arnold harris mathew and the old catholic movement

286 Pages·2017·2.98 MB·English

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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. The relative poverty of the movement, with
few communities owning buildings for public worship,
also brings about a position where mobility is more
about the individuals concerned than about church
property. Even where the clergyman concerned has a
chapel or oratory in his possession, it has generally been
owned by him outright rather than held in common in a
church trust, and so as his ministry moves from one Old
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