his core “'Securus judicat orbis terrarium!”  “The decision of the entire world is definitive.” In other words: When the Church reaches a consensus, the answer is established.  Newman saw that the position claimed by the Church of England to be a via media, a sort of bridge between Catholicism and Protestantism, wasn’t tenable.  You either stood with the Church or outside it.  From this point on his commitment to Anglicanism was in its death throes. 

While he had come to this understanding sometime around 1839, and while he ceased priestly ministry in the Church of England after 1843, it was only in October 1845 that Newman himself made the leap into the Catholic Church.  Several of his Littlemore associates had already preceded him. 

Newman’s choice for Roman Catholicism shocked family and friends alike.  Many of his old associates turned their backs on him.  It was impossible for him to stay at Littlemore since the cottages belonged to the Anglican parish, and he and his associates moved to Oscott, the seminary of Bishop Nicholas Wiseman who was the Vicar Apostolic (Catholic Bishop) of the Midlands district.  (England at the time had no established Catholic hierarchy but was guided by four—and then later eight—regional bishops known as Vicars Apostolic.)  That October, the first anniversary of his being received into the Catholic Church, Newman went to Rome where he was received by Pius IX and ordained a Catholic priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni.  Pius awarded the Doctorate of Divinity to the distinguished convert. He was hereafter known as “Doctor Newman” even in Protestant circles.  Newman wanted to be a religious priest and looked at several Orders, most notably the Dominicans.  In the end, however, he settled on the Oratorians, who are secular priests (without religious vows) living a collegial life with some common prayer and meals while collaborating in ministry.  It is a life highly suited to the apostle and to the scholar but no so much to the mystic. 

Newman returned to England in late 1847, and after some moving around finally settled at Edgbaston in Birmingham where the magnificent church of the Immaculate Conception and a large and commodious house for the Oratorian community were built.  The Church became famous for its superior music and Newman’s preaching drew a large audience, both Catholic and Anglican. 

Newman wasn’t long in England before the Catholic Church in England had to face a major crisis.  We will have to deal with this in a future posting but in summary in September 1850, Pope Pius IX established a Catholic hierarchy in England.  While the Pope was careful not to give his bishops the titles of the pre-Reformation Sees, titles still held by the Bishops of the Church of England, to give any English title was seen to be an affront to Her Majesty, the Queen.  The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was a particularly nasty anti-Catholic and rather than come to some understanding of the situation chose to fan the flames.  The somewhat high and mighty attitude of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the first Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, didn’t help.   Wiseman, like so many hierarchs, was a natural at pontificating and not only at the Liturgy.  The brouhaha reached such a point that Newman was called in to rescue the situation with a series of lectures explaining Catholicism to the public.  Though in the end the arch-Protestants (they had never liked Newman when he was a High Church Anglican) did not accept his explanations, Newman was able to bring an objective understanding of Roman Catholicism into the eye of the English public.  You would think the Catholic party would be appreciative; it never was. 

Newman was part of a flood of converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism.  While his conversion was the occasion that triggered many others to follow, they didn’t convert to the same Catholic Church.  Newman never lost that Anglican reserve that made him uncomfortable with the more exotic flowerings of Latin Catholicism whereas many of the converts—and most especially Henry Edward Manning, the Anglican Archdeacon of Chichester who followed Newman into the Catholic Church in 1851—went full fig into the most outrageous Ultramontane Catholicism.  (Ultramontane refers to those Catholics who were determined not only to be more papal than the Pope, but more I-talian in their enthusiasm for baroque Catholicism and sentimental piety.  It really wasn’t a pretty thing then and it isn’t now as we see in the vagaries of neo-traditionalism and the excesses of the Burke/Cordileone/Morlino burlesque.)  Newman wasn’t trusted by the zealots because he was a strong advocate of using one’s intellectual abilities to define one’s theology rather than blindly getting on the popular bandwagon as it rolled along a road of Italianate extravagances. 

In 1854 the Catholic Bishops in Ireland invited Newman to come to Dublin and establish a Catholic University.  They really didn’t understand his basic philosophy of Education.  Newman believed that the University should be a place free of direct control of the Church where there was sufficient latitude for research, publication and open debate.  His ideas were drawn from the great Medieval universities of Europe where Revelation was cherished and Tradition maintained but also where there was an intellectual freedom to explore questions without being bound to pre-determined answers.  This view did not make the Bishops happy and Newman resigned after four years and returned to the Birmingham Oratory.

Later in life Newman somewhat romanticized his Anglican years as a time of his universal popularity and esteem and his Catholic years as a time of being bitterly misunderstood.  There is some truth to the picture as long as you don’t look too closely at the details—especially in the Anglican phase.  Suffice it to say that the 1860’s and ‘70’s were a time of personal anguish in which he felt he had sacrifice everything for the Truth he found in Catholicism.  Rumors abounded that he had—or soon would—revert to the Church of England.  And in all honesty old Anglican friends, most notably Richard William Church, the Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, were far more faithful friends than his Catholic co-religionists.

Newman was a particular thorn in the side of Manning who had, by this time, advanced to the position of Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and (Catholic) Primate of England.  Henry Manning was a particularly stony fellow who met the description often used by a late friend of mine when describing unpleasant people.  “He had a face like a bowl full of sour a**holes.”  Manning was in many respects the polar opposite of Newman.  As Newman stuck to the understated Recusant Catholic Tradition that marked English Catholicism between the Reformation and the establishment of the hierarchy, Manning embraced a Catholicism that would make a Neapolitan blush.  Newman and Manning came to public disagreement over the Declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870.   Newman professed his belief in the Doctrine but felt that it may not be opportune to define.  Manning supported the definition with an alarming enthusiasm totally divorced from the socio-political realities of the Catholic Church in England.  Newman, of course, was a priest and therefore would not be attending Vatican I, his influence being confined to his writings and talks.  Manning was leading the English Episcopal delegation to the Council.   Manning made sure that Pius IX and the Roman Curia well understood just how liberal Newman was and his intellectual ties to other opponents of the definition. This pushed Newman further and further back into the shadows.

Newman was sustained during this period of neglect by Ambrose Saint John.  Saint John had been part of the Littlemore community and converted to Catholicism about a month before Newman.  He accompanied Newman to Rome and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood there with him.  Together they were received into the Oratory and together they planned and built the Birmingham Oratory.  Other than Newman’s four years in Dublin they lived together in the Birmangham Oratory for the remainder of Saint John’s life.  When Saint John died in May 1875 Newman threw himself on the bed next to the corpse and would not be parted from his friend until the undertakers came for the body the next morning.  Newman said: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine.”  He called Ambrose Saint John his “life under God for 33 years.”  (This would be from the time Saint John came to Littlemore in 1842 until his death in 1845.)  Newman instructed that he was to buried in the same grave as Ambrose Saint John.  It was a very complex relationship and while there is no reason to suspect that it lacked an integrity, it does reveal the complexities of our psycho-sexual natures. 

In 1878 Pius IX died.  The election of Giacomo Pecci as Leo XIII was as much a new broom sweeping away the accumulated rubbish of the previous reign as the election of Pope Francis has proved to be.  And in the very first consistory of Cardinals named in his reign in 1879, Leo named John Henry Newman.   The Duke of Norfolk, the premier peer of the Realm as well as England’s leading Catholic layman, had suggested the idea to the new Pope who was quite enthusiastic about it.  But even here Manning tried to stop it.  The practice was (and still is) that Cardinals who are not residential bishops live in Rome.  Newman, now at the age of 78, was reluctant to give up the comforts and securities of England and said he might accept the Red Hat but only if dispensation were given him to continue to live at the Birmingham oratory.  The correspondence all went through the Primate and Manning did not forward  Newman’s letter but duplicitously wrote Rome saying that Newman had declined as he did not choose to live in Rome.  When Pope Leo expressed his regrets to the Duke of Norfolk, Norfolk immediately cleared up the “misunderstanding” on Newman’s behalf and Newman got his Red Hat.  Punch, the satirical magazine, put it right when it wrote of Newman’s elevation:

"'Tis the good and grey head that would honor the Hat

Not the Hat that would honor the Head."   

 Newman died August 11, 1890 and was interred in Saint John’s grave in Rednal as he had requested. 

When Newman died he was much admired by Anglicans and Catholics alike, especially among the intelligentsia.  A particular correspondent and admiring friend was Liberal Prime Minister William E. Glastone.  Gladstone, like Newman, believed in the supremacy of the individual conscience. 

Ironically Newman has been adopted by several right-wing groups of contemporary Catholics, most notably the “Cardinal Newman Society.”  He is posited as an anti-liberal when in fact he was anything but.  Newman’s opposition was to the “liberalism” of the Enlightenment and its heirs who saw religion only as a natural phenomenon and discounted not only the idea of Absolute Truth(s) but of Divine Revelation itself.  Newman had always seen what a blind alley this rationalism led to but he was no conservative.  His philosophy of Education which had led him into conflict with the Irish Bishops during his years with the National University in Dublin shows his respect for open inquiry, investigation, and discussion. His defense of the supremacy of conscience was decades ahead of its time.   Moreover his essay on the need to consult the laity in matters of doctrine gives lie to his belief in the Magisterium as the sole source of authority in the Church.  Indeed, he had a great confidence in the capabilities of a Catholic laity and was very leery of hierarchical absolutism in the Church.  He is often referred to as “The Father of Vatican II” since the Council realized so many of his dreams for the Church.  We can’t say, of course, what his attitude would be towards the Liturgical Reforms which came about only 75 years after he was in his grave, but an overall familiarity with his writings gives that sense of confidence in modernity that is reflected in the 1970 Missal.  “To live is to change,” he wrote “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”  

Newman’s flight from the Church of England to the Catholic Church gave impetus for many more to follow him but ironically he has always, even in his lifetime, served as an eirenicon of harmonization between the two traditions.  

Let That Fire Fall From Heaven

Irish Crowds celebrating victory
in Same-Sex Marriage Referendum

Well, I was going to run quickly through Methodism and then into the Second Great Awakening, but that will have to wait a day or two as I want to make some comments about Ireland and the national referendum that overwhelming endorsed changing the national Constitution to include the right of same-sex couples to marriage.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the Church (in Ireland) needs a “reality check” to see if it has drifted away from its younger members.  All due respect to His Grace, but sort of reminds me of the “Captain Obvious” commercials for Hotels.com.   On the other hand, at least the good Archbishop is one step ahead of his American confreres (including those who work—or used to work—at the Vatican) in their ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach. 

I remember reading a book several years ago, A Whisper of God: Essays on Post-Catholic Ireland by Richard Clarke, now Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland.  Bishop Clarke was way out ahead of his Catholic colleagues in identifying the reality that Ireland has over the past four decades moved very rapidly from a devoutly Catholic country where the faithful followed the directions of their parish priests to a society in which people think for themselves and have no difficulty in adjusting to the changed social realities.  Bishop Clarke (he was then Bishop of Meath and Kildare) and I shared a platform some years back when invited by a Roman Catholic Religious Order of men to help chart their future in Ireland.  He astutely named the very dramatic changes in Irish society and the impact those changes were to have on the Catholic Church in Ireland and what the Church must do if it wants to remain a part of Irish life.  We could use a similar analysis today.  Of course, Andrew Greeley warned us thirty years ago but remained only a voice crying in the desert.  Thanks to pressure from the infamous Cardinal John Cody, then Archbishop of Chicago, we chose to ignore Greely’s spot-on sociological research.  We need to be careful and ignore no longer or we will see—as the Pew Survey released last week—the Catholic Church shrink into total irrelevancy in American life. 

To a certain extent I think this does tie into the theme I am currently working on of the Great Awakenings.  I think an evangelical revival, a truly evangelical revival, not a fundamentalist reign of terror, is needed in America today to give a boost not only to the Catholic Church, but to all the Churches of Christian orthodoxy, that is to say all the Churches that profess the faith of the traditional Christian creeds.  As you probably note from earlier postings I am intrigued by George Weigel’s definition of Evangelical Catholicism.

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

I think that if the Catholic Church wants to capture the spiritual imagination of the next generation it must address the following issues.

1.   Integrity.  The Church—and Church leaders in particular—need walk the walk they preach.  In particular they need to embrace a less materialistic and consumerist lifestyle and adopt the servant-model of Church in both their personal lives and episcopal ministries.  A key part of this re-visioning is to drop the C.E.O. model of the majority of bishops and the Renaissance Prince model of that wing-nut minority that parades around in Church-drag.  Pastors are neither executives nor princesses but loving fathers of adult sons and daughters. 

2.   We need to re-vision ourselves as Church not as an institution but as a people commissioned by baptism to spread the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in concrete terms of establishing among ourselves and inviting others into a culture of community, peace-building, and a passion for a more just world, 

3.   We need to refashion ourselves as Church not only to be more inclusive and welcoming, but to put the emphasis on community—a family of people who know one another and are invested in one another’s lives as we encourage each other to grow in discipleship.  Part of this community emphasis has to be the development of small groups in the parishes to network in mission and fellowship. 

4.   We as Church need to redo our moral theology to bring its historic values—rooted in the scriptures and tradition—into dialogue with the social, biological, and psychological sciences to come up with a credible anthropology and, in particular, a sound theology of human sexuality.

5.   We as Church needs to permit greater inculturation in its worship, maintaining a unity of faith but recognizing the vast cultural differences that cut across not only nations and language groups, but age and economic groups within societies. 

6.   We as Church need to rethink and re-theologize our understanding of sin in a way that reminds us that we are a community of redeemed sinners and not an “us” (the saved) faction in an otherwise damned world of a supposedly unredeemed “them.” 

7.   We need a reemphasis on spirituality and an empowering of the average Joe or Mary Christian to develop a rich personal spiritual life, rooted in a personal friendship with Jesus as encountered in the scriptures, the sacraments, the community of the faithful, and the poor. 

8.   We need to move beyond the clerical/lay distinction in the Body of Christ so that each Christian is empowered to make full use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit entrusted to him or to her by God for the good of all the Church and indeed, the entire world.

9.   Without abandoning our historic faith and the creeds that express it, we need to move from a Church marked by doctrines and rules to a community of faith where people personally encounter Christ through the fellowship of believers, worship, preaching, and mission. 

There is some redundancy in what I propose and there probably are other features that I am overlooking but the current model of Church is not working.  Religion in general and Christianity in particular are fast losing their credibility in this post-modern world and it is time for a radical renewal of our identity as Church.  The work of theologians such as Avery Dulles, Karl Raher, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Hans Kung, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard McBrien, Jean Vanier, Elizabeth Johnson, Marie Dominique Chenu, and—surprising to some—Josef Ratzinger, make just such a renewal possible, even imperative.   Indeed, while I am not happy about the way Weigel unfolds his thesis in Evangelical Catholicism, I concur with him that the fundamental shift in Catholicism began not with Vatican II, or even with Pius XII’s revolutionary encyclicals Mystici Corporis,  Divino Afflante Spiritu, and  Mediator Dei, but can be traced back to the fundamental shift in Catholicity by Leo XIII at the end of the 19^th century.  Leo’s embracing of the cause of the non-establishment working class with Rerum Novarum, his naming the very non-traditional John Henry Newman to the cardinaliate, and his reconciliation with democracy in his recognition of the Third French Republic may seem to us today small potatoes, but they signify a very dramatic shift in the direction of the Institutional Church that would bear fruit in the Second Vatican Council.  Up to that point the Church had been little more than a well-embalmed vestige of Renaissance Catholicism, but Leo breathed the Spirit upon those bones and we have seen them slowly come back to life.  Now is the time to unbind the resurrected Church and let it go free into the future where we, as Church, can fulfill the great commission to bring the Good News of God’s Kingdom to all nations.  Happy Pentecost.  

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.”