Old Catholic Church vs Roman Catholic

1. What the Old Catholic Church Is

The Old Catholic Church is a communion of small Western churches that broke with Rome in the 1870s over the First Vatican Council, and that describe themselves as holding the Catholic faith of the undivided Church of the first millennium without the papal claims defined in 1870. The historic member churches are in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech lands, joined in the Union of Utrecht of Old Catholic Churches, whose bishops meet as an International Bishops' Conference. They have bishops in apostolic succession, celebrate the Mass and the seven sacraments, and are governed by national synods in which priests and lay delegates vote alongside their bishop.

The name confuses almost everyone who meets it for the first time. Old here means the older faith, in the sense the founders intended: the faith held before the Vatican decrees of 1870, defined by the rule of Vincent of Lerins that the Catholic faith is what has been believed everywhere, always and by all. The German word they coined for themselves, Altkatholiken, carried that claim. They were not asking for an older liturgy, and within twenty years of the break they had gone further in reforming worship and discipline than Rome would go until the 1960s.

Who Uses the Name

Three quite different things travel under the label, and any honest account has to separate them. First, the churches of the Union of Utrecht, which is what this page means by Old Catholic unless it says otherwise. Second, the Polish National Catholic Church and the bodies now grouped with it in the Union of Scranton, which share the same succession and hold a more conservative doctrinal line. Third, a large and loose field of independent groups worldwide that claim Utrecht orders through individual wandering bishops and have no recognition from the Union of Utrecht at all. Section 13 deals with the third group, because a great many people searching this term have actually met one of them.

The dispute is about the papal office, so this page and our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office cover neighbouring ground. That guide sets out the positive Catholic case from Scripture, apostolic succession and the definition of infallibility. This page covers the church body that formed in reaction to it, its history, its own doctrinal statements, and how the Catholic Church answers them.

2. What Vatican I Actually Defined

The First Vatican Council, opened in Rome on 8 December 1869 by Pope Pius IX, defined two things about the Bishop of Rome in the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus on 18 July 1870. The first is jurisdiction: the pope holds ordinary, immediate and truly episcopal power over the whole Church and over every particular church, every pastor and every one of the faithful. The second is infallibility: when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when acting as pastor and teacher of all Christians he defines by his supreme apostolic authority a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, he is preserved from error by the divine assistance promised to Peter, and such definitions are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church.

Both halves matter for this page. Almost every popular account of the Old Catholic separation says it happened over infallibility alone, and the Old Catholic documents themselves object to jurisdiction at least as strongly. A universal ordinary jurisdiction reaching into every diocese was, in their reading, the deeper change to the constitution of the Church, because it made every bishop a delegate of Rome in practice even if not in theory.

The Council Was Not Unanimous in the Hall

A substantial minority of bishops at Vatican I opposed the definition, and most of them opposed it as inopportune rather than as false. They argued that defining infallibility would harden Protestant and Orthodox opposition, complicate relations with European states, and settle in a formula something better left to the ordinary life of the Church. Bishops in this group included Georg von Hefele of Rottenburg, the great historian of the councils, and several of the German, Austrian, Hungarian, French and American bishops. When the final vote came on 18 July 1870, around sixty of the minority left Rome rather than vote against the definition in public session, and the constitution passed with two votes against. Within months every bishop who had opposed it had submitted, including Hefele, who accepted the definition in 1871.

That last fact is the hinge of the whole story. The episcopal opposition folded and the academic opposition did not. What became the Old Catholic Church was led by university theologians and canon lawyers, with laypeople behind them, and it had to go outside Germany to find a bishop at all.

3. The Old Catholic Objection, Stated in Full

The Old Catholic objection to Vatican I is historical before it is theological: the definitions cannot be found in the faith and practice of the ancient Church, so a council could not define them as revealed. Everything else in the Old Catholic case follows from that claim. Ignaz von Doellinger, professor of church history at Munich and the intellectual centre of the movement, had spent a career on the sources, and he argued that the papal claims of the second millennium rested on documents and readings that historical criticism had discredited. Stated in his own terms, the case runs in four steps.

Step One: The Ancient Church Had No Such Office

Old Catholics hold that the Church of the first millennium recognised the Bishop of Rome as first bishop, as the see of Peter and Paul, as a court of appeal and a witness to apostolic faith, and never as a monarch with ordinary jurisdiction in every diocese. Doctrine in that period was settled by ecumenical councils, and councils were received by the whole body of the faithful. On this reading the pope was primus inter pares, first among equals, which is close to the position the Eastern Orthodox Church also holds, and the Old Catholics were conscious of the parallel from the beginning.

Step Two: The Case of Honorius

The historical example Old Catholic writers pressed hardest is Pope Honorius I, condemned by name at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681 for his letters supporting the monothelite position, with the condemnation confirmed by Pope Leo II. Their argument is that a council recognised as ecumenical judged a pope's doctrinal letters to be in error, and that a later pope ratified the judgement, which is difficult to reconcile with a papal teaching office that is preserved from error and irreformable of itself. Doellinger and his circle also cited the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century, whose decree Haec Sancta asserted the superiority of a general council over the pope in certain matters.

Step Three: The Documents

A second historical line concerned forged and misread sources. The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, a ninth-century collection of fabricated papal letters, had shaped medieval canon law and its account of papal authority, and their falsity was established by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Donation of Constantine had been exposed by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. Old Catholic writers argued that the papal system as defined in 1870 had grown up inside a canonical tradition partly built on such texts, and that a doctrine cannot be revealed if the evidence for it is a forgery.

Step Four: The Freedom of the Council

The fourth objection was procedural. Doellinger, writing pseudonymously as Janus in The Pope and the Council in 1869 and in the Quirinus letters from Rome during the sessions, argued that the council's rules of procedure, its agenda and the pressure of the Roman curia made a free debate impossible, and that a body which cannot dissent cannot bind. Catholic historians have contested the picture in detail, and the departure of the minority bishops before the final vote is a fact both sides work with.

4. The Break: Munich 1870 to Cologne 1873

The separation took three years, and it moved from a professors' protest to a church with its own bishop. In August 1870, weeks after the definition, a meeting of German Catholic theologians at Nuremberg issued a declaration rejecting the Vatican decrees as not binding, signed by a large part of the German-speaking Catholic theological faculties. Similar declarations followed from lay committees in Munich, Cologne, Breslau and elsewhere. The signatories at this stage were asking to remain Catholics in good standing while withholding assent from the new definitions.

The Excommunications

The bishops did not accept that position. Doellinger was asked by Gregor von Scherr, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, to submit, and refused, saying that as a Christian, a theologian, a historian and a citizen he could not accept the doctrine. He was excommunicated in April 1871. Other professors, priests and teachers who refused assent were excommunicated or removed from their posts through 1871 and 1872. The refusals were public and so were the sentences, and the practical effect was to turn a scholarly dissent into a body of people outside the sacraments.

The Congresses

A congress met in Munich in September 1871 and a second in Cologne in September 1872, and these gatherings founded the German Old Catholic Church. They resolved to maintain the ancient Catholic faith, to seek pastoral provision for those excluded, and to organise with synodal government in which laity had a real voice. The Cologne congress of 1872 also elected a commission to arrange for a bishop. Doellinger attended the congresses and gave them their intellectual weight, and he declined to become the head of a new church, held back from a formal organisational break, and later disapproved of several of the decisions the new church made, including the abolition of compulsory clerical celibacy. He died in 1890 still excommunicated and still declining to submit, and Old Catholic and Catholic writers have argued about the meaning of that ever since.

Reinkens, and the Kulturkampf

Joseph Hubert Reinkens, professor of church history at Breslau, was elected bishop in Cologne in June 1873 and consecrated in the Netherlands on 11 August 1873 by Hermann Heykamp, Bishop of Deventer in the Church of Utrecht. That consecration gave the new church a line of succession Rome could not dismiss as invalid, and section 5 explains where the Utrecht line came from.

The timing carried a political charge that Catholics have pressed ever since. Reinkens was recognised by the Prussian state as a Catholic bishop and given a state salary, in the middle of Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf, the campaign of legislation against the Catholic Church in Prussia that jailed and deposed bishops and expelled religious orders through the 1870s. Catholic writers argue that Old Catholicism survived its first decade because a hostile state found it useful. Old Catholics answer that state recognition was a legal necessity for any church body in that system, that they did not write the Kulturkampf laws, and that a movement of conscience should be judged on its arguments. Both points can be held at once, and neither settles whether the Vatican decrees are true.

5. The See of Utrecht and Where the Bishops Came From

The Old Catholic succession comes from the Church of Utrecht in the Netherlands, which had been in a bitter canonical dispute with Rome since the early eighteenth century, long before Vatican I. Understanding that dispute is necessary, because it explains why there was a bishop in Europe in 1873 willing to consecrate a German who had just been excommunicated, and why Rome has never questioned the validity of the resulting orders.

The Dutch Dispute

After the Reformation the Catholic Church in the northern Netherlands was reorganised as a mission territory under a vicar apostolic, with the old chapter of Utrecht continuing to claim its ancient rights. In the Jansenist controversies of the period, the Dutch clergy were widely suspected in Rome of sympathy with the theology of Cornelius Jansen on grace and predestination, and of harbouring clergy who refused to sign the formulary condemning it. Archbishop Petrus Codde, the vicar apostolic, was summoned to Rome, investigated, and suspended in 1702, and he was later deposed. The chapter refused to accept the deposition and continued to claim the right to elect.

In 1723 the chapter of Utrecht elected Cornelius Steenoven as archbishop. He was consecrated in 1724 by Dominique Marie Varlet, a French missionary bishop then living in Amsterdam, who had been himself suspended by Rome. The consecration was performed by a validly consecrated bishop using the proper rite with the proper intention, so the orders were valid. It was performed without a papal mandate against an express prohibition, so it was gravely illicit and the participants incurred the canonical penalties. Rome declared the election and consecration null in canon law and the See of Utrecht remained separated, keeping its own line of bishops at Utrecht, Haarlem and Deventer for the next century and a half.

On the theological question behind the Dutch dispute: the Church of Utrecht consistently denied being Jansenist, and formally accepted the condemnations of the five propositions attributed to Jansen while contesting that they were found in his book. Catholic and Old Catholic historians still read the dispute differently, and Rome's position rested on the refusal to accept the papal judgement rather than on a finding that the Dutch clergy held the condemned propositions.

Why 1873 Mattered to Both Sides

By the 1870s the Church of Utrecht was a tiny body of three dioceses that had spent a hundred and fifty years notifying each new papal election and receiving no recognition in return. The German movement gave it allies and a cause, and it gave the Germans bishops. Reinkens was consecrated in 1873, and Eduard Herzog, the first bishop of the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland, was consecrated by Reinkens in 1876. Austria followed. The three national churches and the three Dutch sees then had to decide what they held in common, which produced the Declaration of Utrecht in 1889.

6. The Declaration of Utrecht, 1889

The Declaration of Utrecht, signed on 24 September 1889 by the Dutch, German and Swiss Old Catholic bishops, is the founding doctrinal text of the Union of Utrecht and remains the reference point for what Old Catholics officially hold. It is short, a set of numbered articles rather than a systematic confession, and it is worth knowing what it says because a great deal of what is written about Old Catholics online is guesswork.

What the Declaration Affirms

The bishops declared that they adhere to the rule of faith expressed by Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, that what is to be held is what has been believed everywhere, always and by all, and that they hold the faith of the undivided Church of the first centuries as expressed in the ecumenical creeds and the decisions of the ecumenical councils of that period. They affirmed the Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship, in which Christ is truly present with his body and blood under the forms of bread and wine, and they described its sacrificial character as the perpetual memorial of the one sacrifice offered on the Cross rather than a repetition or renewal of it. They affirmed the value of the sacraments and the ordering of the Church through bishops in apostolic succession.

What the Declaration Rejects

The bishops rejected the Vatican decrees of 18 July 1870 on papal infallibility and on universal ordinary jurisdiction, as contrary to the faith of the ancient Church and destructive of its canonical constitution, while stating that they did not reject the historic primacy which several ecumenical councils and the Fathers of the Church attributed to the Bishop of Rome as first among the bishops. They also rejected the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, promulgated by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854, on the ground that it lacks warrant in Scripture and in the tradition of the first centuries, and they rejected the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 along with other Roman doctrinal decrees on papal authority issued in the modern period. The declaration ends by expressing the hope of eventual reunion among the separated churches and by offering to work with theologians of other communions to that end.

The Catholic response to the eucharistic clause is worth stating, because a Catholic reader may find the memorial language familiar or alarming depending on where they have met it. Catholic teaching holds that the sacrifice of the Cross and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice, because the victim and the one offering are the same, and that the Mass makes that one sacrifice present without repeating it. The Catechism sets it out at CCC 1367. Read against that, the Old Catholic clause is closer to Catholic doctrine than the wording of the Reformation debates it borrows from, and the difference to watch is what each side means by memorial. Our guide to the Eucharist and the real presence covers the Catholic doctrine at length.

7. What Old Catholics Believe and How They Worship

Old Catholic belief is the creedal Christianity of the first millennium held with a strong emphasis on synodal government, and Old Catholic worship is a Western Mass in the vernacular. A Catholic walking into an Old Catholic parish church in Bonn, Zurich or Utrecht on a Sunday would recognise almost everything: an altar, vestments, an entrance rite, readings, a creed, a eucharistic prayer, a communion rite. The differences are in governance, discipline and a short list of doctrines.

Governance by Synod

Every Old Catholic national church is governed by a synod in which the bishop, the clergy and elected lay delegates deliberate and vote together, and the bishop is elected by that synod rather than appointed from outside. The Union of Utrecht binds the national churches through the International Bishops' Conference, which admits and removes member churches and speaks for the communion, and which holds no jurisdiction over the internal affairs of a member church. Lay participation at this level was one of the movement's founding commitments and remains the feature its members name first when asked what distinguishes them.

Liturgy and Discipline

The Old Catholic churches moved to vernacular liturgy in the 1870s and 1880s, generations before the Latin Church did, translating and revising the Roman Mass into German and later into other languages. Compulsory clerical celibacy was abolished in the German church in 1878 and in the other continental churches around the same period, so Old Catholic priests and bishops may marry. Auricular confession is retained and offered, with a general form of confession also available, and it is not required before communion in the way Catholic discipline requires it after grave sin. Fasting rules were relaxed. The churches also permit the remarriage of divorced people after a synodal process.

The Doctrinal Differences That Remain

Beyond papal authority, the standing Old Catholic doctrinal divergences from Rome are the two Marian dogmas defined by papal act, the Immaculate Conception of 1854 and the Assumption defined by Pius XII in 1950, neither of which Old Catholics accept as binding dogma, though they keep the feasts and honour Mary. On indulgences and on the Latin account of purgatory they hold reserve, praying for the dead without the framework of temporal punishment and satisfaction. Since the 1990s the European member churches have ordained women as deacons, priests and bishops, and several have introduced blessings for same-sex couples, both of which are settled Catholic doctrine in the other direction and both of which caused splits inside Old Catholicism itself.

8. Old Catholic and Roman Catholic Side by Side

The clearest way to see the difference is a table, with the caution that the Old Catholic column describes the churches of the Union of Utrecht and binds none of the independent bodies discussed in section 13. Member churches also differ from one another on the more recent questions, so read the Old Catholic column as the general position of that communion rather than as a universal rule.

The Roman Catholic column follows the First Vatican Council constitution Pastor Aeternus (1870), Ineffabilis Deus (1854), Munificentissimus Deus (1950), the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the 1983 Code of Canon Law. The Old Catholic column follows the Declaration of Utrecht (1889) and the published synodal decisions of the member churches, which vary between them on the questions decided since the 1990s.

9. The Polish National Catholic Church

The Polish National Catholic Church is an American church that arose among Polish immigrant Catholics in Pennsylvania in the 1890s and later joined the Old Catholic communion, and its story is a different one from the German professors' revolt. Polish parishes in Scranton and elsewhere had built and paid for their own churches and wanted lay trustees to control the property, Polish-speaking priests appointed to serve them, and Polish representation in a hierarchy that was largely Irish and German. Conflict over those demands, and the property law behind them, drove a break with the Diocese of Scranton.

Hodur and Scranton

Franciszek Hodur, a Polish-born priest, took leadership of the dissenting parish in Scranton in 1897 and became the movement's organiser and theologian. He was excommunicated by Rome in 1898, and the church he led grew across the Polish-American industrial belt. In 1907 he was consecrated a bishop in Utrecht by the Old Catholic bishops of the Netherlands, which brought the Polish National Catholic Church into the Union of Utrecht and gave it the same apostolic succession as the European churches. A related Polish Catholic Church was later established in Poland itself.

How Its Doctrine Differs

Doctrinally the Polish National Catholic Church sits between Rome and the European Old Catholics. It holds seven sacraments, counting the preached and heard Word of God among them and treating baptism and confirmation as a single sacrament, an arrangement particular to it. It permitted married clergy from the early twentieth century. It does not ordain women, and that is the point on which it separated from the Union of Utrecht in 2003 after the European churches proceeded with women's ordination. It later joined with the Nordic Catholic Church, a body founded in Norway in the late 1990s under its auspices, in the Union of Scranton.

Relations With Rome

Relations between the Polish National Catholic Church and the Catholic Church in the United States have been notably warmer than the European situation. A formal dialogue between the church and the United States Catholic bishops has run since the 1980s and has produced agreed statements, and the Catholic side has consistently treated its orders and sacraments as valid. The practical consequence is that the provisions of canon 844 on sacramental sharing in cases of need can be applied to its members and ministers in a way that is more restricted for other separated Western communities. Full communion has not been restored.

10. Anglicans, Orthodox, and Talks with Rome

The Old Catholic churches spent their first sixty years looking for allies, and the outcome was full communion with the Anglican Communion and a long dialogue with the Orthodox that never reached communion. Doellinger convened reunion conferences at Bonn in 1874 and 1875, bringing together Old Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox theologians to work on the Filioque, the sacraments and the conditions of intercommunion. Those conferences produced agreed theses and no union, and they set the pattern for everything that followed.

The Bonn Agreement of 1931

Full communion between the Old Catholic churches and the Church of England was established by the Bonn Agreement of 1931, ratified by the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 1932 and extended across the Anglican Communion. Its terms are three sentences and they are widely quoted in ecumenical work: each communion recognises the catholicity and independence of the other and maintains its own; each agrees to admit members of the other communion to participate in the sacraments; and intercommunion does not require from either communion the acceptance of all doctrinal opinion, sacramental devotion or liturgical practice characteristic of the other, and implies that each believes the other to hold all the essentials of the Christian faith. Our guide to Anglicanism and the Church of England covers the Anglican side and the separate question of Anglican orders, which Rome addressed in 1896.

That agreement carried a cost with the Orthodox. Old Catholic and Orthodox theologians conducted a substantial dialogue through the 1970s and 1980s and produced a long series of agreed texts on the Trinity, Christology, the Church and the sacraments, which many observers thought had cleared the doctrinal ground. Communion did not follow. Orthodox reservations centred on the Old Catholic communion with Anglicans whose own orders Orthodoxy did not universally recognise, and then decisively on the ordination of women in the 1990s, which the Orthodox Churches treat as closing the question.

Talks with Rome

The Catholic Church and the Old Catholic churches have held official dialogue since the Second Vatican Council, and an International Roman Catholic Old Catholic Dialogue Commission published a report on church and ecclesial communion in 2009 that identified a wide area of shared faith and named the remaining obstacles plainly. Those obstacles are the ones this page has already listed: the Petrine ministry as defined in 1870, the Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950, and, since the dialogue began, the ordination of women. Relations are civil and cooperative in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, where the two churches share pastoral work in hospitals, prisons and universities, and full communion is not in prospect. The wider Catholic approach to these relationships is set out in our guide to ecumenism and Christian unity.

11. The Catholic Answer to the Old Catholic Case

The Catholic answer to the Old Catholic case is that the papal office defined in 1870 is the office Christ gave to Peter, that its definition in modern language is a development of expression rather than an invention of substance, and that the historical difficulties Doellinger raised have answers that his own generation of Catholic scholars supplied. Each of the four steps in section 3 gets a reply.

On the Ancient Church

Catholic teaching holds that the Petrine office is given in Scripture and visible in the earliest centuries. Christ names Simon the rock, gives him the keys, and gives him the power to bind and loose (Matthew 16:18-19). He prays that Peter's faith may not fail and charges him to strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:31-32). He gives him the flock three times after the Resurrection (John 21:15-17). In the second century Irenaeus of Lyons appeals to the Church of Rome, founded by Peter and Paul, as the church with which every church must agree because of its more powerful principality (Against Heresies 3.3.2). Clement of Rome writes to Corinth at the end of the first century to settle a dispute in another church. At Chalcedon in 451 the assembled fathers acclaimed the doctrinal letter of Pope Leo with the cry that Peter had spoken through Leo. Catholics read this as an office exercised long before it was defined.

On Honorius

The Catholic answer on Honorius is that the case falls outside the conditions of the definition rather than against it. Honorius wrote private letters of counsel to the Patriarch of Constantinople, advising silence on a disputed formula, and he did not define a doctrine of faith for the universal Church by his supreme apostolic authority. The council condemned him for negligence, for failing to extinguish the error when he should have, and Leo II's letter of confirmation makes exactly that charge, that Honorius did not illuminate the apostolic see with the doctrine of the tradition and allowed it to be stained. The conditions in Pastor Aeternus are narrow by design, and a pope who fails to teach when he should is a different case from a pope who defines error. On Constance, Catholic theology holds that the sessions in question were held before the council had a legitimate papal head and were never confirmed as ecumenical in that part.

On the Forged Decretals

Catholic scholarship accepts that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals are forgeries and that the Donation of Constantine is a forgery, and denies that the papal claims rest on them. The forgeries were composed in the ninth century, and the Petrine texts of the New Testament, Clement, Irenaeus, Cyprian, the appeals to Rome at Sardica in 343 and the acclamation at Chalcedon in 451 all precede them. A forged document that repeats an existing claim inflates it, and it does not create it. The doctrine has to be judged on the earlier evidence.

On Development

The deepest answer is the one John Henry Newman gave in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in 1845, published as he entered the Catholic Church and before Vatican I. Newman argued that a living idea in history unfolds over time, that the Church's understanding of what it has received grows in articulation while remaining the same faith, and that this is how the canon of Scripture, the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the term consubstantial and the doctrine of the two natures all came to be stated. He proposed tests to distinguish genuine development from corruption. If the Old Catholic standard were applied consistently, the fourth-century definitions would fail it too, because the vocabulary of Nicaea and Chalcedon is not found in the second century either. Our guide to John Henry Newman covers his life and his argument.

On the Council's Freedom, and on Vatican II

The charge that Vatican I was not free is a historical claim that Catholic historians have contested with the council's own records, and the strongest practical answer is what happened afterwards. The minority bishops who thought the definition inopportune submitted and taught it, including Hefele, the historian whose scholarship the Old Catholics most respected. The Church then received the definition. And the Second Vatican Council placed the papal office inside a doctrine of episcopal collegiality in Lumen Gentium 22 to 23, teaching that the bishops with the pope form one college with care for the whole Church, which addresses in Catholic terms the fear that 1870 had reduced bishops to functionaries. The Catechism states the infallibility of the whole body of the faithful in believing alongside that of the pope and the college (CCC 889 to 892).

12. Are Old Catholic Sacraments Valid?

The Catholic Church regards the orders and sacraments of the Union of Utrecht churches as valid and their exercise as illicit. Valid means the sacrament truly happens: an Old Catholic priest ordained in that succession genuinely consecrates the Eucharist and genuinely absolves. Illicit means it is done unlawfully, outside the communion and against the canon law of the Catholic Church. Both words are load-bearing, and dropping either one produces a false account.

Why Rome Grants Validity

Validity rests on the unbroken chain from Utrecht. The consecration of Cornelius Steenoven in 1724 by Bishop Varlet was performed by a bishop who possessed the episcopal order, with the rite the Church uses and the intention to do what the Church does, so the sacrament took effect despite the absence of a papal mandate. Every Old Catholic bishop since traces to that line, and the German, Swiss and Austrian churches received it in the 1870s. Rome has never issued a judgement against these orders of the kind Leo XIII issued about Anglican orders in Apostolicae Curae in 1896, and the Catholic Church's practice has consistently assumed their validity. A validly ordained Old Catholic priest received into the Catholic Church is not reordained.

Two qualifications belong here honestly. Since the European member churches began ordaining women, the Catholic Church does not regard those ordinations as valid, holding that the Church has no authority to confer priestly ordination on women. And the independent groups described in the next section carry lines whose validity in many individual cases cannot be established at all, because the documentation is missing or the consecrating bishop's own orders are in doubt.

What a Catholic May and May Not Do

A Catholic does not fulfil the Sunday obligation at an Old Catholic Mass and should not receive communion there, because the sacrament of unity presupposes the unity that is absent. Canon 844 of the 1983 Code sets out the exceptions. A Catholic in danger of death, or in another grave necessity judged by the diocesan bishop, may receive penance, the Eucharist and anointing of the sick from a minister of a church in which those sacraments are valid, when it is physically or morally impossible to approach a Catholic minister. That provision is the reason the validity question is practical rather than academic. A Catholic marrying an Old Catholic needs the permission of the local ordinary and normally the Catholic canonical form.

13. Groups Outside the Union of Utrecht

Many bodies calling themselves Old Catholic have no connection to the Union of Utrecht, and this is the single most common source of confusion about the term, especially in the English-speaking world. The Union of Utrecht is a defined communion with a fixed list of member churches, admitted and removed by its International Bishops' Conference. Anyone outside that list is using the name without the communion behind it, and the Union of Utrecht has repeatedly said so about groups trading on its history.

How the Independent Lines Arose

The pattern begins with individual bishops who were validly consecrated and then acted alone, consecrating others outside any church structure. The best known in this history is Arnold Harris Mathew, an Englishman consecrated in Utrecht in 1908 to serve a body of English Old Catholics that turned out to be far smaller than represented, who then broke with Utrecht and consecrated a series of further bishops on his own authority. Lines multiplied from there through the twentieth century in Britain, the United States, Latin America and elsewhere. Church historians use the term episcopi vagantes, wandering bishops, for clergy in this position: bishops without a diocese, without a synod and without recognition, whose orders may or may not be traceable.

What to Check

If you encounter a church using the name, the practical questions are simple. Is it listed as a member church of the Union of Utrecht, or of the Union of Scranton? Does it have a synod, a seminary, a published constitution and more than a handful of parishes? Are its clergy accountable to anyone? Independent groups vary enormously, from serious small communities to one-man operations offering ordination by correspondence, and the name on the sign tells you nothing. The historic Old Catholic churches are as concerned about this as Catholic writers are, since their own reputation is what gets borrowed.

This section describes a pattern in the historical literature on independent episcopal lines rather than making claims about any particular present-day body. Membership of the Union of Utrecht is published by the union itself, and that published list is the check worth making.

14. Old Catholics Are Not Latin Mass Traditionalists

Old Catholics and Catholic traditionalists are separate movements, separated by a century, and they disagree with each other about almost everything. The word old in the Old Catholic name has misled a great many readers into filing them with the Traditional Latin Mass, and the two positions are opposites on the questions that define each of them.

The Two Movements Compared

Old Catholics broke over the First Vatican Council of 1870, they reject papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction, they moved to vernacular liturgy in the 1870s, they abolished mandatory clerical celibacy in 1878, and the European churches ordain women. Catholic traditionalists took their position over the Second Vatican Council and the Missal of 1970, they accept papal infallibility and the definitions of 1854 and 1950, they hold to the Roman Missal in Latin in its earlier form, they maintain clerical celibacy, and they hold that the Church cannot ordain women. The Society of St Pius X, the largest organised traditionalist body, is in an irregular canonical situation with Rome, which our guide to the SSPX and its canonical status covers, and our guide to the Traditional Latin Mass covers the rite itself.

Three More Bodies People Confuse With Them

The Eastern Catholic Churches keep Byzantine and other Eastern rites and are in full communion with Rome, so they are Catholic in the fullest sense and belong in a different category entirely. The Eastern Orthodox Church is a much larger and far older communion whose separation from Rome dates to the first and second millennia, and whose position on papal jurisdiction resembles the Old Catholic one without any historical dependence on it. The Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Malankara Churches, are a third and separate communion again, not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox, and unconnected to any of this. Our overview of Christian denominations maps how the families relate.

15. Where Things Stand Today

The Old Catholic churches today are small, established in a handful of European countries with public-law recognition in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, in full communion with the Anglican Communion, in dialogue with Rome, and internally divided over the same questions that divide Western Christianity generally. The Union of Utrecht has gained and lost member churches across its history, including the Polish National Catholic Church, which left in 2003. The movement that began as a protest by German professors about the limits of papal authority now finds its identity in synodal government and lay participation more than in the polemics of 1870.

What a Catholic Should Take From This

Three things are worth taking away. First, speak about Old Catholics accurately, which means knowing that their bishops are real bishops, that the sacraments in their churches are real sacraments, and that their founders were serious historians making a historical argument. Contempt is a poor answer to a scholarly claim. Second, know the answer to the argument, because the Vatican I question is asked constantly by Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant friends and by Catholics who have never been given a reason. Section 11 has the shape of it, and the sources named there are short enough to read in an evening. Third, notice what the separation cost. A century and a half later the descendants of the 1870 protest hold positions their founders would not have recognised, which is what tends to happen when a communion is broken over a question of authority.

Pray for This One

Christ prayed that his followers would be one, and the division treated on this page is one of the smaller wounds in a body that carries many. Pray for the Old Catholic churches by name. Learn the Catholic doctrine of the papal office well enough to state it without exaggeration, since a great deal of the resistance to it is resistance to a caricature. And keep the ordinary practice of the faith, which is where unity is actually built.

16. Related Topics