Are Anglican Orders Valid?

1. The Short Answer, and What It Rests On

Anglican orders are not recognised as valid by the Catholic Church. Pope Leo XIII settled the Roman position in the bull Apostolicae Curae, dated 13 September 1896 and made public five days later, which declared that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been and are absolutely null and utterly void. The judgment has never been reversed, and its practical effect is unchanged: a former Anglican priest received into the Catholic Church is ordained deacon and priest again before he can celebrate Mass.

Leo gave two reasons, and they are worth naming precisely because most summaries collapse them into one. The first is a defect of form: the words used at the laying on of hands in the Edwardine Ordinal of 1550 and 1552 did not signify definitely which order was being conferred or what grace and power it carried. The second is a defect of intention: Leo held that the men who compiled the Ordinal had removed every trace of sacrifice and priesthood from the older rite on purpose, and that the rite therefore carried a settled will to institute something different from what the Catholic Church ordains.

The Church of England answered. In 1897 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Frederick Temple and William Maclagan, issued the encyclical Saepius Officio to the bishops of the whole Church, arguing that the Anglican rite keeps the essential matter and form of ordination, that Leo's criteria would condemn ancient Latin and Eastern rites as well, and that Anglicanism has never denied eucharistic sacrifice in the sense the Fathers taught it. Anglicans have made those arguments ever since, and any honest Catholic treatment has to state them before answering them.

This page is about that single question. For what Anglicans believe, how the Communion is governed and where its provinces stand, see our guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion. For the Catholic doctrine of the sacrament itself, see our guide to the Catholic priesthood.

2. What Rome Requires for a Valid Ordination

Catholic sacramental theology tests a rite by four things: the matter, the form, the minister and the intention. An ordination is valid when a validly consecrated bishop lays hands on a baptised man and prays the consecratory prayer of the rite, intending to do what the Church does. Miss any of the four and nothing is conferred, however devout the participants. The framework is old, it was sharpened at the Council of Trent, and Apostolicae Curae applies it directly.

Matter and Form

Matter is the physical action, form is the accompanying words that determine what the action means. For Holy Orders the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the essential rite consists in the bishop's imposition of hands on the head of the ordinand together with the specific consecratory prayer asking God for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and his gifts proper to the ministry (CCC 1573). Pope Pius XII settled a long argument about this in the apostolic constitution Sacramentum Ordinis of 30 November 1947, ruling that the matter of ordination is the imposition of hands alone and the form is the words of the consecratory preface that determine the power conferred. The handing over of the chalice and paten, which medieval Latin rites included and which some theologians had treated as essential, was declared not to be required.

The Minister

Only a validly consecrated bishop can ordain. Succession therefore matters as a chain: a break at any point ends the line, and no later good will repairs it. This is why the historical question of who consecrated whom recurs throughout the Anglican orders dispute, and why the Old Catholic argument in section 8 has the shape it does.

Intention

The Council of Trent taught in its seventh session that a minister must have at least the intention of doing what the Church does. The bar is deliberately low. A minister's private theological errors do not void a sacrament, and his personal unworthiness does not either, because sacraments act by the power of Christ rather than the holiness of the man (the principle Catholic theology calls ex opere operato, CCC 1128). What Apostolicae Curae does with this principle is the part of the bull Anglicans contest hardest, because Leo read the intention off the rite itself rather than off any individual ordaining bishop.

What Catholic Ordination Is For

The Catholic Church holds that the ministerial priesthood differs in essence from the common priesthood of the baptised, and that the ordained priest acts in the person of Christ the head, above all in offering the eucharistic sacrifice and in absolving sins. That understanding of what a priest is for sits underneath the whole dispute, because a rite is judged by whether it confers the thing the Church means to confer. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood sets out the doctrine in full, and our guide to the Eucharist covers the sacrifice of the Mass that Leo treated as the decisive reference point.

3. The Edwardine Ordinal and What Changed in 1550

The Edwardine Ordinal is the English ordination rite published in March 1550 under Edward VI and revised in 1552, replacing the medieval Sarum pontifical that had been used in England before the break with Rome. Thomas Cranmer was its principal architect. Everything in the Roman argument turns on what that book kept and what it took out, so the detail matters more here than in most theological disputes.

What the Ordinal Kept

The Ordinal kept the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and it said so in its Preface, which states that these orders have existed in Christ's Church from the apostles' time and are to be continued. It kept the imposition of hands by a bishop. It kept prayer for the Holy Spirit and for the grace of the office. It kept the giving of a Bible to the newly ordained. In the rite for a bishop it kept the words of 2 Timothy 1:6 about stirring up the grace of God given through the laying on of hands.

What the Ordinal Removed

The Ordinal removed the anointing of the hands, the handing over of the chalice with wine and the paten with bread, and the formula that had accompanied that action, which spoke of the power to offer sacrifice for the living and the dead. It removed the vesting with the chasuble as a sacrificial garment. The 1552 revision went further and removed the delivery of chalice and paten entirely along with the alb and other eucharistic vestments. In the 1550 form for a priest, the words at the imposition of hands were "Receive the Holy Ghost: whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the word of God and of his holy sacraments."

The 1662 Additions

The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 amended the words at the imposition of hands to read "Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands", with a parallel change naming the office of a Bishop in the episcopal rite. The change was made in part to answer Roman Catholic and Presbyterian objections that the earlier words did not specify the order conferred. Leo XIII acknowledged the amendment and held that it came too late to help, because on his account the English hierarchy had by 1662 already lost the power to ordain, so no correction of the words could restore what was no longer there to be handed on.

The Eucharistic Doctrine Behind the Revision

The Edwardine reformers were explicit that they were removing sacrificial language because they judged the late medieval doctrine of the Mass to be wrong. Article XXXI of the Thirty-nine Articles, in the form the Elizabethan Church settled, calls the sacrifices of Masses, in which it was commonly said that the priest offered Christ for the living and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt, blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. Anglicans read that article as condemning a specific medieval account of a repeated propitiatory immolation and a commercial traffic in Masses. Catholics read the surrounding revision, taken together, as a rejection of the sacrificing priesthood itself. That disagreement about what the sixteenth century meant is the live question underneath the twentieth-century arguments. Our guide to the Reformation sets the English changes in their wider European context, and our guide to the Church of England covers the settlement that followed.

4. What Apostolicae Curae Actually Says

Apostolicae Curae is a short document with a long argument. Leo XIII issued it as a bull to the whole Church, opened by recalling his own desire for the reunion of England with Rome, and then moved to the specific question that a group of Anglican and Catholic scholars had pressed him to reconsider. He set out the previous practice of the Holy See, gave his two grounds, and closed with a solemn declaration.

The Declaration Itself

The operative sentence is the one everyone quotes: ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been and are absolutely null and utterly void. Leo added that he pronounced this of his own motion and certain knowledge, that the judgment was to stand ratified and confirmed, and that it was to be held perpetually valid and never to be brought into question. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of a definitive act, and section 11 of this guide takes up what weight the Catholic Church now assigns to it.

Ground One: Defect of Form

Leo argued that the form of a sacrament must signify definitely the effect it produces. In ordination that effect is the order of priesthood with its grace and power, and the power at the centre of the Catholic priesthood is the power to consecrate and offer the true body and blood of the Lord in the sacrifice of the Mass. The words "Receive the Holy Ghost", standing alone in 1550 and 1552, signify nothing determinate, since the Holy Spirit is given in confirmation and in other rites as well. The clause about forgiving and retaining sins, Leo said, names a power the reformers understood in a way short of sacramental absolution, and in any case does not name the priesthood as such. The prayers surrounding the imposition of hands, on his reading, had been so thoroughly cleared of sacrificial reference that they could not supply the determination the words lacked.

Ground Two: Defect of Intention

Leo then argued that a rite must be judged together with its native character and spirit, meaning the purpose visible in the way it was made. If a rite has been deliberately altered to exclude what the Catholic Church means to confer, and if that exclusion is systematic, then the rite itself expresses a contrary intention, and the private intention of an individual ordaining bishop cannot supply what the Church's public act withholds. Leo pointed to the pattern of the omissions, to the eucharistic doctrine of the men who made them, and to the near-contemporary destruction of altars in English churches, as converging evidence of what the Ordinal was for.

The Precedents Leo Cited

Leo argued that Rome had acted on this judgment long before he stated it. During the reign of Mary I, Cardinal Reginald Pole reconciled English clergy under faculties from Julius III, and those ordained by the Edwardine rite were treated as requiring ordination rather than mere reconciliation. In 1704 Clement XI decided the case of John Clement Gordon, a Scottish convert who had been consecrated a bishop in the Anglican succession, by ordering that he be ordained absolutely with no conditional form. Leo treated that decision as a considered precedent settling the practice of the Roman Church for the future.

Quotations and paraphrases in this section follow the text of Apostolicae Curae (Leo XIII, 13 September 1896) in the standard English translation published by the Holy See. The Gordon case of 1704 and the Marian reconciliations are cited within the bull itself, and the historical adequacy of both citations was contested by Anglican scholars from 1897 onward and by some Catholic historians later.

5. How Leo Reached the Judgment

The bull did not come out of nowhere. Through the early 1890s a small group of Anglicans and French Catholics, led on the Anglican side by Lord Halifax and on the Catholic side by the Vincentian priest Fernand Portal, worked to persuade Rome that Anglican orders deserved a fresh examination and that reunion might begin there. Leo XIII was sympathetic to the wider aim. He issued the apostolic letter Ad Anglos in 1895, addressed to the English people and calling for prayer for unity, and he appointed a commission to study the orders question.

The Commission of 1896

The commission Leo appointed was genuinely divided, and the fact is not a Catholic embarrassment to be hidden. Its members included the church historian Louis Duchesne and the canonist Pietro Gasparri, who were open to a favourable verdict, alongside Raphael Merry del Val, Aidan Gasquet and James Moyes, who were not. The commission reported without unanimity. Leo then took the decision himself, with the Holy Office, and the bull followed. Documents from the process were published by historians in the twentieth century, and they show a real argument rather than a foregone conclusion.

The English Catholic Context

English Catholic opinion in 1896 ran strongly against recognition, and the reasons were pastoral as well as theological. The Catholic hierarchy in England had been restored only in 1850, converts from the Oxford Movement had entered the Church at real cost, and a verdict that Anglican orders were valid would have unsettled a community that had defined itself by the claim that the Church of England lacked the sacraments. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, pressed that view in Rome. Naming this does not settle whether the theology is right, and leaving it out would make the history less than honest.

What Happened Next

The Malines Conversations of 1921 to 1926, between Anglicans led again by Lord Halifax and Catholics led by Cardinal Mercier of Malines, revisited the wider question of reunion under the phrase Halifax made famous, an Anglican church united to Rome and not absorbed by it. The conversations were unofficial, they produced no agreement on orders, and they ended after Mercier's death in 1926. The next serious institutional engagement waited until the Second Vatican Council.

6. Saepius Officio: The Anglican Reply

Saepius Officio is the encyclical letter that Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, and William Maclagan, Archbishop of York, addressed to the bishops of the whole Catholic Church in 1897 in answer to Leo XIII. Anglicans regard it as the definitive statement of their case, and it is a more careful document than most Catholic summaries allow. Its arguments are set out here in the Archbishops' own terms, before any Catholic response.

On Form

The Archbishops argued that the essential matter and form of ordination in the tradition of the whole Church are the laying on of hands accompanied by prayer for the grace of the office. Measured against that standard the Anglican rite is sufficient. They pressed the point by comparison: the ancient Roman ordination prayers preserved in the early sacramentaries contain no explicit statement of a power to offer sacrifice for the living and the dead, and several Eastern rites that Rome accepts as valid are similarly reticent. If Leo's criterion is applied consistently, they said, it condemns rites the Roman Church has never doubted. They added that "Receive the Holy Ghost" is determined by the whole rite in which it stands, including the Preface, the examination of the candidate and the prayers, since a sacramental form is read in context rather than as an isolated incantation.

On Intention

On intention the Archbishops made two moves. The first was to point at the Preface to the Ordinal, which states that the offices of bishop, priest and deacon have existed in Christ's Church from the apostles' time and that they are to be continued and reverently used. A church that says that in the front of its own ordination book, they argued, has stated its intention to do what the Church does as plainly as language allows. The second was to insist that the required intention is the general intention to do what Christ instituted and what the Church does, and that this intention is not destroyed by holding a particular theology of the Eucharist, however wrong Rome judges that theology to be. On the Anglican reading, Leo's method makes a private doctrinal judgment about the reformers into a test of sacramental validity, which no Catholic theologian would apply elsewhere.

On Sacrifice

The Archbishops denied that Anglicanism rejects eucharistic sacrifice. They stated that the Church of England offers the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, pleads the sacrifice of the cross before the Father, offers the memorial of the Lord's death and offers the people themselves. What Article XXXI condemns, they said, is the late medieval notion of Masses offered as separate propitiatory acts and the abuses that grew around it. Their claim, which Anglicans still make, is that Apostolicae Curae answers a version of Anglican eucharistic doctrine that Anglicans do not hold.

The Argument From Rome's Own Rites

The sharpest passage in the letter turns Leo's method back on him. If the sacrificial power must be explicit in the form, and if defects in a rite's history reveal a contrary intention, then a number of Roman practices come into question, including the medieval Latin uncertainty about which act was essential that Pius XII had to resolve half a century later. The Archbishops wrote that in overthrowing Anglican orders the pope overthrows his own. Catholic theologians answer that Leo's argument was cumulative, resting on form and intention together rather than on either alone, and that the Roman rites he compared were never stripped of sacrificial reference by their compilers on principle.

7. Where the Two Arguments Actually Meet

The dispute is narrower than it looks, and it comes down to one methodological question: may the intention of a rite be read off the circumstances of its composition, or only off the words the rite actually uses? Everything else follows from the answer. Both sides agree that a bishop laid hands on the ordinand. Both agree that prayer for the Holy Spirit was made. Both agree that Trent's standard is the intention of doing what the Church does.

The Catholic Case Restated

The Catholic position is that a public rite is a public act, and that a church which systematically deletes from its ordination service every reference to the power the Catholic Church means to give has thereby declared what it means to give instead. On this account a sacramental form carries the meaning the community using it puts into it, and Leo read the Ordinal as a document with a purpose, finding that purpose incompatible with conferring the Catholic priesthood. His argument concerned the public rite and the record of its making, leaving the private soul of any individual Anglican bishop out of the question.

The Anglican Case Restated

The Anglican position is that this method proves far too much and is applied nowhere else. The Church has always taught that a heretical or unbelieving minister confers a valid sacrament if he uses the Church's rite and means to do what Christians do, and that the validity of a baptism does not depend on the baptiser's theology of regeneration. A rite that names the three orders, prays for the Holy Spirit and lays on hands has done what the ancient Church did. On this account Leo drew a conclusion about a church's sacramental intention from a judgment about its doctrine, and the two are separate questions.

Three Points Where Neither Side Has Moved

The first is whether the form must name the power conferred. The second is whether the 1662 revision could repair a defect if there were one, which turns on Leo's further claim that the succession had already lapsed. The third is whether the omissions of 1550 and 1552 amount to a positive exclusion or to a return to a simpler and earlier pattern. Anglican and Catholic scholars have written on all three for well over a century without either communion changing its formal position.

Catholic Scholars Who Dissented

Some Catholic writers have argued that the bull's historical reasoning is weaker than its authority. John Jay Hughes, a former Anglican priest ordained conditionally as a Catholic priest in 1968, published Absolutely Null and Utterly Void in 1968 and Stewards of the Lord in 1970, contending that Leo's account of the Ordinal and of the earlier precedents does not survive close historical examination. Roman theologians answered him, the debate ran through the centenary in 1996, and the Holy See made no move to reopen the case. Reporting that a Catholic scholar argued the point is a statement about the history of the discussion rather than about the standing of the judgment.

8. The Old Catholic Complication

The Old Catholic complication, often called the Dutch Touch, is the argument that valid episcopal orders entered the Anglican succession from outside it during the twentieth century, so that whatever was true in 1896 may not be true of every Anglican bishop today. The argument is real, Catholic theologians have taken it seriously in individual cases, and Rome has never accepted it as answering the general question.

Where the Old Catholic Line Comes From

The See of Utrecht separated from Rome in the early eighteenth century over the Jansenist controversy and the appointment of its archbishops. In 1724 Cornelius Steenoven was consecrated Archbishop of Utrecht by Dominique Marie Varlet, a validly consecrated Roman Catholic missionary bishop who was under suspension at the time. Rome judged the act illicit and valid, since a bishop who is suspended still consecrates validly, and the Utrecht line has continued unbroken since. After the First Vatican Council, German, Swiss and Austrian Catholics who rejected papal infallibility organised themselves and took their episcopate from Utrecht, forming the Union of Utrecht in 1889. Our guide to the Old Catholic Church covers that history in full.

The Bonn Agreement and What Followed

In 1931 the Church of England and the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht concluded the Bonn Agreement, establishing full communion between them on the basis that each recognised the catholicity and independence of the other. From the 1930s onward Old Catholic bishops took part as co-consecrators at Anglican episcopal consecrations, and Anglican bishops did the same in Old Catholic ones. Because Anglican consecrations normally involve three or more consecrating bishops and because bishops consecrated in one generation consecrate in the next, the practice spread through the Anglican episcopate over subsequent decades. The Porvoo Common Statement, agreed in 1992 and signed by most of the participating churches in 1996, established communion between the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland and most of the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches, and added further interchange of ministries. Our guides to Lutheranism and to the Episcopal Church cover those bodies in their own right.

Why Rome Has Not Accepted the Argument

The Roman answer runs on three tracks. First, Apostolicae Curae located the defect in the rite and in the intention behind it, so introducing a valid consecrator into a defective rite does not obviously repair it, and Catholic theologians hold that a co-consecrator using the Anglican Ordinal is using that Ordinal. Second, tracing is a practical problem: establishing that a given bishop stands in a line with a validly consecrated participant at every relevant point, with adequate matter and form each time, is a research question rather than a presumption. Third, Rome has not made any general statement revisiting 1896, and silence in this matter functions as the maintenance of the existing judgment.

The Two Conditional Ordinations

Two individual cases are documented and worth knowing, because they are usually reported inaccurately. John Jay Hughes, a former Anglican priest, was ordained conditionally as a Catholic priest at Munster in 1968 by Bishop Joseph Hoffner, with the approval of the Holy See, on the basis of a prudent doubt arising from his particular line of succession. Graham Leonard, formerly Bishop of London, was received into the Catholic Church and ordained conditionally to the priesthood in April 1994 by Cardinal Basil Hume, on the ground that the participation of Old Catholic bishops in his own consecration created a prudent doubt in his individual case. Both men were ordained as priests and neither was ordained a Catholic bishop. Neither case altered the general rule, and convert clergy since have been ordained absolutely.

9. What the Ordination of Women Changed

The ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate in most Anglican provinces changed the shape of the question, closing the practical space that the Old Catholic argument had opened. The change is recent enough that many people arguing about Anglican orders are still arguing about the situation of the 1970s.

The Anglican Decisions

Hong Kong ordained Florence Li Tim-Oi as a priest in 1944 under wartime conditions and the decision was not sustained afterwards, then ordained women again from 1971. The Episcopal Church in the United States began ordaining women as priests in the mid-1970s and regularised the position in 1976, and consecrated Barbara Harris as a suffragan bishop of Massachusetts in 1989. The Church of England ordained its first women priests in 1994 and its first woman bishop in 2015 following the General Synod decision of 2014. Anglican provinces differ among themselves: some ordain women to all three orders, some to the diaconate only, and some to none. Anglicans who support the change ground it in baptismal equality and in the argument that the New Testament restrictions were culturally conditioned. Anglicans who oppose it ground their case in the constant practice of the undivided Church, and provisions were made in England for parishes and clergy who cannot accept it.

The Catholic Position

The Catholic Church holds that it has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood. Paul VI wrote to Archbishop Donald Coggan in 1975 and 1976 warning that the ordination of women to the priesthood in Anglican provinces would raise a grave new obstacle to reconciliation between the two communions. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the declaration Inter Insigniores in 1976, and John Paul II stated the position definitively in the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis of 22 May 1994, declaring that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the faithful. The teaching rests on the constant tradition of East and West, on the choice of the Twelve, and on the priest acting in the person of Christ the bridegroom of the Church.

The Effect on the Succession Argument

The consequence for the orders question is structural. If Rome holds that a woman cannot be ordained a bishop, then a consecration performed by a woman bishop confers nothing in Roman eyes, and any line running through such a consecration ends there. As women bishops take part in consecrations across an increasing number of provinces, the proportion of Anglican bishops whose lines a Roman investigator would regard as free of that difficulty falls with each generation. Whatever weight the Old Catholic argument once carried, the practical scope for pursuing it in individual cases narrows steadily.

Dates in this section are the dates of the decisions and ordinations named. Provinces of the Anglican Communion legislate separately on this and continue to differ, so no single date describes the Communion as a whole. Statements of the Anglican arguments for and against are drawn from the reports and synod debates of the provinces concerned.

10. ARCIC and the Roman Response of 1991

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, known as ARCIC, is the official theological dialogue between the two communions, and it produced a body of agreed statements that came closer to reopening the orders question than anything else in the twentieth century. It did not reopen it. Understanding why requires following what ARCIC claimed, what Rome answered, and what the two sides said afterwards.

How the Dialogue Began

Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey signed a Common Declaration in Rome on 24 March 1966, announcing a serious dialogue founded on the gospels and the ancient common traditions. Paul VI gave Ramsey his own episcopal ring, a gesture Anglicans read warmly and which conferred nothing juridically. A preparatory commission led to the establishment of ARCIC in 1970 under co-chairmen from each communion.

The Agreed Statements

ARCIC I issued the Windsor Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine in 1971, the Canterbury Statement on Ministry and Ordination in 1973, and two statements on Authority in the Church in 1976 and 1981, with Elucidations answering criticisms, gathered into the Final Report of 1982. The Canterbury Statement claimed substantial agreement on the doctrine of ministry and ordination, describing ordination as a sacramental act in which the ordained is given the grace and the authority to serve, and setting out a eucharistic ministry the two communions could recognise in common. The 1979 Elucidation observed that agreement of this kind placed the question of Anglican orders in a new context, and it deliberately made no judgment on validity, since the commission's terms of reference did not include it.

What Rome Answered in 1991

The official Response of the Holy See to the ARCIC I Final Report was issued in December 1991, prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith together with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. It welcomed the work and judged that substantial agreement had not yet been reached on the Eucharist and on ministry, and it named the points needing clarification: whether the eucharistic sacrifice is the making present of the one sacrifice of Christ in the sense Trent taught, whether the real presence endures so that adoration and reservation follow, whether ordination confers a sacramental character and constitutes a priesthood differing in essence from the common priesthood, and the questions of papal primacy, jurisdiction, infallibility and the Marian dogmas. The Response also observed that the level of agreement reached did not permit a re-examination of the question of Anglican orders.

Clarifications and What Followed

ARCIC published Clarifications on the Eucharist and ministry in 1993, and in 1994 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity judged that these had greatly strengthened the agreement and that no further study of those two subjects appeared to be required at that stage. The judgment concerned the agreed doctrine and it did not extend to the validity of orders. ARCIC II went on to produce statements on salvation, on the Church as communion, on moral questions, on authority in The Gift of Authority in 1999, and on Mary in Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ in 2005. ARCIC III has met since 2011 and published Walking Together on the Way in 2018. The dialogue continues, and the orders question sits inside the larger questions of Eucharist, priesthood and authority rather than beside them.

Dates above are the dates of the documents themselves. Apostolicae Curae is dated 13 September 1896 and was made public on 18 September, which is why both dates appear in the literature.

11. How Binding Is the 1896 Judgment?

Catholics owe the judgment of Apostolicae Curae firm assent, and its precise doctrinal weight is a technical question with a documented answer. In 1998 John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem, adding to canon law a provision on truths definitively proposed by the Church, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published an accompanying doctrinal commentary signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as prefect and Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone as secretary.

The Three Categories

The commentary distinguishes three kinds of teaching. The first is what is divinely revealed and believed with the assent of faith, such as the articles of the Creed. The second is truths connected to revelation by historical or logical necessity, definitively proposed and to be firmly accepted and held. The third is teaching of the ordinary magisterium requiring religious submission of will and intellect, which can develop.

Where Anglican Orders Sit

The commentary places the declaration of Leo XIII on the invalidity of Anglican ordinations in the second category, as an example of a truth connected to revelation by a historical relationship and definitively proposed. In plain terms, a Catholic is required to hold it firmly, and it is not presented as an article of divine faith. Some Anglican and a few Catholic theologians questioned that classification when the commentary appeared, arguing that a judgment resting on a contested historical reading of sixteenth-century documents is an unusual candidate for definitive status. The classification stands as the position of the Holy See.

What Would Have to Change

A Catholic change of position on this question would require either a demonstration that the historical premises of the bull were mistaken in a way that voids its conclusion, or a doctrinal agreement on Eucharist, priesthood and authority substantial enough that the two communions could recognise one another's ministries as a whole. Neither has happened. The 1991 Response said in effect that the second route was not yet available, and Rome has shown no interest in the first. Anyone who tells you the Church is about to reverse itself is speculating.

What Catholics Should Not Conclude From It

An invalid ordination is not a judgment on the man ordained or on the fruitfulness of his ministry. The Second Vatican Council taught that many elements of sanctification and truth exist outside the visible structures of the Catholic Church and that the Spirit uses these communities as means of salvation, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that all who are justified by faith in baptism are incorporated into Christ and rightly called Christian (CCC 818, CCC 838). Anglican preaching, pastoral care, Scripture and prayer have brought vast numbers of people to Christ. Holding that a rite did not confer the sacrament of orders is compatible with all of that, and Catholics who use the judgment as a weapon in argument have misunderstood what kind of judgment it is.

12. What Other Churches Have Said

Rome is not the only body to have ruled on Anglican orders, and the other verdicts are usually reported in a garbled form. Several Eastern Orthodox Churches issued favourable statements in the interwar period. The Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Syriac and Malankara) form a separate communion that is not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox, and those statements do not speak for them. Protestant bodies that do not hold to apostolic succession approach the question on different premises altogether.

The Eastern Orthodox Statements

The Ecumenical Patriarchate under Meletios IV declared in 1922 that Anglican orders possess the same validity as those of the Roman, Old Catholic and Armenian Churches. The Patriarchates of Jerusalem and of Cyprus made similar declarations in 1923, Alexandria in 1930, and the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1936. These statements were framed as theological opinions offered in the expectation of doctrinal union, generally with the qualification that recognition in practice would follow agreement in faith rather than precede it. The Moscow Patriarchate declined to follow at the Moscow Conference of 1948. The Anglican decisions on the ordination of women from the 1970s onward were treated in most Orthodox jurisdictions as having ended the discussion, and in current Orthodox practice Anglican clergy are not received in their existing orders. The Eastern Orthodox Church is a separate communion from the Oriental Orthodox family, and the two should not be run together.

The interwar Orthodox statements are recorded in the acts of the churches named and are widely reprinted in ecumenical documentary collections. Their present force is disputed among Orthodox theologians, several of whom hold that they were conditional and have lapsed. Anyone relying on them for a practical decision should ask the jurisdiction concerned rather than the historical record.

Old Catholic and Porvoo Recognition

The Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht recognise Anglican orders, and have done so since the Bonn Agreement of 1931. The Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches within the Porvoo Communion likewise recognise Anglican ministries and have interchanged them since 1996. Rome recognises Old Catholic orders as valid, which is what gives the Dutch Touch argument its force, and Rome does not recognise the ministries of the Lutheran churches. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the ecclesial communities derived from the Reformation have not preserved the proper reality of the eucharistic mystery in its fullness, especially because of the absence of the sacrament of Holy Orders (CCC 1400).

Independent and Continuing Bodies

A wide range of independent bishops and small jurisdictions claim orders through Old Catholic and Anglican lines, and their claims vary enormously in documentation and in the adequacy of the rites used. Catholic practice is to examine such claims individually and sceptically. Our guide to independent Catholic churches covers that territory. Continuing Anglican bodies that separated from the Anglican Communion over prayer book revision and the ordination of women stand in the same relation to Apostolicae Curae as the Communion does, since they use the same Ordinal tradition.

13. What This Means for Convert Clergy Now

An Anglican clergyman received into the Catholic Church is received as a layman, and if he is to serve as a Catholic priest he is ordained deacon and then priest in the Catholic rite. Nothing about the process implies that his previous ministry was worthless or insincere. The Catholic Church treats the question as one of sacramental fact, and it has built two structures to make the path realistic for men with wives, families and years of pastoral experience behind them.

The Steps

Anglican baptism is recognised as valid and is never repeated, provided it was administered with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Anglican confirmation is not recognised, because it is administered by a bishop whose orders Rome does not recognise, so the convert is confirmed. He makes a profession of faith and is received into full communion, then receives the Eucharist. Any subsequent path to ordination is a separate matter requiring formation, examination, the consent of a bishop or ordinary, and in the case of a married man a dispensation. Our guides to baptism and confirmation cover the sacraments involved.

The Pastoral Provision

The Pastoral Provision is the arrangement approved by John Paul II in 1980 for the United States, allowing married former Episcopal clergy to be ordained Catholic priests under a dispensation from the law of celibacy, and permitting the erection of parishes using an adapted Anglican liturgical use. It is administered through the United States bishops' conference with an appointed ecclesiastical delegate, and it operates case by case. Similar dispensations have been granted in England and elsewhere, most notably to clergy who left the Church of England after 1992.

The Personal Ordinariates

Benedict XVI issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus on 4 November 2009, creating personal ordinariates for groups of Anglicans entering full communion while keeping elements of their liturgical and spiritual inheritance. Three exist: Our Lady of Walsingham for England and Wales, erected in 2011; the Chair of Saint Peter for the United States and Canada, erected in 2012; and Our Lady of the Southern Cross for Australia, erected in 2012. They worship according to Divine Worship: The Missal, approved in 2015, a fully Catholic rite carrying the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. Married former Anglican clergy may be ordained priests by dispensation. A married former Anglican bishop may be ordained a Catholic priest and may be appointed ordinary of an ordinariate, and he is not ordained a Catholic bishop, since the Latin and Eastern traditions alike reserve the episcopate to unmarried men.

Questions People Actually Ask

Does the Catholic Church say my ministry was fake? No. It says a particular rite did not confer a particular sacrament, and it says nothing about the good that was done through you. Do I have to repudiate my Anglican formation? No. The ordinariates exist precisely because Rome judged that Anglican patrimony is worth keeping inside the Catholic Church. Will I be ordained conditionally? Almost certainly not; absolute ordination is the rule and the two documented exceptions turned on specific lines of succession. Can I stay married? Yes, if you are already married, with a dispensation, and you will not be ordained a bishop. Is anyone obliged to become Catholic? Everyone validly baptised is truly a Christian and stands in a real though imperfect communion with the Catholic Church (CCC 838), and the question for each person is what he has come to believe the Church requires of him.

14. What Anglicans and Catholics Can Say Together

Catholics and Anglicans share more than the orders dispute suggests, and saying so honestly is part of stating the dispute accurately. Both confess the Nicene faith and the Trinity. Both baptise validly and recognise each other's baptisms. Both read the same Scriptures and pray large parts of the same daily office, since Cranmer built the Book of Common Prayer out of the Latin breviary. Both hold that ministry is given by Christ through the Church rather than generated by the congregation.

What the Popes Have Said About Anglicans

Paul VI, preaching at the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970, spoke of the day when the Roman Catholic Church would be able to embrace her ever beloved sister in the one authentic communion of the family of Christ. John Paul II prayed at Canterbury Cathedral with Archbishop Robert Runcie in 1982. Successive popes and archbishops have signed common declarations, and the Anglican Centre in Rome has operated since 1966. The affection is genuine and it has not resolved the questions.

Where the Difficulty Is Honest

The 1991 Response named the difficulties without softening them: eucharistic sacrifice, the enduring real presence, the sacramental character of priesthood, the primacy and infallibility of the Bishop of Rome, and the Marian dogmas. Anglican developments since have added the ordination of women and, in several provinces, decisions on marriage that Catholic teaching cannot accept. Progress on orders would require progress on those, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Our guides to ecumenism and to the papacy set out the Catholic position on the underlying questions.

What a Reader Should Do With This

State the Anglican case accurately before answering it, which means reading Saepius Officio itself. Hold the Catholic judgment as the Church proposes it, firmly and without triumph. Pray for unity, which Christ asked for in John 17:21 and which no argument on this page substitutes for. If you are an Anglican reading this because you are weighing a move, talk to a Catholic priest and to your own bishop, and take the time the decision deserves.

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