Anglicans, Catholics discuss holy orders; centenary of Leo's bull brings no rejoicing

National Catholic Reporter, May 12, 1995 by Patricia Lefevere

NEW YORK -- Few anniversaries have been anticipated with less jubilation. But the centenary next year of Pope Leo XIII's bull, Apostolicae Curae, invalidating the ordination of Anglican deacons, priests and bishops, finds few in the Church of England or the Roman Catholic church ready to make merry.

The long shadow cast by Leo's pen has dimmed 30 years of ecumenical progress by the two sister churches since the Second Vatican Council -- Especially the greater understanding concerning holy orders and ordination gained in the Anglican-Roman Catholic bilateral dialogues.

If the dialogue is to continue, then "a great church that gives major importance to doctrinal tradition should explain theologically the grounds of its actions ... in withholding recognition from the ministers of other churches," said Professor R. William Franklin. Late last month, Franklin chaired a Conference on Anglican Orders at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church here, where he teaches church history.

Originally Fordham University was to have hosted the meeting that drew some 18 international scholars and more than 80 participants. But just weeks before the conference, Fordham pulled out, apparently for financial reasons, according to a spokesman, who disputed a report in The Tablet of London that the switch was due to New York Cardinal John O'Connor's urgings. Instead the university and the Jesuit community donated $5,000 to the seminary, which also gained funding from the archbishop of Canterbury and others.

Even Rome and Canterbury thought the conference important enough to send emissaries: Fr. Tim Galligan of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and canon Stephen Platten, ecumenical secretary to the archbishop of Canterbury. But why would some of the best Anglican and Catholic minds want to discuss Anglican orders if they've been null and void 99 years or more?

New openings

The answers are many: The opening of the Vatican archives -- up to 1903 -- to scholars has cast new historical and theological light on the reasons for Leo's encyclical and suggested directions for future ecumenical conversation.

Leo's bull forms the backdrop of the current practice of re-ordaining Anglican clergy who cross over to Rome -- about 300 in Britain and 95 in the United States in the past few years. Of the U.S. number, 60 are married priests.

Nevertheless, most ordained Angelicans do not consider their original ordinations invalid, said canon Christopher Hill of St. Paul's Cathedral, London. "Who's doing the doubting?" Hill 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. It's an impasse to reconciliation, Hill said.

With Pope John Paul II increasingly fixed on the millennium -- and counting on the cooperation of all Christian leaders to join in a special proclamation of Christ's reign at that time -- some Protestant and Orthodox leaders think that now is the hour to prod Rome to lift some of the anathemas and historic burdens that have divided Christendom. Some think it might also be the time to push for removal of obstacles like Apostolicae Curae.

Furthermore, Rome is responsible, in the view of Catholic theologian Hans Kung, for having pigeonholed the documents of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, or ARCIC, and for thus effectively blocking ecumenical progress between Canterbury and Rome. Kung made the charge late last year at Lambeth Palace, world headquarters of Anglicanism. It was one that no British Anglican or Catholic, with whom NCR spoke at the conference, denied.

Whatever the reasons for taking Leo's "null and void" decree 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 Joanne McWilliam, an Episcopalian and professor at the seminary, called the "distraction of women's ordination to this conference." Because women priests did not exist in Leo's time, they should not be a concern of this gathering, they argued.

Still it was hard to deny the reality of so many women in the audience wearing priestly garb. The meeting devoted one of its segments to women's ordination, presented by Most Blessed Trinity Sr. Sara Butler of the University of St. Mary of the Lake, a member of ARCIC.

She noted that after 50 years of debate, the 1968 Lambeth Conference, an international conference held every 10 years in Lambeth Palace, declared as "inconclusive' the arguments for or against women's ordination. Rome had yet to begin a debate in 1968, she said.

But Pope John Paul II's recent letter ordering an end to discussion of women's ordination has become, in Anglican terms, a new obstacle to reconciliation," she said, just as Anglican ordination of women has become an impasse to fuller communion between Rome and Canterbury. Butler thought that progress in the dialogue between the churches now requires greater theological engagement on the meaning of tradition.