Conference Explores Issue of Validity of Anglican Orders
Episcopal News Service. May 18, 1995 [95097]
Patricia Lefevere, Freelance Writer from New Jersey
For too long Pope Leo XIII's triumphalist phrase, "absolutely null and utterly void" has misled people on both sides of the confessional divide into thinking that Rome was declaring that in Anglican sacraments "nothing happens," said a Roman Catholic priest, who was ordained an Episcopal priest 27 years ago.
But the church can never issue such a guarantee. "God is bigger than his church and bigger than the church's sacraments. His grace is always operative when sacraments are properly celebrated," said Father John Jay Hughes who was conditionally ordained, rather than absolutely re-ordained, when he became a Catholic priest in Munster, Germany in 1968.
Father Hughes was one of 18 international scholars who addressed some 80 participants at a recent conference on Anglican orders held April 20-22 at the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary in New York, the priest's alma mater.
Why should topnotch Anglican and Catholic theologians from Britain, Rome and across America spend several days talking intensely about the offending papal bull. Apostolicae Curae, which will be 100 years old next year -- a document no participant appeared eager to celebrate?
At least one of the reasons is the long shadow that Pope Leo's pen has cast over ecumenical relations between the two sister churches -- a shadow so menacing that it has dimmed 30 years of bilateral progress made since Vatican Council II.
"The longer we sidestep the issue the more cold, embarrassing and incoherent will be our relationship and the less credible our commitment to full ecumenical communion with the Anglicans," said Catholic theologian Jon Nilson of Loyola University in Chicago.
American ecumenists have wanted to reopen the issue of Anglican orders for four years, especially after reaching common understanding concerning holy orders and ordination in the Anglican-Roman Catholic (ARC/USA) dialogues.
This conference to assess Leo's encyclical in the wake of new historical and theological light thrown on it by the opening of the Vatican archives (up to the year 1903) was already scheduled in 1990. Many at the meeting had looked into these archives and Hughes, a theological consultant to the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, had even written two books on the subject.
A further reason for revisiting the papal bull was the fact that it forms the backdrop of the current practice of absolutely re-ordaining Anglican clergy who cross over to Rome (about 300 in Britain and 95 in the U.S. in the past few years, including 60 married Episcopal priests).
Nevertheless, most ordained Anglicans do not consider their original ordinations invalid, said Canon Christopher Hill of London's St. Paul's Cathedral. "Who's doing the doubting?" he asked. "Not the Anglicans. . . Anglicans go to the sacraments without any real doubts about their orders. They don't see their sacraments as charades."
Yet Leo's prohibition is also at the heart of the practice of admitting Anglicans to Holy Communion only in very limited circumstances in Roman Catholic churches. The papal bull is an impasse to reconciliation, Hill said.
Besides, "People don't think like their fathers' thought and theologians today don't think like Leo thought," said Jesuit Francis Sullivan of Boston College, a theologian who has pored over Leo's papers during his nearly 40 years at Rome's Gregorian University. He related how four of eight theologians named by Leo to study Anglican orders concluded they were valid, based on their research of documents at the time of the split.
The other four were favorably disposed as well, Sullivan said, but it was the Leo's personal theologian who wrote a "negative summation" of the commission's work, which became the basis of Leo's ruling. Non-theological factors played a big role in the end, the priest said.
One of these factors was Leo's hatred of modernism and his lumping of socialist, communists, nihilists, atheists and Free Masons into a conspiracy out "to ruin the church, the family and civilized society," said Father Georges Tavard, a theologian at Marquette University.
Worse yet, Leo ascribed the origin of the dangerous modern movements to the 16th century Reformers, Tavard said.
Jesuit Father James Sadawsky of Fordham University noted that both Catholics and Anglicans affirm that "the real presence of Our Lord is in the consecrated elements." So despite Leo's distrust of the Reformers, his questioning of their intention, their definition of Eucharistic sacrifice and of priesthood, "the Reformers did not get together and say 'let's stop the real presence from happening,'" the priest said.
Whatever the reasons for taking Leo's "null and void" decree back off the shelf, Jesuit Edward Yarnold of Oxford University put it most urgently: "We've got it wrong on Anglican orders and we've got to put it right, irrespective of (Anglican) ordination of women or anything else," he said.
Some scholars tried to steer the meeting away from what one professor called the "distraction of women's ordination." Because women priests did not exist in Leo's time, they should not concern this gathering, a few argued.
Still it was hard to deny the reality of so many women in the audience wearing priestly garb. Sara Butler, an American Catholic nun who serves on the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), noted that after 50 years of debate the 1968 Lambeth Conference declared as "inconclusive" the arguments for or against women's ordination. Rome had yet to begin its debate in 1968, she said.
But Pope John Paul II's recent letter ordering an end to discussion of the issue has become, in Anglican terms, "a new obstacle to reconciliation," Butler said, just as Anglican ordination of women has proved an impasse to fuller communion between Rome and Canterbury. She thought that both churches ought to do more theological work on the meaning of tradition in order to advance the dialogue.
Hill said that the conference had helped keep the ecumenical flame alight at a time when many Christians think little is happening on the road toward unity. He said that the issue of women's ordination was a "blessing in disguise" because "the question of orders won't be dealt with speedily." In the meantime, he predicted "that our two churches will remain in a degree of communion ensured by our baptism. What we're not in yet is holy communion," he said.
Discussion of the papal bull, however, takes on some urgency because it is "still an active force in the relations of our two churches -- and it still lies at the heart of the contemplation of any future for Anglican-Roman Catholic reconciliation because it outlines the doctrinal basis for the official Roman Catholic rejection of the validity of Anglican ordained ministry," said Prof. William Franklin of General Seminary, organizer of the conference.
During his opening welcome, Franklin reminded participants that the 1990 report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue called on theologians of both churches to "assess anew the past and present climate of our relationship, and to suggest possible ways forward to preserve and promote the ecumenical impact of Vatican II and of recent dialogues, even in the face of whatever serious difficulties still exist."
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