ARNOLD HARRIS MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND 1908-52 JOHN KERSEY The WESTERN ORTHODOX UNIVERSITY http://www.thedegree.org COMMONWEALTH OF DOMINICA MMX ANNO DOMINI 2 The Western Orthodox University The Western Orthodox University, founded in 1945 under Mar Georgius of Glastonbury and since 1977 a constituent part of the Apostolic Episcopal Church, has an ongoing mission to promote research into the smaller Apostolic communions. The University is accredited by the Pontificia Accademia Tiberina, Rome. Website: http://www.thedegree.org 3 First published in 2010 by European-American University Press Third edition second impression, revised and updated, published by Lulu Enterprises, 2017 Copyright © John Kersey, 2017 The right of John Kersey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 4 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT CONTENTS Introduction 6 The Old Catholic Movement on the Continent 25 Arnold Harris Mathew: Old Catholic 30 Bishop in the British Isles The Old Roman Catholic Church of Great 182 Britain after Mathew The Liberal Catholic Church 202 The Old Catholic Orthodox Church and James 239 Bartholomew Banks Supplement – Photographs and Documents 251 Appendix I – On the Present Day Position of the 271 Utrecht Union regarding the English and United States Old Catholic Groups Bibliography 275 About the author 286 5 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT INTRODUCTION The present work consists of a revised reprint of material from my earlier work A History of the Old Catholic Movement in England (European-American University Press, 2010) with an intention of providing a more accessible historical volume aimed at the general rather than the specialist reader. At its heart is a biography of Arnold Harris Mathew, and the work then goes on to consider some of the major extensions of his movement, specifically the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain and the Liberal Catholic Church. In addition, a profile of the Old Catholic Orthodox Church is included. The period considered is demarcated for convenience by the death of Bernard Mary Williams in 1952, which marked a period of significant change for the Old Catholics and indeed which poses a considerably more complex task for the historian, given that it is during the 1950s and 1960s that churches which had hitherto been united divided – and indeed sometimes reunited - in a number of ways. Nevertheless, where necessary and practicable in brief terms, certain later events have been outlined for clarity’s sake. English Old Catholicism is a tremendously diffuse movement in which the outsider can find it difficult to discern structure or commonality. Between 1908 and 1910, that structure was provided through the formal alliance of the Old Catholic Church of Great Britain with the Union of Utrecht of the Old Catholic Churches on the Continent. The Union appointed Arnold Harris Mathew, a former Roman Catholic priest who had also served as a curate in the Church of England, as Old Catholic Regionary Bishop of Great Britain. However, the Union was moving ever closer towards Canterbury 6 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT as Mathew was moving closer towards a Romanist position in keeping with the original mission of Old Catholicism. These and other factors caused a breach whereby Mathew declared his autonomy from Utrecht in 1910. Between 1910 and 1915, although the English Old Catholics were no longer in union with Utrecht, they were nevertheless a homogenous group under Mathew’s common leadership. In 1915, as a result of a split within the church, two main groupings emerged; one, which sought to develop a proto-Uniate Roman rite, with its principal differences from the Roman Catholic Church being the acceptance of a married priesthood and a vernacular liturgy, and the other adopting those aspects but adding to them a background context of Theosophy and other esoteric traditions. These two divisions can be referred to as Old Roman Catholic and Liberal Catholic respectively. Both divisions claim to be the true successors of Mathew to the exclusion of other claimants. Organisationally, the Old Catholic movement is both a structural and a theological entity. Structurally, it is a decentralised church that manifests as a series of small groups, most of which take on an autocephalous and autonomous identity based on their ultimate origins within the Roman Catholic Church. This leads variously to groups which are proto-Uniate in character, seeing their mission as closely aligned to Rome, as well as groups that express a wider ecumenical identity. The disparity between the small size and relative poverty of these communities and their sometimes highly ambitious plans for structure and expansion is notable and occasionally strains credibility; however, inasmuch 7 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT as the Old Catholic movement has from time to time been the refuge of the vainglorious and ambitious, we must remark on how much more so have been the larger churches, particularly with their ties to State patronage in the form of the Vatican City or indeed the English government. Theologically, Old Catholic groups have much in common in terms of their basis in faith and practice, and particularly in terms of their adoption of a Catholic hierarchy and liturgy (all groups here described have used the Roman Rite or a variant thereof). There is less variation in what each church teaches than in terms of the context of that teaching, and the freedom permitted to the individual in matters of interpretation. Equally, even what to an outsider may seem minor points of difference are enough to constitute the basis for a separate community, and the flexibility of Old Catholic structure permits such communities to be created relatively easily with a good prospect that each will survive in some form. If we occasionally and rightly reflect that more could be done to promote unity within communities that are united by more than divides them, then we should reflect all the more on the fact that all that has divided the Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain from Rome for much of her existence are the two points of a vernacular liturgy and a married priesthood, and even if Rome has compromised on the first point, there is limited prospect at present that she will do so on the second, with certain isolated exceptions. The decentralisation of the movement imposes a series of unusual requirements. Firstly, in order to have a means of continuity and access to the full range of the 8 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT sacraments, a community cannot exist without the ministrations of a bishop. However, because Holy Orders are conferred in perpetuity, and are not dependent upon adherence to a particular communion, a bishop can move from one community to another with relative ease, or start his own community, without necessarily in so doing being guilty of conscious schism, since all communities are seen primarily as centred upon Rome and their identity as “church” is carefully circumscribed to account for this. This is not so different from “church planting” (work in which Old Catholics under Joseph-René Vilatte were actively engaged in the United States in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century) as commonly found among the Baptists or the Pentecostals. We have become used to Catholic and Anglican communities with the priest at their centre, but the “Ignatian” model of the bishop as the heart of the parish is in fact much older, and is the first model of church organisation that has come down to us. Are such communities truly independent? Rarely so, and certainly not independent from an identity as a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, nor as communities that look actively towards Rome for much of their doctrinal and liturgical basisi. There is in fact a very significant unity between communities for those i We are not concerned in this work with the largely postmodern and revisionist school of thought that maintains that “independence” per se is desirable and that Old Catholic communities should cut their ties with Rome. This is dominant in certain independent sacramental communities in America, but there is no historical or indeed present justification for the imposition of such a viewpoint on the Old Catholic movement as a whole. 9 MATHEW AND THE OLD CATHOLIC MOVEMENT who look closely at such matters, and that unity is in terms of faith, practice and policy. We would not dream of denying the unity of Baptists or Pentecostals simply because there are differences between their various communities that are the outcome of their particular local character, or of the approach of the minister concerned. So it is with the Old Catholics. And there is significant dogmatic agreement too; every community described in this work, for example, has accepted the Nicene Creed, although communities have certainly varied according to the extent of freedom permitted in its interpretation, and most have also accepted the Seven Ecumenical Councils. What difference there is is largely attributable to the strong influence that particular bishops can have on their communities and therefore the way in which those communities will take on a particular episcopal character modelled after the bishop’s own approach. This freedom gives rise to a much greater potential for clashes of personality than is normally the case, since most bishops operate from a traditionally hierarchical point of governance, and again it is the structural flexibility of the Old Catholic movement that means that the clergyman who leaves a church, particularly if he is a bishop, is not without the prospect of a future ministry.