That All May Be One

Martin Luther

I saw recently that a joint commission of Bishops and Theologians representing both the Catholic Church in the United States and the Evangelical Lutheran Church In America (ELCA) are forwarding to Rome and to the General Convention of the ELCA) a proposal authorizing Eucharistic sharing between Lutherans and Catholics in recognition of the significant doctrinal agreements that have been reached in the fifty years of Ecumenical dialogue since the Second Vatican Council.

I must admit that I was startled at the proposal.  (“Startled” doesn’t mean that I don’t like it, only that—much like the “Francis Agenda” at the recent Synod on the Family, I am amazed how fast the Church is ready to move in this papacy.)  There are significant issues to be addressed, not the least of which is the Elephant on the Coffee Table of Valid (Apostolic) Orders.  The Catholic Church believes that during the Reformation the Apostolic Succession of the Lutheran hierarchy and ministry was “lost.”   This is a serious question because the authority to preside at the Eucharist, to forgive sins, to confirm, to ordain, and to anoint the sick depend—in Catholic theology—on the minister of the sacrament standing in an unbroken succession of clergy whose ordinations can be traced back to the Apostles.

Now frankly, the Apostolic Succession is a highly complex issue.  Can only bishops ordain priests?  There are historical precedents before the Council of Trent (and I believe there is even one within the century after Trent) where the Catholic Church recognized ordinations conducted by a presbyter (priest).  (Ironically I came across this information about forty years ago in a series of essays by theologians and historians  who were involved in the same Lutheran Catholic dialogue process that is making the recommendation of Eucharistic sharing,)  If priests can validly ordain, then Apostolic Succession has been retained in the Lutheran Church.  Moreover, in some strains of Lutheranism, most notably the Swedish,  the office and ministry of Bishops was maintained in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church.  The argument was made by Catholics that in rejecting the Eucharistic doctrines of the Catholic Church, most notably Transubstantiation and Eucharistic Sacrifice, even those Episcopal Churches in the Lutheran Communion suffered a break in the Apostolic lineage.  But again, things are much more complex.  Recent ecumenical dialogues have established that there is no essential difference between the Catholic formula of Transubstantiation and the Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantiation.   As Catholics are bound to the doctrine of the Real Presence and not essentially to the doctrine of Transubstantiation (which is only one way of explaining the Real Presence) there is quite a bit of room for accord here.  Actually Transubstantiation and Consubstantiation are, at the root, essentially the same when one understands the difference between Thomistic (Scholastic and neo-Scholastic) thought in the Catholic Tradition and the Neo-Platonic or Augustinian philosophy espoused by Luther and the theologians who followed him.  When Luther says that the bread and wine remain bread and wine but Christ is truly Present “in, with, and under” the forms of bread and wine he means what we Catholics mean in saying that whle the “accidents” of bread and wine remain unchanged, their substance is transformed into the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity (and, though we forget to add it, humanity) of Christ.  The physical and chemical properties of bread and wine remain bread and wine. 

While we have come a tremendous distance in a common understanding, I am not hopeful that this proposal will be accepted by Rome.  (I think the ELCA will be all over it like ants at a picnic.)  The highly sensitive issue of Apostolic Orders has not been addressed and a solution has not been found for it.  More important are the unspoken agendas.  Rome, even after Vatican II, can’t seem to move away from an “unconditional surrender” approach to Ecumenism.  With Rome you pretty much have to buy the whole ball of wax and we have some issues here.  We won’t even bring up the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin or purgatory.  Women’s ordination is a stumbling block all of its own.   Katholic Krazies will go berserk about this proposal as the ELCA supports “a woman’s right to choose” as well as Same-Sex marriage.  And of course most of the Krazies just hate ecumenism in general because they get a lot of their energy just from hating. 

In the end it is a huge fuss over nothing.  I see Lutherans and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and even the odd Greek Orthodox coming up the aisle in our Church for Holy Communion every Sunday.  My Methodist sister-in-law even has permission from the local Catholic bishops to receive Holy Communion.  She is at mass with my brother every Sunday.  Used to run the kid’s choir in the parish.  Hardly anyone in town knows that she technically isn’t a Catholic.  And hey—Catholics in the Lutheran Church: I know we aren’t supposed to go to Communion but I’ve seen priests—even fairly uptight ones that like to get all dolled up like Cardinal Burke—kneeling at the Lutheran rail.  Most Catholics don’t have a clue about the prohibition and it wouldn’t stop them if they did.  As in so many ways, the faithful are out in front while the magisterium puts their mitered heads in the sand and the theologians all wriggle and moan like they need a laxative. 

So am I condoning Eucharistic Sharing with Lutherans?  Don’t have to any more than I have to condone the sun coming up in the East.  It is just a fact of life.  Sure the krazies are beside themselves, “goin’ to fight it with everything in me” one writes.  But the words of Jesus remain: ut unum sint.

Now, for another matter.  I am taking a few weeks off while on a secret mission.  keep me in your prayers and I will keep you in mine.  

Maybe If They Knew What They Were Talking About We Wouldn't Consider Them Krazies

Pope Francis with Bishop Tony

Palmer shortly before Palmer's

death

The Krazy Katholic Blogosphere is alight with alarm over the fact that Pope Francis not only authorized a Catholic Funeral Mass for his friend, Tony Palmer, a Bishop of the Communion of Episcopal Evangelical Churches, but permitted him to be buried with the prayers and rites proper to the funeral of a bishop. 

Catholic Canon Law permits a Catholic Funeral Mass for baptized non-Catholics under certain circumstances.  Perhaps the most famous of these Masses was in August 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI sent Cardinal Walter Kasper to preside over the Funeral Mass of Brother Roger Schütz, the Founder of the Ecumenical Monastic Community of Taizé and a close personal friend of both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  Cardinal Ratzinger had personally given Brother Roger Holy Communion at the funeral of Pope John Paul earlier that year.  In the case of Tony Palmer permission for a Catholic Funeral Mass was granted by the local bishop because Palmer’s wife and children are Catholic.  It is not only permissible under Canon Law to provide a funeral Mass for a non-Catholic member of a Catholic family, especially one who frequently worships with his or her family, but it is routine in most parishes today to do so.  Certainly in our parish it is a common event, perhaps provided as often as a dozen times a year.

When the Palmer family asked that Tony have a Catholic Funeral Mass, the Bishop of Clifton, the Rt. Rev. Declan Ronan Lang, granted permission but said he was not to be buried as a Bishop.  This is when Pope Francis stepped in and granted the permission for a funeral in which the deceased was given the rites due a bishop.  How could a Protestant, the Krazies wonder, possibly be accorded recognition as a bishop?  Well, we need to look at the facts.  We cannot presume that just because a person is Protestant that they are not, according to the standards of the Catholic Church, validly ordained.   In fact, the Communion of Episcopal Evangelical Churches has been very careful from its foundation to make sure that its Bishops are consecrated according to Rites acceptable by the Catholic Church and by Bishops whose Apostolic Succession is unquestioned by Rome.  Their Orders are derived from the Old Catholic Church in Netherlands whose first bishop, Cornelius van Steenoven was consecrated for the empty See of Utrecht in 1724 —without papal mandate—by Dominique-Marie Varlet, titular Archbishop of Babylon, who had himself been consecrated—with papal mandate—by Jacques de Goyon Matignon, who had served as Bishop of Condom from 1671-1673.  While the episcopal consecration of van Steenoven was illicit (there being no papal mandate, and in fact Steenoven had been turned down by Rome as a candidate for Archbishop of Utrecht because he was suspect of Jansenism), it was valid as it was performed by a validly ordained bishop according to the canonical rite and with presumable correct intention to consecrate a Bishop in the sense that the Church holds.  Thus the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands has an undisputed Apostolic Succession (and is and has always been recognized as such by the Holy See) and thus the Succession passed on to the Bishops of the Communion of Episcopal Evangelical Churches is also recognized.  Pope Francis was simply giving Bishop Palmer the courtesies due him in the funeral service.  That doesn’t please the Krazies, but if they would do their homework –theological as well as historical—they would lose their beef with Francis.  But then, if they didn’t have their gripes with the Pope, they wouldn’t be special and who wants to be just a garden variety Catholic like the rest of us?  What would you blog about if you were happy?  I don’t know, but I find an awful lot good about the Church today and where it is going.  And when I hear that Pope Francis reached out to Bishop Palmer’s family with his sort of courtesy, I am profoundly thankful that we have such a Pope.  At the same time, to be fair, I have no doubt that Pope Benedict would have done the same as his actions at the time of the death of Brother Roger would indicate.  We call this the hermeneutic of continuity.    

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXI

The Chapel at Lambeth Palace

where Matthew Parker was 

consecrated Archbishop of 

Canterbury

Elizabeth’s challenge was to get her new Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated.  All the Marian bishops, including Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff in Wales who had adopted the Protestant Rites under Edward VI, reverted to Catholicism under Mary, and would adopt Protestant worship again under Elizabeth, refused.  In the end Elizabeth came up with four co-consecrating bishops which is, after all, one more than required. However the credentials of several of them were not as impeccable as one might have hoped.

The consecration of Matthew Parker is a key stumbling block in Catholic/Anglican dialogue.  All current Anglican Bishops can trace their lineage back to Parker.  If he was not consecrated validly, then the validity of the diaconal and priestly ordinations and episcopal consecrations of subsequent Anglican bishops gets called into question.  If he was consecrated validly then all subsequent Anglican bishops stand in the Apostolic Succession and the Churches of the Anglican Communion have, by Catholic standards, a fully valid sacramental system.  (The issue is complicated, by the way, by the introduction of Old Catholic co-consecrating bishops in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, but that is for a later post.) 

Spoiler alert: Pope Leo XIII declared in the Bull Apostolicae Curae of 1896 that Parker’s episcopal consecration was invalid on several points and thus the Anglican Church does not stand in the Apostolic Succession.  For us historians, the issue is far more complex and not as easily settled however, and so we want to look in detail at the Parker consecration and what happened so as to see the evidence on which Leo’s commission appointed to study the issue came to their conclusions.  And for those who think it is a settled question, consider this: In 1993, in an effort to persuade the Church of England not to go ahead with women’s ordination (to the priesthood) then-Cardinal Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, offered that in return for the Church of England backing away from this historic step of admitting women to the priesthood, the Holy See would re-open the question of Valid Orders.  To proceed, however, with the ordination of women to priestly ministry as either bishops or priests would mark a definitive closure to this question as the Catholic Church believes that it is of divine law that only men can be ordained bishops and priests.  The willingness of the Catholic Church—and Cardinal Ratzinger could not have made the offer without the consent of the Pope at the time (Saint John Paul II)—to reexamine the decision of Apostolicae Curae does mean that Leo’s Bull is not irreversible. 

What do we mean by valid orders?  The Catholic Church—along with the Orthodox Churches, the Churches of the East and the Copts, the Anglican Church and several branches of Lutheranism (among them the Church of Sweden)—holds that bishops receive not only their authority but their sacramental “power” from standing in a long line of bishops traceable back to the Apostles through the prayer invoking the Holy Spirit on the new bishop and the laying on of hands conferred on each new bishop in each successive generation from the Apostles to the present day.  Priests, likewise, receive the “power” to celebrate the Eucharist and forgive sins by the laying on of hands by their ordaining bishops who stand in this lineage traced back to the apostles.

Frankly, no one has the papers to show an unbroken line back to any of the 12, but the claim of an unbroken succession from the Apostles is not as outlandish as it may seem.  From the first century onwards their was great scrupulosity about making sure that this transmission of office was done through the laying on of hands and it is a very reasonable assumption that bishops can indeed trace the lineage back to the Apostles laying hands on those they chose for ministry in the primitive Church.

If it were simply a matter of the lineage of the hand-onlaying, it wouldn’t be complex.  But historically there were challenges to various features of the ritual.  Were there specific words, or at least specific ideas, that had to be vocalized in the accompanying prayer invoking the Holy Spirit?  Were there other accompanying actions that comprised an essential part of the ritual?  What if the ordaining bishop were not orthodox in his faith? Would an ordination conferred by him be valid?  What if candidate was not orthodox in his?  What if either secretly rejected what was supposedly happening?  There is no end to the number of pins on which a questionable number of angels can dance.  

The allegation that ordinations had been invalid or where ordinations were subsequently annulled has been widely abused in the history of the Church.  Various movements and groups in the Church of the third and fourth century had declared the ordinations of their rivals “invalid” in order to discredit them and shake the confidence of their adherents.  The Donatists claimed that the personal sinfulness of the bishop or priest made him incapable of conferring sacraments validly.  The Montanists refused to recognize the ordination of those outside their movement and orthodox Christians in turn rejected the ordinations of the Montanists.  In the ninth and tenth century it got even worse as successive popes annulled the ordinations of their predecessors who came from rival political factions in Rome.  Popes declared the ordinations of antipopes invalid and antipopes returned the compliment which sounds reasonable until you realize that most often it was only years later that it was settled which claimant to the papacy wore the white tiara and which wore the black.  All of this is to say that the charge of “invalid orders” was so overused and abused throughout history as to have little credibility except as a polemical tool.  And so when told that their ordinations were not valid, the sixteenth-century reformers sort of shrugged their shoulders and went on with their lives.  “Wolf” had been cried too often. 

This isn’t to say that there is not substance the idea of “valid” and “invalid” orders, but only that the entire matter has to be very carefully nuanced.  It isn’t like buying a quart of milk with an expiration date on it.  The milk is either sour or it isn’t and everyone can tell.  What do you mean by “valid” or “invalid” orders?  How can you tell?

I remember one time forty years ago, as the ecumenical movement was just beginning to dawn, being at a very High Church Episcopal Eucharist.  A friend of mine, then a Catholic seminarian, said as the Sacrament was being incensed at the consecration: “Don’t they know that it is just crackers and grape-juice.”  That then-seminarian is now dean of an Episcopalian Cathedral and he obviously doesn’t know that it “is just crackers and grape-juice.”  Nor is it.  Chapter 22 of Unitatis Reintegratio, Vatican II’s Declaration on Ecumenism, says of the Eucharist as celebrated in the various churches that we Catholics judge to stand outside the Apostolic Succession

Though the ecclesial Communities which are separated from us lack the fullness of unity with us flowing from Baptism, and though we believe they have not retained the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Orders, nevertheless when they commemorate His death and resurrection in the Lord's Supper, they profess that it signifies life in communion with Christ and look forward to His coming in glory. Therefore the teaching concerning the Lord's Supper, the other sacraments, worship, the ministry of the Church, must be the subject of the dialogue.

Notice: “while we believe that they have not retained the fullness of the Eucharistic Mystery”—primarily because of the break in the Apostolic Succession—we acknowledge that

1.   Like our understanding of the Mass, the Eucharist in these communities commemorates the death and resurrection of the Lord,

2.   It signifies (a word replete with sacramental meaning) life in communion with Christ

3.   And it is a sign of the Kingdom of God 

It is amazing that the Council Fathers chose to admit their subjectivity in this crucial matter and did not make an absolute pronunciation on the full validity of non-Catholic Eucharists.  The Council Fathers also spoke of the “fullness of the Eucharistic Mystery,” again not saying that the Protestant Holy Communion is “crackers and grape-juice” but only somehow lacking in what it might have should the Apostolic Succession have been maintained.  There is, the Catholic Church says, an authentic union with Christ; the issue is whether Christ is corporally present. 

There is a reason for this to be challenged.  Jesus asks: what father among you would hand your child a stone if he asked for bread…” (Matthew 7:9; Luke 11:11.)  No serious theologian, unless he were descending from theology into polemics, would claim that the prayers of the baptized would go unheard by our heavenly Father when the baptized ask him for their spiritual nourishment in the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.  No, the understanding of the Eucharist is most often different among our separated brothers and sisters; the experience is most often different as well.  But that “nothing” happens?  Well, actually that is what many Catholics believed for several centuries, but then we were burning women for witches and spreading stories about Jews stealing the Eucharistic host to use in the ritual killing of Christian children.  That great age of Counter-Reformation baroque: It often wasn’t a pretty sight when you looked too close. 

By the way, just as a point of clarification: while the Catholic Church questions the precise nature of the sacramental systems of the various Protestant Churches, we accept the validly of the Sacraments of the Orthodox Churches (though they do not all accept ours), the Ancient Churches of the East, and the Copts and other ancient Churches. 

We have drifted far from Matthew Parker’s Episcopal consecration, but let’s review.  We need validly ordained consecrating bishops (one is absolutely required; three is usual, and we have four—though that validly ordained thing is sketchy for two of them, as we will see.)  We need to be able to reasonably presume that the ordaining bishops intend to pass on the Apostolic Succession, or we at least need to have no evidence that they are withholding their intention do so do. We need a ritual that has an acceptable verbal formula for calling down the Holy Spirit upon those being ordained/consecrated.  We need whatever other parts of the ritual are required for validity.  (This last will be interesting because the Catholic Church will change horses in mid-theological-stream, leaving Leo XIII hanging out to dry on this point.) 

What do we get?  There are four consecrating bishops.  We have William Barlow, once Bishop of Bath and Wells.  We have John Scory, once Bishop of Chichester.  We have Miles Coverdale, once Bishop of Exeter.  And we have John Hodgkins, Bishop of Bedford.  Barlow was consecrated a bishop in 1536 when England was in Schism but still using the traditional Pontifical.  He was therefore a validly ordained bishop.  Hodgkins was similarly consecrated under the ancient ritual in 1537.  Coverdale and Scory were consecrated Bishops according the revised Protestant rites in the Ordinal of Edward VI. Their ordinations are, therefore, less certain depending on whether one acknowledges the validity of the Reformed Rite.  Nevertheless, we only need one and we have at least two.