Old Roman Catholic Church in Europe - History

History

Background

The Old Roman Catholic Church was founded by Arnold Harris Mathew, Old Catholic Church bishop for England, on 29 December 1910. A former Roman Catholic, he was ordained priest in 1877 in Glasgow Roman Catholic Pro-Cathedral by the Most Revd Charles Eyre, Archbishop of Anazarba in partibus infidelium, Vicar-General of the Western District of Scotland, who became the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow after the restoration of the hierarchy to Scotland. Fr Mathew was granted a degree of Doctor of Divinity by Pope Pius IX. He remained a Roman Catholic priest until, in 1889, various personal doubts and issues caused him to retire from the Roman obedience. Later in 1891 he was persuaded to "trial" the Anglican ministry and went to assist the rector of Holy Trinity, Sloane St, London. He was never officially received into the Church of England, neither did he formally leave the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1897, Fr Mathew had met the Revd Richard O'Halloran and became curious about the suggestion of an Old Catholic Church in Great Britain. O'Halloran had been corresponding with the Old Catholic bishops in Holland and Germany and believed that such a movement would interest a large number of disaffected Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. In June 1906 the Royal Commission appointed in 1904 to inquire into "ecclesiastical disorders", afterwards known as the Ritual Commission, presented its report and this was followed by the issue of Letters of Business. It was expected that the Catholic-minded Anglican clergy, with their congregations, might, by Act of Parliament, be forced out of the Anglican Communion. Persuaded by O'Halloran, Mathew decided to join the movement and was elected the first Regionary Old Catholic Bishop for Great Britain and in 1908 the Old Roman Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht was petitioned to consecrate him to this charge.

On 28 April 1908, in St Gertrude's Cathedral, Utrecht, Arnold Harris Mathew was consecrated Regionary Old Catholic Bishop for Great Britain and Ireland at the hands of Mgr Gerardus Gul, Archbishop of Utrecht, assisted by Mgr James John van Thiel, Bishop of Haarlem, Mgr Nicholas Bartholomew Peter Spit, Bishop of Deventer and Mgr Joseph Demmel, Bishop of Bonn.

Bishop Mathew's election was to some extent, a precautionary endeavour by those anticipating a precipitous action of the Government regarding the Ritual Commission's findings, there were only a small number of Old Catholics in England. However, the Kings Letters of Business dealing with the Report of the Ritual Commission received no further attention as other important issues, including questions of tariff reform, claimed the immediate attention of the Government and no action was taken. The result being that those who had taken part in Bishop Mathews' election were able to remain within the Anglican Communion. Unprepared for the position in which he then found himself, Mathews disclosed the matter fully before the Dutch bishops who, with the Old Catholic bishops held an inquiry into the circumstances. Bishop Mathew was subsequently publicly exonerated from all suggestion of misrepresentation in a letter to The Guardian of 3 June 1908, the bishops also refused his request to retire and insisted he continue with the original mission.

In 1909, Mathew issued The Old Catholic Missal & Ritual, for the use of English-speaking Old Catholics with the imprimatur of Mgr Gerardus Gul, Archbishop of Utrecht. In September 1909, Bishop Mathew attended the Old Catholic Congress in Vienna, where he expressed his sympathy with the conservative position of the Dutch Old Catholics opposing the innovations being introduced among the German and Swiss Old Catholics to accept the decrees of the Holy Synod of Jerusalem (1672) and to renounce the Sacrament of Penance (auricular confession), the Invocation of the Saints and alterations in the liturgy, including the omission of the Pope's name from the Canon of the Mass. Mathew expressed fears that the trend of Continental Old Catholicism was towards Modernism, perhaps because of the growing association with Anglicans and Lutherans, and hoped for a return to the orthodox principles of the Church of Utrecht. At Utrecht, in October 1910, he assisted at the consecration of Michael John Maria Kowalski as Archbishop of the Old Catholic Church of the Mariavites of Poland.

Eventually, with the support of his clergy, on 29 December 1910, Bishop Mathew issued a pastoral letter entitled "A Declaration Of Autonomy And Independence" from the Union of Utrecht Churches. This necessitated then the continuation of the Apostolic Succession for the survival of the "old" Roman Catholic faith and so on 7 January 1911, Mathew consecrated Archdeacon Francis Herbert Bacon, Canon Cuthbert Francis Hinton, Fr William Edmond Scott-Hall and Fr Frederick Clement Christie Egerton to the episcopate. An episcopal synod then followed and Bishop Mathew was unanimously elected Old Roman Catholic Archbishop of Great Britain and Ireland. In February 1911 in response and arguably in recognition of the validity of the consecrations, Pope Pius X formally excommunicated Archbishop Mathew for having consecrated bishops without permission of the Holy See (which permission the Dutch Church was granted freedom from by previous Papal Bulls).

Archbishop Mathew had been in contact with people interested in extending the presence of the Eastern Orthodox Church to Western Europe. On 5 August 1911, at a conference in Bredon's Norton, Worcestershire attended by Archbishop Gerassimos Messarra, Archbishop of Beirut, Legate of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Archbishop Mathew and others. After a long and full discussion the faith of the Old Roman Catholic Church under Archbishop Mathew was considered in full accord with that of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Archbishop Mathew was then solemnly received by Mgr Messarra on behalf of Gregory IV (Haddad) and the Old Roman Catholic Church into union with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch as an autocephalous jurisdiction of the Holy Synod and on 26 February 1912, Photius, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria, also accepted this union. As this status has never been formally withdrawn or repudiated, it may be reasonably argued that Old Roman Catholic bishops are not in fact episcopi vagantes (an oft used term of disparagement by critics) but bishops of a canonically autocephalous church in communion with two historical patriarchal sees of the ancient undivided Church .

In 1914, the previous bishops having left the church for various reasons, Bishop Mathew elected Bishop Rudolph Francis Edward Hamilton de Lorraine-Brabant, Prince de Landas Berges, to continue the succession and initially to establish the ministry of the Old Roman Catholic Church in Scotland and then later in the United States. Shortly thereafter, Father Carmel Henry Carfora, an Italian Franciscan friar who had left the Roman Catholic Church, was elected to succeed Bishop de Landes Berghes as Archbishop of the Old Roman Catholic Diocese of America. Because of the move to America of Bishop de Landas Berghes, to safeguard the succession once more, Canon Bernard Mary Williams was consecrated by Archbishop Mathew on 14 April 1916. On 25 March 1917 Mathew appointed Bishop Williams as his successor and on 20 December 1919 he died at South Mymms, Hertfordshire where he had retired.

Being now the only active Old Catholic bishop in Great Britain, Mgr Williams considered the question of safeguarding the succession. Being unwilling to see any repetition of the scandals of the past (the consecrations of undisclosed Theosophists resulting in the Liberal Catholic Church), he arrived at a mutual understanding with Mgr Carfora, who had succeeded Archbishop de Landas as Archbishop of the North American Old Roman Catholic Church, that, should either die without leaving a successor, the survivor would consecrate a duly elected person to fill the vacancy. Following Archbishop Carfora's death in 1958, the North American Old Roman Catholic Church evolved into five autonomous but cooperating ecclesiastic bodies, one of which is the Old Roman Catholic Church Latin Rite.

In 1925 Mgr Williams issued a new constitution which repudiated the whole historical and doctrinal position of Old Roman Catholicism, the very position upon which Archbishop Mathew had stood firm. By this constitution, he repudiated the objections of the Church of Utrecht to the Roman Church and renewed his acceptance of the canons and decrees of the council of Trent, all with the aim of creating a pro-Roman rite and eventual reconciliation with the Church of Rome. Archbishop Bernard Mary Williams died on 9 June 1952 leaving no successor.

Old Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain

Three priests had remained loyal to Mgr Williams and continued to maintain the Old Roman Catholic Church. They chose a former priest of Archbishop Mathew, Gerard George Shelley, who had gone to America, where he was consecrated by Bishop Marchenna - who himself had been consecrated by Archbishop Carfora - to succeed Mgr Williams. Bishop Shelley became resident in Rome and so was able to succeed Mgr Williams as third Archbishop of the Old Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain. On Whit Sunday, 1960, Mgr Shelley consecrated Mgr Geoffrey Peter Paget King, as coadjutor bishop for England of the Old Roman Catholic Church, and he succeeded as fourth archbishop upon the death of Mgr Shelley. Archbishop Paget King retired in 1982 and was succeeded by Archbishop James Charles Hedley Thatcher as fifth Archbishop. Upon his retirement he was succeeded by Archbishop Denis St Pierre as sixth archbishop and, following his death in 1993, the Most Reverend Douglas Titus Lewins succeeded as seventh Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Old Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain. However, in 1998, Archbishop Lewins was reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church, under the authority of the then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and served for a time as an assistant in a parish of the Diocese of Brentwood.

Old Roman Catholic Church in Europe, Latin Rite

In the late 1990s a new group of mainly disaffected Anglo-Catholic clergy and laity, disappointed with the then small growth of the Continuing Anglican movement in Great Britain and ignorant of pre-existing orthodox Old Roman Catholic presence in the United Kingdom, approached the Old Catholic Church of the United States (OCCUSA) under the primacy of Archbishop Robert Gubala, petitioning for the creation of a missionary province to re-establish an orthodox Old Catholic presence in the United Kingdom (the OCCUSA being derived from one of the five autonomous dioceses created after the death of Carfora). After the consecration of its first bishop in 2000, the English Catholic Church (ECC) became an autonomous church from the OCCUSA while still retaining communion with it. After a few difficult years of internal struggles, mainly caused by some confusion in ideaologies and personality clashes between the founding members, the ECC eventually gained some internal stability in 2006 and after discussion with other orthodox Old/Independent Catholic bishops on the Continent, changed its name to the Old Catholic Church in Europe (OCCE) with a view to unify disaffected Old Catholics of the Utrecht Union.

Gradually attracting a number of disaffected former Roman Catholics as well as Anglo-Catholics, and desiring to reflect its adherence to the faith and tradition of Archbishop Mathew, in 2009 the OCCE became the Old Roman Catholic Church in Europe and on 5 December 2011 was received into full communion with the Old Roman Catholic Church Latin Rite, one of the original five jurisdictions founded after Carfora's death. Thus, it may be said, that the missionary endeavour of Archbishop de Landes Berghes came full circle through Archbishop Carfora's descendents in Archbishop Shelley and later Archbishop Grosvold.

Present

On 14 August 2012, the Vigil of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God (Assumption), the two leading prelates of canonical Old Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom, Archbishops Douglas Lewins of the ORCC/GB and Jerome Lloyd OSJV of the ORCCE/LR, met informally for prayer and discussion. Representing two branches of Old Roman Catholicism of Matthew and Carfora descent respectively in the United Kingdom, the archbishops discussed ways in which a more structured and united presentation of the Old Roman Catholic faith and tradition could be effected. The archbishops agreed at this meeting the mutual recognition of their common inheritance and declared their intention to create closer ties between their respective jurisdictions, hopefully setting a model of partnership and co-operation for Old Roman Catholic unity globally.

On 29 November 2012, the Vigil of the Feast of St Andrew, Archbishops Lewins and Lloyd signed the "Walsingham Declaration" intercommunion agreement and the foundation document of the Old Roman Catholic Council of Europe.