Ultrajectine - Tertiary Founders

Tertiary Founders

Arnold Harris Mathew, who had moved between various Christian denominations after having been suspended as a Roman Catholic priest, was instigated by the Modernist Fr. George Tyrell to become an Old Catholic, and obtained consecration as head of the Old Catholic Church of England (Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain) by the Ultrajectines. Mathew went on to consecrate a wide range of men, some of whom emigrated to the United States where they founded a range of Old Catholic independent churches, varying between very conservative institutions to extremely liberal Gnostic churches.

Some North American Old Catholics draw their lineage from Joseph Rene Vilatte, who had been denied consecration by the Ultrajectines, but who was consecrated by Fr. Francis Xavier Alvares, a Goan Catholic priest who apostatized to Jacobitism or Monophysitism as Mar Julious of the Jacobite Church of Ceylon, Goa and India. Vilatte, on returning to North America, reverted to Old Catholicism and went on to found several Old Catholic groups.

Mathew and Vilatte are considered to be jointly the parents of the North American Old Catholic movement.

The Ultrajectines and Old Catholics together form one community in practical fact, although the ecumenical Union of Utrecht or Ultrajectine Communion includes the Lithuanian National Catholic Church, and the Mariavites, and maintains full intercommunion with the Anglican and the Aglipayan or Philippine Independent churches. However, the Polish National Catholic Church in 2004 was ejected from the Old Catholic Communion, due to the See of Utrecht becoming liberalized in a similar vein to movements within the Anglican churches. The PNCC rejects the ordination of women and gays; as well as more extreme ecumenism and modernist liturgics.