Anglican Orders and Defect of Intention

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ANGLICAN

ORDERS and Defect ofIntention

ANGLICAN ORDERS and Defect of Intention FRANCIS CLARK, S.J.

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First Published 1956

Imprimi potest J. D. Boyle, SJ. Pracp. Prov. Aug. Soc. Jesu.

Nihil obstat Joannes Μ. T. Barton, S.T.D., L.S.S., Censor deputatus.

Imprimatur E.Morrogh Bemud, Vic. Gen. Westmonasterii, die 7a Januarii, 1956

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO LTD

THE UNIVERSITY TRESS, GLASGOW

CONTENTS Chapter

page

vii

INTRODUCTION EXTRACT FROM THE BULL ‘aPOSTOLICAE

CURAE*

1. DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PASSAGE IN THE BULL WHICH DEALS WITH DEFECT OFINTENTION (i)

(a) 'The intention of the authors and Earners of the Edwardine Ordinal’ (b) 'The internal intention of the minister in the strict theological sense’ 2. DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (ll)

(c) 'The minister’s intentio circa significationemformae* (d) 'The antecedent motive of the minister, influencing his choice of matter and form’

3.

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (ill)

(e) 'The external intention: i.e. the corporate intention of the Anglican Church’ (/) ‘The external intention: i.e. the outward purport of the minister’s actions’ (g) ‘The objective intention ofthe rite in itself’

I

II

13

17 20

26 38 42

42

56 ^1

4. A CLOSER STUDY OF THE MEANING OF THE BULL: THE INTENTION REFERRED TO IS THE INTENTION IN THE MIND

OF THE MINISTER OF THE SACRAMENT

5.

SOME WEIGHTY OBJECTIONS AGAINST THIS INTERPRE­

TATION

6.

120

‘THE PRINCIPLE OF POSITIVE EXCLUSION* IN PRESENTDAY THEOLOGY

8.

98

THE QUESTION OF SIMULTANEOUS CONTRARY INTENTIONS IN THE MINISTER OF A SACRAMENT

7.

78

I40

HOW THE ‘PRINCIPLE’ WAS APPLIED TO THE CASE OF

ANGLICAN ORDINATIONS IN THE DISCUSSIONS OF 1895-6

I54

VI

CONTENTS

Chapter 9. THE

p^g 108

DEFECT OFFORM

192

THE OLD CATHOLICCO-CONSECRATORS

IO.

197

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

203

INDEX

211

Abbreviations

used in

References

to

Publications

AA.S.

Acta Apostolicae Sedis

A.E.R.

AMERICAN ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW

A.S.S.

Acta Sanctae Sedis

C.H.S.

CHURCH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

C.I.C.

Codex luris Canonici (code of canon law)

C.T.S.

CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY

I.E.R.

IRISH ECCLESIASTICAL RECORD

RJW.P.

The Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood by dr. E. C. MESSENGER (2 VOLS.)

S.P.C.K.

SOCIETY

FOR

KNOWLEDGE

THE

PROMOTION

OF

CHRISTIAN

INTRODUCTION

A nglican ordinations were declared invalid by Pope Leo ΖΔ ΧΠΙ in the Bull Apostolicae Curae on two counts—defect of JL A^form and defect of intention. It may seem strange that although the Bull has been subjected to the closest scrutiny through sixty years of controversy, there still appears to be no agreement as to what and whose intention was declared defective, and why. Among both Catholic and Anglican apologists there have been from the start, and still are, divergent interpretations of that short paragraph in which the Pope deals with the defect ofintention, and so the arguments used, whether to defend or to attack his de­ claration, have also varied accordingly. To unravel this tangled skein is now a laborious task, but it seems worth the attempt, especially as the question is becoming more and more a focal point of discussion. Rightly or wrongly many people have come to assume that the ‘defect of intention is the crux of the controversy about Anglican Orders. This is the issue, they consider, on which the Papal condemnation stands or falls. Even the question of the defect of form is held to be a corollary, depending on the main controversy about intention. The discussion of the Catholic judgement on Anglican Orders is not a matter of mere word-spinning in an academic debate. It is an inquiry which not only concerns theological truths of considerable moment, but one which also calls in question the dearest and most heart-felt convictions of many, and their very way of serving God. For that reason it demands reverent sym­ pathy in our minds as we discuss it, even though the actual dis­ cussion of the objective truth must perforce seem dry and techni­ cal. It is moreover a matter of intellectual honesty that Catholics should weigh fairly the force of their opponents’ objections, and vii

ANGLICAN ORDERS

should not put out glib reasonings which seem convincing to the plain man, but which he would find by no means complete if he probed more deeply into the lore of the theologians. To say, ‘The Anglican Reformers couldn’t have intended to give Catholic Orders, therefore Anglican Orders are invalid from defect of intention’, seems simple and obvious enough, especially when it is reinforced by quotation from Cranmer’s diatribes against the Mass and the priesthood. But the argument takes on a very different complexion and complexity when we come to apply to it the more technical teaching of Catholic theology about sacra­ mental validity. Some Catholic apologists have tended to shrug off the Anglican counter-objections summarily: ‘It’s all perfectly plain—they can’t see it because they won’t’ But the fact remains that there are men of good-will, who have shown by many tokens that they have minds ready to find and embrace the truth, who yet in all sincerity cannot see the point of the argument from defective in­ tention. They are still more perplexed by the divided counsels of Catholic spokesmen about what ‘defect of intention’ means. One can sympathise with the inquirer who expressed his puzzlement in a recent newspaper debate, with the moderate request: ‘It would be helpful if we Anglicans could be given an accepted Catholic interpretation of intention, since this is the core of the contro­ versy.’1 The controversialists have been much more vehement in their comments on the seeming inconsistency of the Catholic spokes­ men. F. W. Puller wrote, thirty years ago: ‘They are either con­ sciously using arguments which have been refuted over and over again by their own theologians, in which case they are bound as honest men to warn those whom they are trying to pervert that such is the case, or, if they are not aware of that fact, they are venturing to discuss sacred and mysterious subjects in a state of crass and most culpable ignorance.’2 The same alternative charges—either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty—are laid at the door of Pope Leo ΧΙΠ himself by the authors of the somewhat 1 The Rev. Hugh Ross Williamson (then still a member of the Church of England), in a letter to the Catholic Herald, 19 February 1954. * Essays and Letters on OrdersandJurisdiction (Longmans 1925), p. 139.

viii

INTRODUCTION

unfortunate tract, Infallible Fallacies*· when they refer to the pro­ nouncement on defect of intention. Another Anglican writer asserts: ‘In every particular the case against the validity ofAnglican Orders is found wanting by the judgement of Roman Catholic theologians.’2 From the first, Anglican writers have brought a charge of confusion and faulty reasoning against Apostolicae Curae.

The theological argument [wrote T. A. Lacey in 1896] is very nebulous. Its defenders are not sure ofits meaning.... A French writer has shown that the defect of intention is inferred from the use of a defective form. ... Fr. Bernard Vaughan [says] that the fault is attributed not to the form in itself but to the employment of the form in a new and de­ fective sense. That is to say the defect of form results from a defective intention. The two arguments combined will make an excellent circle. Read apart, they leave us wondering what the Bull does mean.8

'The Roman doctrine of intention has been that of the chame­ leon said the American episcopalian, A. Lowndes, in his monu­ mental two-volume reply to Apostolicae Curae* 'The intent changes according to surroundings and localities.’ Another American writer, T. Richey, complained that all this subtle cavilling about intention was ‘not Anglo-Saxon’.6 Puller opined that Leo ΧΙΠ must have been 'deluded by some of his advisers’ about some of the statements made in the Bull, and found in 'the extraordinary feebleness of its arguments on the subject of form and intention... a fresh confirmation of the absolute security of our position in this matter’.6 It became the fashion to dismiss the Bull as vieux jeu, or to explain it away more benignly as ‘a noninfallible pronouncement’. But the Bull shows a perennial vitality, despite the attacks of such doughty champions, and in recent years there has been less 1 S.P.C.K. 1953, p. 12. 1 The Rev J. G. Morton Howard, in Epistola ad Romanos: an Open Letter to our Brethren ofthe Roman Catholic Church (Council for Promoting Church Unity, 1933). * Contemporary Review, December 1896, p. 796. 4 Vindication ofAnglican Orders (New York, 1897), Vol. Π, p. 492. * Leo XIII and Anglican Orders: The Proper Gift ofa Christian Ministry (New York, 1897: Chapter V—‘The Doctrine of Intention*). * Orders andJurisdiction, pp. 132 andj4O.

ix

ANGLICAN ORDERS

inclination to dismiss it as poor sport, and more to sharpen weapons against it *****

Even i£ it were for no other reason, the whole of this lengthy and even laboured inquiry seems well justified when one reads such a cri de cceur as this from another Anglican clergyman:

‘Roman Catholics and Anglicans alike are often unable to understand how anyone can accept the authority of the Holy See and yet remain outside the visible unity of Peter. Nevertheless there is a not incon­ siderable minority of people consisting of clerics, religious and lay folk, who believe ex animo the teaching of the Holy See concerning faith and morals, not on any selective principle, but upon the authority of the Holy See itself, and yet are not in visible union with Rome. ... They accept the validity of Anglican Orders, but do not claim that the possession of valid Orders, or their continuity, justifies the Church of England.... Our only reason for remaining in schism is that we cannot rid ourselves of the belief that the validity of Anglican Orders is a matter of truth, and therefore we cannot accept reconciliation with Rome at the price of denying in word or action what we believe to be true. For us it is the lesser evil to remain as we are. If we were to be re­ conciled upon the existing terms, the end would not justify the means. ... We face the moral issue and view our position as a calamity. We endure it only because it is forced on us.... ‘... The question of Anglican Orders is the sole barrier to our recon­ ciliation with the Holy See. ... Our reasons for differing from the decision of Pope Leo ΧΙΠ in this matter are based upon the teaching of Roman theologians.... We are compelled therefore, with every deference towards the Holy See, to observe that if the Holy See and the Roman theologians in question are taken conjoindy in die matter ofAnglican Orders, they represent a house divided against itself.... ‘[Leo Xin’s] argument narrows down to the question of defect of intention? ‘The crux of the matter? the writer reiterates later, ‘is the alleged defect of intention’.1 IThe Rev. Victor Roberts, In Terra Aliena (printed privately and reproduced by permission), pp. 1-7. So, too, Dom Gregory Dix affirms that ’the practising Anglican with a knowledge of the facts who is considering, perhaps even preparing and wishing, to yield assent to the Bull* finds himself faced with reasoning in it which is theologically unsound. After summarising this reasoning, as he interprets it, he concludes: ‘Any man might be

X

INTRODUCTION

If there are men, however few, in such a state of perplexity because of an imagined contradiction between Apostolicae Curae and the accepted teaching of Catholic theologians on sacramental intention, then it is certainly worth while showing that their difficulty is based on nothing more solid than a misunderstanding. The position which was defended by the writer just cited is, admittedly, an unusual one, and we must beware of the kind of illusion (to which Catholic observers sometimes succumb) of taking such sentiments as representative of opinion within the Establishment. The Anglican clergyman of Catholic leanings is not usually distressed by the alleged weaknesses in Apostolicae Curae, but rather comforted by them. Firmly persuaded of the validity of his Orders, he is inclined to regard even the raising of the question as evidence of a polemical spirit. He makes tolerant allowance for the position of his Roman friends, assuring them that he quite understands that they are bound by loyalty to authority to accept without demur the Papal condemnation of Anglican Orders; but he also intimates that Christian charity and good taste are best served by silence about this distasteful topic. Christians today are breathing an eirenic air, and those who have the cause of catholic reunion at heart should not risk sullying that air by raising the dust of the controversies of an older day. So an Anglican correspondent, pleading for ‘theological understanding at a deeper level than is customary in religious controversy, of which we have had more than enough,’ insists: ‘The last questions to be discussed are those concerned with Orders and Jurisdiction.*1 I respect the viewpoint of those who think like this, and share fully with them a longing for the restoration of Christian unity: nevertheless I offer no apology for presenting this study of the theological reasons underlying the Papal decision on Anglican ordinations. Charity is not ill served by frank discussion and re­ moval of misunderstandings, especially when the matter con­ cerned is one of the fundamental obstacles to reunion. Realistic forgiven for finding these statements difficult to believe. When he is required to make them specifically on these grounds about what has hitherto been the mainspring of the best things in his life, he may well find himself unable to do so, not through pride or perversity, but out of scruple for truth.' (The Question ofAnglican Orders, reproduced by permission of Dacre Press: A. and C. Black, Ltd., 1944, pp. 87-8.) 1 Canon E. C. Rich, in a letter to the Catholic Herald, 20 May 195$.

xi

ANGLICAN ORDERS

observers on both sides admit that this question of valid orders is still very much a live issue, despite the wishful tendency of many to presume its decease. ‘I quite realise’, wrote Dom Gregory Dix in The Question of Anglican Orders,1 ‘that once the question has been fully raised in one’s own mind, the answering of it can, and even should, become an essential condition of getting on with one’s duty towards God without making a change.’2 And later he added: You will see now that Apostolicae Curae has an intrinsic importance for us as well as for Roman Catholics. It was a ruling on a controverted point from a very weighty authority, given after deliberation. That in itself we are bound to ponder seriously. But its importance goes further than that. If the Pope was right, then on its own principles the Anglican Church is more or less a bogus church, even though in good faith.... If Pope Leo was right, then all Anglicans are bound by their own beliefs forthwith to leave the Anglican Church and seek the ‘effectual signs of grace* where they are to be found; or the Anglican Church as at present constituted must, as it were, ‘disband’ (or cease to pretend to exist) by procuring valid orders where it can, and reconstituting itselfas a Church which can at least do what it teaches must be done by any Christian Church. Where the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is accepted, there the Catholic doctrine of the Priesthood is a logical and an ab­ solute necessity. No orders, no Eucharist! Once that question has been raised, we are bound to find a sufficient solution to it or in very loyalty to our own Church to leave it! We Anglicans cannot just ignore Apostolicae Curae, if only because it puts us as Anglicans in such a very awkward dilemma—-ifthe Pope was right about the facts.3

Nothing in the following pages, may I say, is meant in a polemical spirit. This contribution to an already protracted de­ bate is not intended merely to strengthen the barriers that divide us from our Anglican brethren on the question of Orders— *P.14. 1 Contributors to The Tablet correspondence of the spring of 195$ assigned a number of obstacles which were held to stand in the way of any movement of corporate recon­ ciliation. Some shrewd comments on these ideas were offered by Mgr. H. Barton Brown, speaking from a long and wide experience. He added: ‘The real difficulty which I have found in the minds of those who have found their way to the Faith has been their tenacious beliefin the validity oftheir ordination.* (The Tablet, 14 May 19$$, p. 482.) ’Pp.35-6.

xii

INTRODUCTION

barriers which they regard as hostile ramparts raised against them, but which we see simply as the walls of the sheepfold. For us, too, as for Anglicans, this question of whether the Apostolic succession of Orders was handed on to the Church of England at the Re­ formation is a most important matter of truth. We are at least united with them in the desire that the truth may appear; and the more the truth prevails over misconceptions and misrepresenta­ tions, the more likely is it that we shall at last find ourselves no longer on different sides of the barrier. By this I do not mean that the question of valid orders is the decisive point at issue in this sad separation. There are separated churches with valid orders, but the Catholic can only look upon them with sorrow as societies cut off from the Mystical Body of Christ, His one, visible and indivisible Church.1 In Catholic eyes this question of vital unity and spiritual authority, of incorpora­ tion in the Church under its divinely appointed Head on earth, is fundamental. This larger issue, however, is not discussed in these pages, which have a more limited scope—to examine the meaning of Apostolicae Curae, and to vindicate it from the charge that its theological reasoning is unsound and untraditional. *****

Some apologists on the Catholic side maintain that the defects of form and intention treated of in Apostolicae Curae are two mutually complementary elements which combine to produce a single defect: others hold (more accurately, as I hope to show) that they are two separate defects, one sufficient in itself to in­ validate Anglican Orders, even prescinding from the effect of the other. These latter may object: ‘Why go into all these subtleties about the defect of intention when the defect of form was in any case sufficient to make void the succession? Even if it could be shown from the teaching of Catholic theologians that the Anglican intention was possibly sufficient, it would be a useless speculation, for the defect of form would remain decisive. If the comparison may be excused, it would be idle to inquire, when a 1 According to Catholic doctrine, of course, individual members of all non-Catholic bodies may be connected with the Church by desire, and so have some participation in its inner life ofgrace.

xiii

ANGLICAN ORDERS

man has been killed by one bullet wound, whether a second wound he had received were lethal or not.’ To which we must reply that Pope Leo ΧΠΙ judged both defects to be present and prefaced both considerations to his de­ cision. It is certainly no idle speculation to point out the justifica­ tion of the Pope’s words and to show how the charge of error brought against him fails. He was making no mere conjecture when he pronounced on the defect of intention in Anglican ordinations—as is seen from his use of an emphatic palam est. If his statement on that point cannot be sustained, then non­ Catholic inquirers will think that the authority of Apostolicae Curae cannot be sustained, όγ in any case if they find that one of the Pope’s two arguments is faulty, then they will be likely to suspect the other as well. Moreover the whole debate has now become so involved that inexact notions about the defect of intention seem to lead inevitably to inexact notions about the defect ofform. Apostolicae Curae needs no gloss or excuse: it remains wholly coherent and conclusive. But it does need study and a certain amount of translation ofits technical language, for it is a summing up in short compass of a great deal of sacramental theology and canonical practice. A study of the implications of its teaching on sufficient and defective intention is offered in the pages that follow. One conclusion which is proposed is that the confusion and mis­ understandings that have bedevilled this discussion for sixty years are not to be found in the Bull of Pope Leo, but rather in the arguments ofits attackers, and not infrequently—let it be admitted —in those of its defenders. This makes a detailed examination of the question all the more necessary, for this very diversity ofinterpretation appears as a weakness in the Catholic case. Doubtless there will be some who, after reading in these pages of the somewhat bewildering disagreement about the interpreta­ tion of Apostolicae Curae, will object that a document which leads to such confusion stands self-condemned. To meet this objection, it will help to bear in mind two considerations. First, that on the Catholic side the number of writers who have adopted dissident interpretations of the Bull is relatively small, compared with the xiv

INTRODUCTION

great majority, including noted theologians, who have always understood it in the same consistent sense. The second consideration concerns the stilus curiae, and the manner in which papal pronouncements are composed. In Catholic theology, as well as truths which are of faith and those which, while not proposed as articles of faith, are universally taught in the Church as certain, there are many other teachings which are ‘theologically probable’—taking ‘probable’ in the Latin sense of ‘approvable’. In other words, in matters on which the Church’s magisterium has not intervened decisively, there is often free speculation among the theologians, and any one of two or more rival explanations of some doctrinal point may be orthodox and tenable. One view may be more ‘probable* than the others, on account of the stronger theological reasons brought to support it, but even so the alternative explanations may still remain at least theoretically tenable. In such cases the faithful are not bound to accept any particular one of these probable opinions: but it does not follow that they are free to reject them all, for the underlying doctrinal truth, which all are attempting to clarify, is not open to doubt. The magisterium of the Church, while intervening when necessary to establish what is true and to condemn what is false, is very careful to respect this liberty allowed to the theologians in exploring the riches of Christian truth. The wording of official documents is, therefore, most judiciously chosen so that it does not appear to exclude any view which still enjoys some ‘theolo­ gical probability’, even though the opposite view may be much the more common in the Schools. One result of this wise tolerance is that the phrasing of an ecclesiastical document, so couched that it takes account of a number of different hypotheses, can appear involved and even cryptic to those to whom the technical background is unfamiliar. It is my contention that such a judicious choice of phrasing, with implicit hypothetical reasoning to allow for varying theological views, is to be found in the Bull Apostolicae Curae, in its treatment both of the defect of form and of that of intention. If many have misinterpreted the wording of the Bull, it is not xv

ANGLICAN ORDERS

because that wording is vague and misleading, but because they themselves have failed to read it in the theological context which such a document presupposes. That context is not to be looked for in the Bull itself. Pope Leo was pronouncing a decision for the sake of the Church under his obedience, not writing a general manual ofinstruction in sacramental theology. The explanation of the defect of intention that is defended in these pages as the true one is really quite simple, despite the length at which it has perforce to be discussed. It is no novelty or artificial subtlety, and its substance can be expressed in a couple of para­ graphs. It hinges on firm principles of sacramental theology. But because those principles have not always been understood in the English debates on Anglican Orders, and because other and, I believe, inadequate explanations have been in partial possession for so long, it is no longer possible simply to make a short state­ ment and leave it at that It will be necessary first to dear the ground by making a critical examination of the several rival explanations which have been put forward, and then as a second step to vindicate the principles on which, I submit, the declaration in Apostolicae Curae was based, and which offer a sure solution to the objections brought against it. And because the opponents of the Bull allege that it is inconsistent with other decisions of the Holy See, and with the teaching of Catholic theologians, it will be well to test their allegations by quoting fairly extensivdy from documents and authors. In so doing, another and more general advantage may be gained from the present enquiry. Catholic teaching on sacramental intention has undergone a considerable clarification in the course of the past four centuries, and Apostolicae Curae is an important landmark in this field. I suggest that a closer study of the sup­ positions which lie behind Pope Leo’s pronouncement may be rewarding for both the dogmatic and the moral theologian, especially on the subject of simultaneous contrary intentions in the minister of a sacrament, and on the question of the alleged support given to the Catharinian doctrine of ‘external intention’ by Apostolicae Curae. Chapter Nine is devoted to an examination ofwhat is meant by xvi

INTRODUCTION

the defect of form, on which point, too, there have been frequent misunderstandings. Once it has been shown what the defect of intention was not, it becomes easier to see what the defect of form was. As the defect of form in the Edwardine Ordinal is the more important of the two defects alleged against Anglican ordina­ tions,1 and the one to which Leo ΧΠΙ devotes most space in his Bull, it may seem out of proportion to give it such a relatively short discussion in this work. One reason for this arrangement is that the defect of form, induced by the objective connotation of the Ordinal, has more often received detailed attention from Catholic writers. But the chief reason is that the term ‘intention’ has now become so entangled with the discussion of the defect of form that it seems necessary to disentangle and separate the defect of intention before the question of the form can be clearly viewed. This distinction, to which I shall have to return again and again in the following chapters, between defect of form and defect of in­ tention, may seem to some a technical cavil of minor importance. But if some demon of confusion had set out to put the parties at cross-purposes in this long debate about Anglican Orders and Apostolicae Curae, and to ensure that it should be extremely difficult for the sincere inquirer to gain a dear notion of what it Was all about, he could not have hit upon a more effective measure than to persuade the authors to jumble together the defect of intention with the defect of form; so that thenceforth learned men should busily refute their opponents, and go on making die tangle thicker, by applying to one defect the terms and principles that apply properly only to the other. Finally, in Chapter Ten, a question is discussed which is of no litde interest today—whether the participation of Dutch Old Catholic bishops in Anglican episcopal consecrations in 1932, 1933 and 1947 has introduced a stream of valid Orders into the Church ofEngland. ★

★

★

★

★

To avoid misunderstanding about the scope and argument of this book, I must make clear that I do not intend to rehearse here 1 Since it is objectively and permanently present wherever the Anglican rite is used. As will be argued below, the same may not necessarily be true of the defect ofintention.

b

xvii

ANGLICAN ORDERS

the history of the English Reformation. That field has been often and thoroughly surveyed, and despite differences about details, there is now a general measure of agreement about the facts and the main currents of thought. Of this historical evidence, the most important for our present purpose is that which relates to the opinions and aims of Cranmer and his party in the middle of the sixteenth century. It cannot now be seriously controverted that this group held views about the real objective presence of Christ in the Eucharist, about the sacrifice of the Mass, and about the nature of the Christian priesthood, which were deliberately opposed to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Nor can it be seriously doubted that Cranmer and his associates, who exerted decisive influence in ecclesiastical matters in the reign of Edward VI, sponsored the changes made during that reign, in public worship, in the liturgical books, and in church discipline, with a view to furthering their doctrines and cause against those of their ‘papistical’ opponents, whom they alleged to have intro­ duced essential corruptions into the Christian religion. Inde­ pendent historians, scholars writing from the Evangelical stand­ point, and those of other Protestant denominations have no difficulty in admitting that the Roman Catholic interpretation of Cranmer’s doctrines and aims is accurate.1 A generation ago 1 So, for example, Dr. C. A. Briggs, of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, wrote in his book, Church Unify: Studies of its most important Problems: 'There can be no doubt that a serious change was made in the intention of the Church of England in the matter of ordination. It was a deliberate rejection of the pre-Reformation intention, and it was the substitution of a new intention, which may have been truer to the intention of the original institution of the Ancient Church, but which was certainly not the intention of the Church of England for centuries before the Reformation.... The Edwardine Ordinal had no intention of ordaining priests to offer the sacrifice of the Mass, but the Anglicans at the time deliberately rejected all that the Roman Catholics regard as essential to priest­ hood and sacrifice.' (Longmans, 1910, pp. 117-8.) C£ the following statement by an Anglican divine, in a book published in 1946 with an approbatory preface by the Bishop of Sodor and Man. Summing up the changes intro­ duced by the Edwardine Ordinal, the author says: 'The most important of these is the re­ definition of the function of the priest. ... All sacerdotal language is removed. The Anglican priest is a presbyter, not a sacrificing priest.... When Roman Catholic apolo­ gists claim, as they do, that the “intention" of the Anglican Church changed at the Re­ formation, that from 1550 she did not intend to make a man a priest in the Roman sense the claim should be candidly admitted....' (77ie Book of Common Prayer, by D. E. W Harrison, p. 123.) Even stronger statements were made by Bishop H. Hensley Henson of Durham, in his Anglicanism (Macmillan, 1921, p. 155), and by many leading Anglican churchmen in the Prayer Book debates of 1928.

xviii

INTRODUCTION

authors of High Church persuasions used to attempt to vindicate the essential Catholic orthodoxy of Cranmer on the Eucharist, on sacrifice, and on Orders, but the evidence has now been made too dear for this position to be tenable. This is admitted today even among the most Catholic-minded defenders of Anglican Orders, who are no longer concerned to deny the fact of Cranmer’s heresy on those points, but argue on theological grounds that it is irrelevant to the issue of valid Orders. So Dom Gregory Dix wrote:

The old ‘High Church* apologetic for Anglicanism was sincere and consistent, but also a litde deficient not only in plausibility but in candour, in its treatment of the Reformation in the time ofEdward VI. It was always tempted to represent Archbishop Cranmer and his colleagues as premature Tractarians, or at all events as forerunners of the Carolines. But the written works ofthese men remain, in which they represent themselves as genuine Protestants, sincerely desirous of intro­ ducing Protestantism of the Swiss or ‘extreme left-wing’ variety into the Reformed Church ofEngland.... Cranmer personally was probably seriously heretical about the meaning of Ordination (cf. e.g. his Works, ed. Parker Society, ii, 1846, p. 116). It might well be true, therefore, that he personally intended to express an heretical intention in his new Ordination rites. But that has simply no bearing on the theological question ofAnglican Orders.1 In another recent work, Apostolic Succession and Anglicanism,2 Dr. Felix L. Cirlot makes similarly frank admissions about the opinions of Cranmer and his party, and about their motives for the changes they introduced. On die power of the priest to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice, he concludes: ‘We have decisive grounds for questioning and completely surrendering (on this point) Cranmer’s orthodoxy.’3 As these facts are no longer in serious dispute, it has not seemed necessary to re-tread here paths which have been so well explored. Those who seek fuller treatment of this aspect will find plentiful documentary evidence about the nature of the Edwardine inno­ vations in Volume I of Dr. E. C. Messenger’s The Reformation, the 1 The Question ofAnglican Orders, pp. 31 and 33. • Lexington, U.S.A., 1946; especially Chapter XVI. •Ibid., p. 376.

xix

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Mass and the Priesthood,1 and an admirably concise account in Volume Π ofFr. Philip Hughes’ The Reformation in England.2 Other historical facts relevant to the argument of this book, especially those which concern the attitude of the Catholic Church to the Ordinal during the Marian restoration, and also those re­ lating to the foundation of the new Elizabethan hierarchy in 1559, will be considered in the text where necessary. Some may be surprised to find here little discussion of such historical questions as the extent and resoluteness of the considerable ‘AngloCatholic’ resistance to the innovations of Edward’s reign, or the formulation and interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, or the opinions and aims of the later Elizabethan and Caroline divines. These matters figure largely in many of the controversial writings about the validity ofAnglican Orders, but they have, I submit, no decisive bearing on that issue. There is likewise no detailed treat­ ment here of the case of the French Calvinist of 1684, or of the Gordon case of 1704. These cases were illustrative of the un­ varying judgement and practice of the Holy See, but the theo­ logical arguments in Apostolicae Curae do not depend on these historical instances. 1 Longmans, 1936; Pan IV, pp. 325-566. 1 Hollis and Carter, 1953; especially Part Π, Chap. 2, pp. 101-37· C£ also Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer by Cardinal Gasquet and Edmund Bishop (3rd Ed. Shecd and Ward, 1928).

XX

EXTRACT FROM THE BULL ‘APOSTOLICAE CURAE’ OF POPE LEO XIII, DATED 13 SEPTEMBER 1896, ON ANGLICAN ORDINATIONS (The following is the section of the Bull in which the Pope treats of the two defects, of form and of intention, in Anglican ordinations, and of the theological issues involved. The Latin text is from the Acta Sanctae Sedis, Vol. XXIX, 1896-7, pp. 198-201, and the English translation is based mainly on that of Mgr. Canon G. D. Smith.1 The headings and paragraph divisions are not in the original, but have been added here for ease of reference in the pages that follow.)

(I) The Defect of Form

(a) The needfor a determined significance in a sacramental rite In ritu cuiuslibet sacramenti conficiendi et administrandi iure discernunt inter partem caeremonialem et partem essentialem, quae materia et forma appellari con­ suevit. Omnesque norunt sacramenta novae legis utpote signa sensibilia atque gratiae invisibilis efficientia, debere gra­ tiam et significare quant ejfficinnt et efficere quam significant. Quae significatio, etsi in toto ritu essentiali, in materia scilicet et forma, haberi debet, praecipue tamen ad formam pertinet; quum materia sit pars per se non determinata, quae per illam determinetur. Idque in sacramento Ordinis manifestius apparet, cuius conferendi materia, quatenus hoc loco se dat con-

In the rite for the peformance and administration of any sacrament a distinction is jusdy made between its ‘ceremonial’ and its ‘essential* part, the latter being usually called its ‘matter and form*. Moreover it is well known that the sacraments of the New Law, being sensible signs which cause invisible grace, must both signify the grace which they cause and cause the grace which they signify. Now this signification, though it must be found in the essential rite as a whole, that is, in both matter and form to­ gether, belongs chiefly to the form; for that matter is by itself the inde-

1 This translation is to be found in the C.T.S. pamphlet, Anglican Orders—Still No Case (1946). It is used here by kind permission of the Catholic Truth Society.

I

ANGLICAN ORDERS

terminate terminate especially of Order,

siderandam, est manuum impositio; quae quidem nihil definitum per se significat, et aeque ad quosdam Ordines, aeque ad Confirmationem usurpatur.

part, which becomes de­ through the form. This is apparent in the sacrament die matter of which, so far

as it needs to be considered here, is the imposition of hands. This by itself does not signify anything definite, being used equally for the conferring ofcertain Orders and for administering Confirmation.

THE DEFECT OF THE FORM FOR PRIESTLY

ORDINATION

(b) The words *Receive the Holy Ghost9 do not contain in themselves that determined sacramental significance lamvero verba quae ad proximam usque aetatem habentur passim ab Anglicams tamquam forma propria ordinationis presbyteralis, videlicet, Acdpe Spiritum Sanctum, minime sane significant definite ordinem sacerdotii vel eius gratiam et potestatem, quae prae­ cipue est potestas consecrandi et offerendi verum corpus et sanguinem Domini1 eo sacrificio, quod non est nuda commemoratio sacrificii in Cruce peracti.1

Now the words which until quite recent times have been generally held by Anglicans to be the proper form of priestly ordination—*Receive the Holy Ghost*—certainly do not signify de­ finitely the order of the priesthood or its grace and power, which is preeminendy the power *to consecrate and offer the true Body and Blood of the Lord*1 in that sacrifice which is no 'mere commemoration of the sacrifice performed on the Cross*.2

(c) Even ifthe additions of1662 could have validated theform they were made too late It is true that this form was subsequendy amplified by the addition of the words, for the office and work of a priest*; but this proves, rather than anything else, that the Anglicans themselves had recognised that the first form had been defective and in­ adequate. £ven if this addition could have lent the form a legitimate

Forma huiusmodi aucta quidem est postea iis verbis, ad officium et opus presby­ teri: sed hoc potius convincit, Anglicanos vidisse ipsos primam eam formam fuisse mancam, neque idoneam rei. Eadem vero adiectio, si forte quidem legitimam significationem apponere formae posset, serius est inducta, elapso iam saeculo post receptum Ordinale edwardianum: quum

1 TrW. Sess. XXIII, de sacr. ord., can. I. * Trid. Sess. XXII, de sacrif. Missae, can. $. 2

APOSTOLICAE CURAE

propterea, Hierarchia extincta, potestas signification, it was made too late, ordinandi iam nulla esset. when a century had already elapsed since the adoption of the Edwardine Ordinal and when, consequently, with the hierarchy now extinct, the power of ordaining no longer existed.

(d) Other suggested prayers incapable ofproviding a validform because oftheir connotation Some have latterly sought an argu­ ment for their case in other prayers of the same Ordinal, but in vain. To say nothing of other reasons which show such prayers to be inadequate, when occurring in the Anglican rite, for the purpose suggested, let this one argu­ ment serve for all: namely that these prayers have been deliberately stripped of everything which in the Catholic rite dearly sets forth the dignity and functions of the priest­ hood. It is, then, impossible for a form to be suitable and sufficient for a sacrament if it suppresses that which it ought distinctively to signify.

Nequidquam porro auxilium causae novissime arcessitum est ab aliis eiusdem Ordinalis precibus. Nam, ut cetera praetereantur quae eas demonstrent in ritu anglicano minus sufficientes proposito, unum hoc argumentum sit instar omnium, de ipsis consulto detractum esse quidquid in ritu catholico dignitatem et officia sacerdotii perspicue designat. Non ea igitur forma esse apta et sufficiens sacra­ mento potest, quae id nempe reticet quod deberet proprium significare.

THE DEFECT OF THE FORM FOR EPISCOPAL CONSECRATION

(e) Similar reasoning The case is the same with episcopal consecration. Not only was the formula, 'Take the Holy Ghost*, too late amplified by the words, for the office and work of a bishop*, but even these additional words, as We shall shortly show, must be understood otherwise than in a Catholic rite.

De consecratione episcopali similiter est. Nam formulae, Accipe Spiritum Sanc­ tum non modo serius adnexa sunt verba, ad officium et opus episcopi, sed etiam de iisdem, ut mox dicemus, indicandum aliter est quam in ritu catholico.

(/) Reasonfor rejecting one suggestedformula Neque rei proficit quidquam advocasse praefationis precem Omnipotens Deus: quum ea pariter deminuta sit verbis quae summum sacerdotium declarent.

Nor is it of any use to appeal to the prayer of the preface, ‘Almighty God .. .*, since from this in like manner the words which denote the high priesthood have been eliminated.

3

ANGLICAN ORDERS

(g) The question ofordination ‘per saltum’ irrelevant Sane nihil huc attinet explorare, utrum episcopatus complementum sit sacerdotii, an ordo ab illo distinctus; aut collatus, ut aiunt per saltum, scilicet, homini non sacerdoti, utrum effectum habeat necne. At ipse procul dubio, ex institutione Christi, adsacramentum Ordinisverissimepertinet, atque est praecellenti gradu sacerdotium; quod nimirum et voce sanctorum Patrum et rituali nostra consuetudine summum sacerdotium, sacri ministerii summa nuncupatur.

It is entirely beside the point to in­ quire whether the episcopate is the complement of the priesthood or an Order distinct from, it; or whether the episcopate conferred per saltum, that is, upon one who is not a priest, is valid or not. It is quite certain in any event that the episcopate, by Christ's institution, belongs most truly to die sacrament of Order and is die priesthood in die highest degree; it is what the holy Fathers and our own liturgical usage call the high priesthood, the summit ofthe sacred ministry.

(A) The anti-sacerdotal character of the rite makes it impossible for true episcopate to be conferred thereby Jnde Jit ut, quoniam sacramentum Ordinis verumque Christi sacerdotium a ritu anglicano penitus exclusum est, atque adeo in consecratione episcopali eiusdem ritus nullo modo sacerdotium con­ fertur, nullo item modo episcopatus vere ac iure possit conferri: eoque id magis quia in primis episcopatus muniis illud scilicet est, ministros ordinandi in sanctam Eucharistiam et sacrificium.

Whence it follows that since the sacrament of Order and the true priesthood of Christ has been totally expunged from the Anglican rite, and since accordingly the priesthood is in no way conferred in the episcopal consecration of the same rite, it is equally impossible for die episcopate itself to be truly and properly con­ ferred thereby; die more so because a chief function of the episcopate is that of ordaining ministers for the Holy Eucharist and for the sacrifice.

A COMPENDIOUS ARGUMENT WHICH DEMONSTRATES THE INSUFFICIENCY OF ALL FORMS

CONTAINED

IN

THE

ANGLICAN RITE

(i) The setting in which the Ordinal appeared Ad rectam vero plenamque Ordinalis anglicani aestimationem, praeter ista per aliquas eius partes notata, nihil profecto tam valet quam siprobe aestimetur, quibus adiunctis rerum conditum sit et publice constitutum.

But for a just and adequate appraisal of the Anglican Ordinal it is above all important, besides considering what has been said about some of its parts, righdy to appreciate the circum­ stances in which it originated and was publicly instituted.

APOSTOLICAE CURAE

(/) The heterodox designs ofthe authors ofthe Ordinal A detailed account would be tedious as well as unnecessary: the history of the period tells us clearly enough what were the sentiments of the authors of the Ordinal towards the Catholic Church, who were the heterodox associates whose help they invoked, to what end they directed their de­ signs. They knew only too well the intimate bond which unites faith with worship, 'the law ofbeliefwith the law of prayer, and so, under the pretext of restoring it to its primitive form, they corrupted the order of the liturgy in many respects, to adapt it to the errors of the Innovators.

Longum est singula persequi, neque est necessarium: eius namque aetatis me­ moria satis diserte loquitur, cuius animi essent in Ecclesiam catholicam auctores Ordinalis, quos adsciverint fautores ab heterodoxis sectis, quo demum consilia sua referrent. Nimis enimvero scientes quae necessitudo inter fidem et cultum, inter legem credendi et legem suppli­ candi intercedat, liturgiae ordinem, specie quidem redintegrandae eius formae primaevae, ad errores Novatorum multis modis deformarunt.

(&) The objective connotation ofthe whole Ordinal is anti-saaifeial and anti-sacerdotal Hence not only is there in the whole Ordinal no clear mention of sacrifice, of consecration, of priesthood, of the power to consecrate and offer sacri­ fice, but, as We have already indi­ cated, every trace of these and similar things remaining in such prayers of the Catholic rite as were not com­ pletely rejected, was purposely re­ moved and obliterated. The native character and spirit of the Ordinal, as one might say, is thus objectively evident.

Quamobrem toto Ordinali non modo nulla est aperta mentio sacrificii, con­ secrationis, sacerdotii, potestatisque consecrandi et sacrificii offerendi; sed imnio omnia huiusmodi rerum vestigia, quae superessent in precationibus ritus catholici non plane reiectis, sublata et deleta sunt de industria, quod supra attigimus. Ita per se apparet nativa Ordinalis indoles ac spiritus, uti loquuntur.

(I) Theform ofthe Ordinal permanently invalid Moreover, incapable as it was of con­ ferring valid orders by reason of its original defectiveness, and remaining as it did in that condition, there was no prospect that with the passage of time it would become capable of con­ ferring them. It was in vain that in the time of Charles I, some attempted to

Hinc vero ab origine ducto vitio, si valere ad usum ordinationum minime potuit, nequaquam decursu aetatum, quum tale ipsum permanserit, Juturum fuit ut valeret. Atque ii egeruntfrustra qui inde a temporibus Caroli I conati sunt admittere aliquid sacrificii et sacerdotii, nonnulla dein ad Ordinalefacta accessione;

5

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Jrustraque similiter contendit pars ea Anglicanorum non ita magna, recentiore tempore coalita, quae arbitratur posse idem Ordinale ad sanam rectamque sententiam intelligiet deduct.

make room for some part of sacrifice and priesthood, and that, later, certain additions were made to the Ordinal; and equally vain is the contention of a fairly small and recently formed section of Anglicans that the said Ordinal can be made to bear a sound and orthodox sense. /

(m) Why even the present Anglicanforms are invalid These efforts, We say, were and are fruitless. And they are fruitless for this reason also, that, even though some words in the Anglican Ordinal as it now stands, may present the possibility of ambiguity, they cannot bear the same sense as they have in a Catholic rite. For, as we have seen, when once a new rite has been intro­ duced denying or corrupting the sacrament of Order and repudiating any notion whatsoever of consecra­ tion and sacrifice, then the formula, 'Receive the Holy Ghost* (that is, the Spirit who is infused into the soul with the grace of the sacrament) is deprived of its force; nor have the words, for the office and work of a priest or bishop, etc., any longer their validity, being now mere names, voided of the reality which Christ in­ stituted.

Vona, inquimus, fuere etsunthuiusmodi conata: idque hac etiam de causa, quod, si qua quidem verba, in Ordinali anglicano, ut nunc est, porrigant se in ambi­ guum, ea tamen sumere sensum eumdem nequeunt quem habent in ritu catholico. Nam semel novato ritu, ut vidimus, quo nempe negetur vel adulteretur sacra­ mentum Ordinis, et a quo quaevis notio repudiata sit consecrationis et sacrificii: iam minime constat formula, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, qui Spiritus, cum gratia nimirum sacramenti in animam infunditur, minimeque constant verba illa ad officium et opus presbyteri vel episcopi ac similia, quae restant nomina sine re quam instituit Christus.

(fl) ‘Catholic interpretation rejected hy Anglicans themselves The force of this argument is felt by many Anglicans themselves, inter­ preting the Ordinal more accurately than others, and they use it openly against those who are vainly attempt­ ing, by a new interpretation of the rite, to attach to the orders conferred thereby a value and efficacy which they do not possess.

Huius vim argumenti perspectam ipsi habent plerique Anglican, observantiores Ordinalis interpretes; quam non dissimu­ lanter eis obiciunt qui nove ipsum interpre­ tantes, Ordinibus inde collatis pretium virtutemque non suam spe vana affingunt.

6

APOSTOLICAE CURAE

(o) A prayer which might be sufficient for a form in a Catholic rite is rendered defective by the connotation ofthe Ordinal The same argument by itself is fatal also to the suggestion that the prayer, Almighty God, giver of all good things, occurring towards the beginning of the ritual action, can do service as a legitimate form of Order; although, conceivably, it might be held to suffice in a Catholic rite which the Church had approved.

Eodem porro argumento vel uno illud etiam corruit opinantium posse in legiti­ mam Ordinis formam sufficere preca­ tionem Omnipotens Deus, bonorum omnium largitor, quae sub initium est ritualis actionis; etiamsi forte haberi ea posset tamquam sufficiens in ritu aliquo catholico quem Ecclesia probasset.

*

*

(II) The Defect of Intention (p) Defect ofintention is as decisive as defect ofform Then with this intrinsic defect ofform has been combined a defect of intention, —of that intention which is equally necessary for the existence of a sacra­

Cunt hoc igitur intimo formae defectu coniunctus est defectus intentionis, quam aeque necessario postulat, ut sit, sacramentum.

ment.

(q) Inner intention must bejudged in sofar as it is manifested Concerning the mind or intention, inasmuch as it is primarily something interior, the Church does not pass judgement: but in so far as it is ex­ ternally manifested, she is bound to judge ofit.

De mente vel intentione, utpote quae per se quiddam est interius, Ecclesia non iudicat: at quatenus extra proditur, iudicare de ea debet.

(r) Presumption ofsufficient intention is infavour ofa minister who uses due matter andform Now if, in order to effect and confer a sacrament, a person has seriously and correctly used the due matter and form, he is for that very reason pre­ sumed to have intended to do what the Church does. This principle is the basis of the doctrine that a sacrament is truly a sacrament even if it is con­ ferred through the ministry of a heretic or unbaptized person, pro­ vided the Catholic rite is used.

lamvero quum quis ad sacramentum con­ ficiendum et conferendum materiam formamque debitam serio ac rite adhibuit,

eo ipso censetur id nimirum facere in­ tendisse quod facit Ecclesia, Quo sane principio innititur doctrina quae tenet esse vere sacramentum vel illud quod mini­ sterio hominis haeretici aut non baptizati, dummodo ritu catholico, conferatur.

7

ANGLICAN ORDERS

(s) But the evidence in the case ofthe early Anglican ordinations clearly proves an invalidating defect ofministerial intention Contra, si ritus immutetur, eo manifesto But if, on the contrary, the rite is consilio ut alius inducatur ab Ecclesia non changed with the manifest purpose of receptus, utque id repellatur quod facit introducing another rite which is not Ecclesia et quod ex institutione Christi ad accepted by the Church, and of re­ naturam attinet sacramenti, tunc palam pudiating what in fact the Church est, non solum necessariam sacramento does and by Christ's institution be­ intentionem deesse, sed intentionem immo longs to the nature of die sacrament, haberi sacramento adversam et repug­ then it is evident, not only that the . intention necessary for a sacrament is nantem. lacking, but even that an intention is present which is adverse to and in­ compatible with the sacrament.

THE DECISION

(After recalling the care with which the issue had been weighed by the Holy See, and the danger that not a few would be led into the harmful error of thinking themselves to find the sacrament of Order and its fruits where in fact they do not exist, the Pope de­ clares his resolution to pronounce judgement, which he delivers in these terms:) Therefore adhering entirely to the decrees of the Pontiffs Our Prede­ cessors on this subject, and fully rati­ fying and renewing them by Our own authority, on Our own ini­ tiative and with certain knowledge, We pronounce and declare that ordi­ nations performed according to the Anglican rite have been and are com­ pletely null and void.

Itaque omnibus Pontificum Decessorum in hoc ipsa causa decretis usquequaque assentientes, eaque plenissime confirm­ antes ac veluti renovantes, auctoritate Nostra, motu proprio, certa scientia, pronunciamus et declaramus, ordina­ tiones ritu anglicano actas, irritas prorsus fuisse et esse, omninoque nullas.

In his letter to Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris, dated 5 November 1896, Pope Leo ΧΙΠ affirmed that in issuing the Bull Apostolicae Curae, ‘It was our intention to deliver a final judgement and completely settle the question.... All Catholics are bound to receive the decision with the utmost respect, as being fixed, ratified and irrevocable.’

8

‘apostolicae

curae*

In ecclesiastical documents of this kind, of course, the doctrinal and explanatory parts leading up to the final decision do not share the same absolute authority as the decision itself. They belong to the exercise of that part of the Church’s magisterium which, although not necessarily infallible, requires the respectful attention of Catholics, and affords safe guidance to theological progress. With an examination of the theological reasons which the Pope prefaced to his decision this book is chiefly concerned; to show how, even prescinding from the weighty authority which supports them, they are cogent. I do not propose to discuss at any length the question of the precise dogmatic force of the decision itself, which is in any case certain and irrevocable for Catholics. As several authors point out, there are strong reasons to indicate that papal infallibility relating to ‘dogmatic facts’ is involved, for the Pope was pronouncing on a matter which concerns the constitution and unity of the Church in every continent, as well as her office ofsafeguarding the sacraments.

A further consideration, which has been receiving special attention in recent years, is worth mentioning here, although the argument of this book does not depend on it. In addition to the doctrinal and judicial authority of Apostolicae Curae, there is also to be considered its practical effect as an authentic decree determining the essential form of a sacrament. Theologians are bringing more and more into prominence1 the Church’s effective power to determine what is and what is not sufficient to confer the sacrament that Christ instituted. In a cogently reasoned article, ‘The Church and her Sacraments’, in the Clergy Review for April 195ο,8 Mgr. G. D. Smith argues that an indirect or implied infallibility underlies the exercise of this power. Similarly Dr. Henricus Schillebeeckx, O.P., the eminent Belgian sacramentologist9 writes (in a paper kindly communicated to the author4): To what an extent a visible separation from the true Church of Christ exerts an influence on the external rite itself, that is, whether 1 Especially since the Apostolic Constitution, Sacramentum Ordinis, of 30 November X947. (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, Vol. XL, 1948.) 1 Pp. 217-31; the application of the argument to the Anglican ordination rite is on pp. 228-31. • Author of De Sacramentele Heilseconomie: Theologische bezinning op S. Thomas sacramentenleer in het licht van de traditie en van de hedendaagse sacramentsproblematiek (Antwerp, 1952), which has already appeared in translations. 4 ‘Cmot licentia publice utendi*.

9

ANGLICAN ORDERS

such a rite does or does not continue the ritual profession of the faith of the Church, must be determined by the Catholic Church herself. It belongs to the true Church to determine whether a rite performed in given circumstances is an ‘exteriorisation’ of her own faith, that is, whether it is her own act; or whether it is, on the contrary, an act expressing the faith of another, separated church, qua separated. In this latter case the rite is not valid. Thus Pope Leo ΧΙΠ decreed in the concrete that Anglican ordinations do not remain acts of the true Church: in them ‘ritual contact’ with the faith of Christ’s Church is not maintained. The ultimate test of the validity of sacramental rites is not to be found in scholarship and liturgical research alone. When the sufficiency or insufficiency of a rite is in question, the decisive norm is the accep­ tance or rejection of it by the Catholic Church. So it can be argued that when the head of the Church officially rejects a rite as incapable of mediating sacramental efficacy, as he did in the constitution Apostolicae Curae, he is not only judging authoritatively about a past dogmatic feet, but is also exercising in the present what may be called ‘pracdcal infallibility’. Even by itself, prescinding from anything that had gone before, this solemn act of the Holy See was sufficient to disown the Anglican rite as not a sacramental rite of the Catholic Church. Thus there has been since 1896 an added source of certainty about the in­ validity of the Anglican rite—a certainty based on the ‘practical infallibility’ of the Church’s determining decrees, which in the sacra­ mental sphere effectively guarantee what they declare. This weighty argument, and the radical principle which it involves, will of course be rejected by those who are not prepared to recognise in the decrees of the Holy Sec the authentic voice of Christ’s Church, and also by those who deny that the Church has an effective power to restrict sacramental validity.1 Having mentioned this argument here, I shall make no further appeal to it in the course of these pages, which are concerned with the theological and historical antecedents of Apostolicae Curae, rather than with its consequences. 1 The view that sacramental rites can 'work* quite independently of the will of the Church, and even in spite of her authoritative condemnation, seems to savour of magical or materialistic ideas, as Dr. Schillebeeckx, O.P., observes. Non miror quod nostris temporibus Ecclesia facilius propensa est fld declarandum sacramenta collata a non-communicante cum Ecclesia non use valida, siquidem Ecclesia aucioritative ea non amplius actus proprios Ecclesiae reputet. Ita character ecdesiologicus ipsorum sacramentorum clarius patet, atque non indulgetur cuidam magiae vel materialismo, aesi verba materialiter prolata et ritus materialiter confectus absolutam quondam efficaciam haberent etiam contra voluntatem ipsius Ecclesiae Christi, cuius actusproprii etcharacteristici sunt sacramenta* (In the paper referred to above.)

IO

Chapter One

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PASSAGE IN THE BULL WHICH DEALS WITH DEFECT OF INTENTION (I) ith the defect of form in the Anglican rite, says the Pope, ‘has been combined a defect of intention’. Pre­ cisely what and whose intention is under discussion in that passage? The following catalogue of the different answers which have been given to that question will serve as a framework for the first stage of our inquiry. After each interpretation is added in brackets the names of some of those who have proposed or favouredit:

W

(a) The intention of the authors and framers of the Edwardine Ordinal. (Rivington, Wilfrid Ward, Woodlock:: Lord Halifax, Lacey.) (b) The internal intention of the minister in the strict theo­ logical sense; in particular of the consecrator(s) of Arch­ bishop Parker. (Gasparri, Lehmkuhl, Boudinhon, Brandi, Noldin, Marchal, Vermeersch and the majority of Catholic commentators:: Hrauda, Cirlot.) (c) The internal intention of the minister, not in the usual technical sense (intentio faciendi quod facit Ecclesia), but con­ sidered in its bearing on the validity of the form, i.e. as giving determination to otherwise ambiguous wording— (intentio circa significationem formae). (Sydney Smith— following Estcourt—Harent, Toumebize, Pesch, Mes­ senger.) (d) The antecedent motive of the minister influencing his choice of matter and form. (Moyes.) II

ANGLICAN ORDERS

(e) The external intention: i.e. the corporate intention of the Anglican Church. (The Anglican Archbishops, Brightman, Swete, Lowndes, Puller, Sokoloff, and the majority of Anglican commentators.) (f) The external intention: i.e. the outward purport of the ministers actions, which must be taken as sure and suffi­ cient indication of intention, irrespective of any vagaries of the inward will. (Crowe, Priimmer, Donovan:: LangfordJames.) (g) The intention not of any particular person or persons, but of the rite considered objectively in its historical setting. (Barnes, Rickaby, Bevenot:: Moberly, Briggs, Dix.)

These interpretations are not all mutually exclusive. Many authors, for example, combine (e) and (g); and those who favour (e) usually presuppose (J). Whichever of these interpretations be adopted, the defenders of Anglican Orders maintain, it is impossible to see how Leo ΧΙΠ could conclude to the certain invalidity of those Orders ex defectu intentionis. For to justify the Pope’s assertion it is necessary to establish two things. First, that the ‘intention’ in question—what­ ever it is—can be shown with certainty to have been defective in the case of Anglican ordinations; and secondly, even if that be proved, it must be explained how, in the light of the teaching of Catholic theologians about sacramental intention, Anglican Orders are necessarily invalid on that score. None of the inter­ pretations mentioned above, it is objected, satisfy both these re­ quirements. The next step, then, must be to examine each of these interpre­ tations in turn, and to see the arguments and counter-arguments in each case. Three chapters will be devoted to this process. The effect on the reader as he is led through this labyrinth of differing opinions, and is shown at every turn the difficulties which seem to make each inadmissible, may well be one of bewilderment. But if he will patiendy examine each of these rival interpretations in its turn, weighing its force and weakness, he may come to admit that this general survey of the question in all its complexity 12

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(l)

and confusion is needful in order to make a just appraisal of what the issue really is. It seems best to lay the whole tangled web out flat, noting aU its knots and loose ends, before setting about the task of disentangling it. The interpretation that will eventually be defended in these pages is that listed as (6) in the table given above. In this preliminary survey, however, it will first be submitted to a critical examination, and the reasons brought forward which seem to make it untenable. The positive defence of this interpretation, together with answers to the objections made against it, will be reserved for later chapters (Chapters Four to Eight). ★

★

★

*

★

(a) The intention ofthe authors andframers ofthe Edwardine Ordinal

Ever since the publication of the Bull many commentators, both Catholic and Anglican, have assumed that the defective intention alleged there by the Pope is the heterodox purpose of the original authors of the Edwardine Ordinal in making their alterations to the rite of ordination. They cite the context in favour of this interpretation. The Pope has shortly before been dealing with ‘die sentiments of the authors of the Ordinal’, and has recalled that they ‘purposely removed and obliterated’ all mention of the power to consecrate and offer sacrifice. Now he declares the existence of the defect of intention,1 and goes on to explain that such a defect can be judged to be present where ‘the rite is changed with the manifest purpose of introducing another rite ... and of repudiating what the Church does ...’. But the rite was changed by those who compiled the Ordinal in Edward’s reign. Surely, therefore, it must be their intention that is referred to? Moreover the similarity of language and argument in the later passage makes it seem reasonable to infer that the Pope is still speaking of the same intention as before—that of the auctores Ordinalis. In support of this interpretation it can be added that already in the controversies that preceded the Bull both Catholic and 1 Using an igitur, which would seem to make this declaration a summing-up of what has preceded. (Paragraph (p) in the extract from the Bull, p. 7 above.) The force of this igitur is discussed on pp. 87-8 below.

c

13

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Anglican champions had given much attention to the ‘intention of the framers of die rite’. Thus Fr. Sydney Smith, S J. in the second of his articles in The Month in 1894 commenting on the recently published essay of ‘Dalbus’ (the abb6 Portal), admits the ex­ pression, and discusses the intention ofthe compilers ofthe Ordinal at some length. The argument of the Anglican apologists, he concedes, rests on a sound principle, on one, indeed, to which we ourselves appeal largely in connection with this question, for the appeal is to the ‘intention’ of the framers as determining the meaning of their rite. The word ‘intention’ seems to possess a strange fascination for some persons. It is supposed to be a cunning device whereby a Catholic writer can deliver himself from his controversial difficulties by disregarding the plain meaning of terms and the overt purpose of actions. In reality, the word ‘intention’ is but a synonym for the word ‘meaning’; it signifies no more.1 So too Wilfred Ward, looking back on the debate a few years later,2 affirms:

The main argument urged in recent discussions of the subject has not been... the certain invalidity of the form per set but its invalidity when we consider the manner in which it was framed and the intention of its framers. It is not surprising that when the Bull appeared with its de­ claration on ‘intention* many should have understood the term to be used in the sense just explained, which had been to the fore in the recent controversies in England. Some people on both sides have continued to understand it so. Thus L. Rivington, who in 1897 wrote a little book called Tekel, or the Answer of the Anglican Archbishops to the Bull on Anglican Orders examined and convicted of83 flaws,3 asserted: 1 The Month, November, p. 389. These articles were reprinted by the C.T.S. in 1895. Meanwhile, however, The Times controversy of the autumn of 1894, and the appearance of the works of eminent Continental theologians, had focused attention on the ‘intention of the minister* and of Barlow in particular. Sydney Smith himself came eventually to acknowledge that the ‘defective intention* at issue was not directly that of the compilers of die Ordinal, 1 Life and Times ofCardinal Wiseman, Vol. I, p. 300, note (Longmans, 1897). * Bums and Oates: (p. 5).

U

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (l)

Anglican Orders have been condemned, or rather the original con­ demnation has been explained and confirmed by Leo ΧΙΠ, by reason of a defect, (i) in the form used in 1559, and (ii) in the motive for the compilation of that new form. Lord Halifax, who had a fairly intimate knowledge of all the discussions and events both leading up to and following the Bull, does not seem to have doubted that this was the meaning,1 and that the alleged defect of intention was not mentioned as a dis­ tinct root ofinvalidity but as determining the defect of form.2 Similarly, Fr. F. Woodlock, S.J., writing in 1923, declared:

It is not then the interior intention or lack of intention in a con­ secrating bishop that invalidates the ceremony, but the heretical in­ tention of the Gamers of the new rite that is appealed to by Pope Leo ΧΙΠ in his condemnation.3

In the Institutiones Theologiae Moralis of Genicot-Salsmans,4 the intention in question is taken to be that of the 'Anglicani ritualis redactors’. It is difficult, however, to see how this interpretation can be adequate. It is certainly plain that the purpose of Cranmer and his associates in Gaming the Ordinal was heterodox; and it may well be, as will be seen later, that this purpose has a bearing on the defect ofform: but the purpose of an author in composing a rite is not the same as a sacramental intention in the theological sense. And although it may be argued that the ordinations that Cranmer himself carried out as minister of the sacrament in Edward Vi’s reign, using the new rite, must have been invalid Gom defect of intention as well as Gom defect of form, that would not have been enough to vitiate all subsequent Anglican orders ex defectu inten­ tionis. Present-day Anglican Orders do not stand or fall by the 1 As can be seen from a number of comments in his book, Leo XIII and Anglican Orders (Longmans, 1912). 1 Ibid., p. 379 and pp. 392-4. Canon T. A. Lacey seems to have come to the same con­ clusion at least at the time of die publication of the Bull. (Cf. his Roman Diary, pp. 97-8. So also A. Benson, in his Life of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, (Mac­ millan, 1899), Vol. Π, p. 622. * Constantinople, Canterbury and Rome, p. 59, note (Longmans). 4 VoL Π, η. ΙΠ. This section, however, purports to deal with the intention of the minister ofthe sacraments.

ANGLICAN ORDERS

validity of Cranmer s own ordinations, for a fresh start was made in the Elizabethan episcopal consecrations, and it is from those that the succession descends. (Barlow—assuming that he was con­ secrated—and Hodgkin, who took part in the consecration of Matthew Parker, had been made bishops in the reign of Henry VID, while the Pontifical was still in use.) These facts were well known and discussed in Rome while the Bull was being prepared, and in fact leading theologians of the time expressly stated that the intention under discussion was the ministerial intention in the consecration of Parker. (See Chapters Four and Eight.) Leo ΧΠΙ, therefore, can hardly have meant that the heretical purpose of the authors of the Ordinal was itself the defectus intentionis which induced invalidity into all subsequent Anglican Orders. By this I do not mean to say, as does Dom Gregory Dix,1 that the designs of Cranmer and his associates in compiling the rite have no relevance to the issue of invalidity. It is certainly relevant, when judging the adequacy of a rite for sacramental validity, to consider what its authors intended to express by it; but to appeal to that intention in the present case, as evidence that the sacra­ mental significance of the Ordinal is inadequate, is to argue to the defect ofform, whereas in the passage under review the Pope clearly considers defect of intention as additional to and distinct from the defect ofform (as will be seen more fully in later pages). In any case, heretical intentions on the part of the framers of a rite do not necessarily invalidate the sacraments for which it is used, even under the aspect of defect of form. As Dix observes justly enough: ‘An entirely orthodox person might draw up a rite which was as a rite defective, just as a heretic could draw up a rite which was as a rite sound.’2 It is only in certain circumstances (i.e. when the language remains indeterminate) that the framer’s intention can have a decisive bearing on the validity of the form, whereas the Pope refers explicitly to an intention that is always 1 'I have gone into all this so as to be able to get it quite dear what it is that we have to investigate. It is not Cranmer*s private opinions as to the meaning of Ordination, or of the character of the rites he drew up. These bulk largely in many popular presentations of the Roman attack on Anglican Orders, but they can have no bearing whatever on the theo­ logical issue.*—The Question ofAnglican Orders, pp. 34-5 (Dacre 1944). ’ The Question ofAnglican Orders, p. 35.

l6

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(l)

essential to the existence of a sacrament—(‘quam aeque postulat, ut sit, sacramentum:9 see p. 7 above, paragraph (p)). ★

★

★

★

*

(b) The internal intention ofthe minister in the strict theological sense

Leo XIII’s declaration cannot, then, refer simply to the purpose of the authors of the Ordinal, but it seems rather that if it is to have any force it must be applied to the personal intention of later Anglican bishops when ordaining.1 But if we assume that it was their intention he meant, further serious difficulties arise. First, how could he know surely the intention of those prelates? The heart of a man is unsearchable, even by those nearest to him; how much less certainty can there be about the inner mind of men long ago. Does not the Pope expressly say that the Church cannot judge the mental intention, as it is something wholly interior— De mente vel intentione, utpote quae per se quiddam est interius, Ec­ clesia non judicat? And would he go straight on to make a judge­ ment about something he has just declared unjudgeable?2 It may be urged that because the Elizabethan ordainers adhered to the same errors they must have had the same purpose as the leaders of the Edwardine Reformation. To which it is answered that this inference is too facile, and in any case is inconclusive against the validity of Anglican orders. Too facile, because some of the Anglican bishops, even though trimmers and temporisers, may well have held orthodox views about the sacraments (was it not precisely to humour this Catholic-minded section that the Anglican formularies were couched in such ambivalent terms?), and it would be rash to assert that all of them must have had a heretical intention in ordaining. So the author of an article in the 1 This is the interpretation adopted by the majority of Catholic authors who comment on the Bull, and is the one that will finally be defended in these pages. ■ The author of one of the first tracts written in answer to the Bull (A Treatise on the Bull 'Apostolicae Curae', S.P.C.K., 1896) assumed that the Pope had clearly abandoned the ob­ jections brought against Anglican ordinations on the score of inner ministerial intention: ‘Such objections have often been made by Roman controversialists, and indeed they have been made in letters to provincial newspapers in England and by persons of importance within the last few months. But it is most important to notice that the Pope has now in effect withdrawn them.... Charges of inadequate intention on the part of those who use the Ordinal.. .are definitely disowned in the Bull itself.* (Pp*3$and37.)

17

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Church Times, 9 October 1896 (pp. 353-4), objected: ‘If they themselves [the authors] would have used this form with a vicious intention, it does not follow that others must imitate them.’ Very different from the temper of Cranmer and his associates was that of men like Guest, who was responsible for reforming in a less Protestant sense the paragraph in the 28th Article dealing with the Real Presence, or Cheyney of Gloucester, that ‘miserable old man’, of whom even Campion testified that he remained a Catholic at heart. Even granted, however, that we could be sure that all the Elizabethan ordainers, at any rate at the material times, held heterodox views on the Sacrament of Order, how conclude from that that their ordinations were certainly invalid from defect of intention? All theologians agree that concomitant error (or heresy) in the mind of the minister does not necessarily vitiate sacramental validity: nor does even openly professed lack of Catho­ lic intention, provided that there be present the minimum inten­ tion of doing what Christ or the true Church does.1 Many de­ cisions of the Holy See have confirmed this principle, perhaps the most often quoted in this context being the ruling of the Holy Office in 1872 about the validity of Methodist baptisms in Central Oceania. Two dubia had been proposed: 1. Utrum baptismus ab illis haereticis administratus sit dubius propter drfectum intentionis faciendi quod voluit Christus, si expresse declaratum fitit a ministro antequam baptizet, baptismum nullum habere effectum in animam?

2. Utrum dubius sit baptismus sic collatus si praedicta declaratio non ex­ presse facta fuerit immediate antequam baptismus conferretur, sed illa saepe pro-

1. Whether baptism administered by those heretics [Methodists] is doubtful on account of defect of the intention to do what Christ willed, if an express declaration was made by the minister before he baptised that baptism had no effect on the soul? 2. Whether baptism so conferred is doubtful if the aforesaid declaration was not expressly made immediately before the conferring of baptism, but

1 This answer to the allegation of defect of ministerial intention had already been care­ fully explained by Dr. E G. Lee in his book The Validity ofthe Holy Orders ofthe Church of England (London 1869). This scholarly and temperate work was a pioneer attempt to marshal the Scholastic and even post-Tridentine theologians in defence of Anglican Orders. It was a store from which later apologists, notably Denny and Lacey, were to draw much of their ammunition.

I8

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (l)

nuntiatafiterit a ministro, et illa doctrina aperte praedicetur in illa secta?1

had often been asserted by the minister, and the same doctrine was openly preached in that sect?

To these the Sacred Congregation replied: Adprimum: negative, quia non obstante errore quoad effectus baptismi, non excluditur intentio faciendi quod facit Ecclesia. Ad secundum: provisum in primo.

Reply to die first question: in the negative, because despite the error about the effects of baptism, the in­ tention of doing what the Church does is not excluded. The second question: provided for in the answer to the first.

Now if heresy about the essential effects of baptism, openly declared by the minister at the time he performs the rite, does not invalidate that sacrament, why should heresy about Orders, pre­ sumed to be held by those early Anglican bishops, invalidate the ordinations performed by them? There is an answer given by Catholic authors to this objection, but it is one that can be attacked in turn by a still more searching objection. The answer is that heresy does not indeed vitiate the sacramental intention as long as it is only concomitant, that is, residing simply in the intellect and not inserted into the sacra­ ment, as it were, by an explicit act of the will. (So in the decisions on Methodist baptisms and in similar cases it is presumed—unless there is proof to the contrary—that the ministers are merely stating their concomitant disbelief, and not conditioning their intention.) If, however, the heresy is not merely concomitant in the intellect, but also generates an active intention in the will, then it does nullify the sacrament. The counter-attack to this argument may be stated as follows. Even if it be granted that the early Anglican ministers of the sacrament of Order were heretical on the subject, and even if there could be found some way of proving that their error was not merely concomitant in the intellect, but overflowed into a positive intention of the will contrary to the conferring of the Catholic priestly office, nevertheless they also had a general in­ tention of doing what Christ instituted and what the Apostolic Church did. It is common doctrine that if this latter intention 1 Acta Sanctae Sedis, Vol. XXV, p. 246.

19

ANGLICAN ORDERS

stood alone in the mind, without any positive contrary intention, it would be sufficient for sacramental validity, even if the minister were in error about what Christ really instituted or what the true Church does. Granted that in the present case it is accompanied by a contrary intention, by what principle do you assert that this contrary intention must have nullified the general ‘Christian’1 intention? Catholic theologians and moralists (Bellarmine, Suarez, Lessius, De Coninck, Sylvius, Lacroix, St. Alphonsus and many others) teach that where the will elicits two contrary intentions, the predominant of the two prevails. Now to begin with, who can be certain that the ‘Protestant’ intention was stronger than the ‘Christian’ intention in the minds of those ministers? Men can with difficulty judge which of mixed purposes is uppermost in their own minds; how can they surely determine the psychological balance in the minds of others who lived four centuries ago? In any case apparently conclusive arguments can be offered to show that the contrary intention, if it were present, could not have nullified the sacrament in those Anglican ordinations. Theologians teach that when there are two such contrary in­ tentions in the will of the minister conferring a sacrament, a universal will to do ‘what the true Church does’ normally pre­ vails, even over an intention not to do what the Roman Church does. The reason is that the former intention implicitly includes the intention of doing what the Roman Church does, even though the agent be unaware of it; just as in logic a man who assents to a universal proposition implicitly admits all the particular pro­ positions contained in it, even though he may deny one of those particulars in words because he has not yet seen the application of the universal to it This point was explained, for example, by Sylvius in the seventeenth century.2 1 The expression, ‘general Christian intention* is used here and henceforth as an abbre­ viation for the too unwieldy phrase, *a general intention to do at least what Christ, or Christ’s true Church, or true Christians generally, do in the administration of the sacra­ ments.' 1 'Sun/ interdum in ministra intentiones repugnantes, ut si haereticus baptizans intendatfacere quodfacit Ecclesia Christi, sed non quod Ecclesia Romana.... Tales intentiones non suntforma­ liter repugnantes: non magis quam assensus duarum contrariarum vel contradictoriarum, unius in universali, alterius in particulari.... Generalis intentio faciendi quodfacit Ecclesia praevalet par­ ticulari.' ('Commentarium in Tertiam Pariem Summae', quaest. 64, art. 8: Antwerp 16x8.)

20

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(l)

Some restriction to this view, admittedly, is required. The authors mentioned, who discuss the effect of two simultaneous contrary intentions, would not admit that a merely logical sub­ ordination of one to the other must always produce a corre­ sponding subordination in reality, for they concede that the particular can prevail over the general intention if the will so determines.1 The rule they give is that if one of the two intentions is willed conditionally and die other absolutely, this latter prevails, even if it be the particular and private intention of the individual. This conditioning of one intention to the other can be either explicit or implicit. Now what if—and this is what is relevant in the case of the early Anglican ordinations—the minister does not realise, owing to error, that the intentions are incompatible with one another, and does not consciously make either conditional to the other? Apparently the answer of theologians and moralists of great name is that we must decide which intention the minister would have preferred to prevail ifhe had known that the two were incompatible, and it is that one which in fact prevails. St. Alphonsus Liguori himself can be cited in favour of this principle: 'Quaeritur, si minister habeat duas intentiones contrarias, quaenam debeat prae­ valere? ... Si voluntates istae sint simul, praevalet praedominans: nempe, quae eligeretur, cognita incompossibilitate.’2 To apply this to the case of the Elizabethan Anglican ordina­ tions is not difficult. Let it be granted that Barlow and the others, as well as having a general intention to do what Christ instituted and the Apostolic Church did (or at least to act as Christian ministers), had also a contrary intention not to ordain to a sacrificing priesthood, and owing to error they did not realise that the intentions were mutually incompatible. If they had known for certain that Christ really instituted a sacrificing priest­ hood, would they still have insisted on deliberately willing to 1 So Sylvius himself says: 'Si autem nollet facere quod Ecclesia Romana facit, etiamsi esset vera Christi Ecclesia, et sequeretur Christi institutionem, sacramentum non subsisteret’ (ibid., p. 191). 1 Theologia Moralis, Liber VI, tract. 1, n. 24. Modem authors, too, can be cited as following St. Alphonsus in applying this principle to sacramental intentions: e.g. Merkelbach, Summa Theologiae Moralis (Paris 1936): De Sacramentis, n. 83. As will be seen below, however (pp. 125-8), the words of St. Alphonsus are qualified by their context.

21

ANGLICAN ORDERS

exclude it? Who still calling himself a Christian minister would have such a diabolically perverse state of mind? Even the most impassioned controversialist would hesitate to affirm as certain that the wills of those Protestant churchmen were so rooted in malice,1 and Leo ΧΠΙ would hardly have based his categorical decision on such an obscure surmise. We cannot, then, reasonably deny that those Anglican bishops had a general ‘Christian’ intention, and there is nothing to prove that they were so perverse that they would still have refused, if they had known the whole truth, to conform their will to what Christ actually willed in particular. Hence it would seem that we cannot reasonably deny that they were all the time implicitly intending what Christ and His Church do, and so had at least the minimum intention sufficient, according to accepted theological teaching, for sacramental validity. In the words of Adrian Fortescue, which both Dix and Ross quote with relish: ‘People who are not theologians never seem to understand how little intention is wanted for a sacrament.... The “implicit intention of doing what Christ instituted” means so vague and small a thing that one can hardly help having it—unless one deliberately ex­ cludes it’ This argument seems to be the ace that takes the final trick,2 and the more observant Anglican apologists, versed in the lore of the theologians, have played it with a flourish. The Rev. C. F. Hrauda, in a series of able and moderate articles in the review Reunion3 after quoting Bellarmine, St. Alphonsus and Sylvius, sums up: ‘... the only kind of defect of intention which can in­ validate a sacrament is where the minister deliberately does not intend to do what he knows or believes the Church does and Christ instituted.’4 1 A. W. Hutton, in The Anglican Ministry (Kegan Paul, 1879, p. 181), did go so far as to introduce that sinister hypothesis. Even he added: ‘But this is stated only as suggestive, and not as the real grounds on which Anglican ordinations are rejected.' In any case such a conjecture is impossible to prove: and it is a gratuitous and improbable charge to accuse the Reformers of speaking against their inner mind when they made such statements as this of Cranmer*s: ‘I would stand by the old Church, and which doctrine could be proved the elder, that I would stand unto.’ (Quoted by Lowndes, op. cit., p. 500.) * Yet even an ace can be trumped I • VoL V, No. 33-5 (1945-6). 4 Ibid., No. 33,p. 71.

22

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (l)

The same argument is hammered home at considerable length in Ciriot’s Apostolic Succession and Anglicanism,1 where great stress is placed on the parallelism between the case of Anglican ordina­ tions and that of the Methodist baptisms in Oceania. He subjects to a dose criticism Dr. E. C. Messenger’s treatment ofthe question,2 and draws &om his adversary’s own admissions arguments to refute him. Λ sufficient implicit sacramental intention is present, he concludes, in any case where there is present the sincere intention *to do what God or Christ does or wills to be done’. And that intention, be­ cause it is unconditional, is sufficient to prevail over not only the absence of the explicit intention that ideally ought to be present, but even over an explicit intention to the contrary, as long as the latter is only conditional. And it is only conditional in die case of every heretic who is not consciously and deliberately saying to God, ‘Neverthe­ less, not Thy will but mine be done*.

This same reasoning had already been appealed to before the appearance of the Bull by Denny and Lacey in their De Hierarchia Anglicana,3 where they marshalled a not inconsiderable array of supporting authority. Most explicit and useful for their purpose were these words of Cardinal Franzelin, often dted since in this connection:

The sacrament can truly be said to be valid,'provided that the minister, by his general intention, will to confer baptism in the same way that Christians usually confer it, even if by a special inten­ tion he should will not to do what the Church does: for example, if 1 Lexington, 1946, pp. 362-91: Chapter XXX, ’The Attack on Our Intention.’ 1 Contained in the ’Concluding Theological Essay’ of Volume Π of The Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood (Longmans, 1937) csp. pp. 678-96 and 713-21. This richly-documentcd work (which will be referred to in the following pages as R.M.P.) is very useful for the study of the history of the Anglican Orders controversy. It must be confessed, however, that the author’s treatment of the intention (which is token by many to repre­ sent the authoritative Catholic exposition of the question), is somewhat obscure. Con­ fronted with the conflicting opinions and interpretations, he has set some of them down side by side, but without sufficiently indicating their different points de dtpart. The general effect may well be to leave the reader wondering what exactly is the defect of intention in the case, and how the statement in Apostolicae Curae is to be defended. Dr. Messenger, as will be seen below, did in places show a preference for one definite interpretation, but it is one that is open to question. • De Hierarchia Anglicana Dissertatio Apologetica, by E. Denny and T. A. Lacey (London, C. J. Chy and Sons, 1895), pp. 90-6.

23

ANGLICAN ORDERS

he should will that the baptism (which he sincerely wills to confer, namely the baptism of Christians) should not be a sacrament; if he should will not to sanctify the person baptised, etc., or should will not to do what the Roman Church does, (thinking that she does not possess true baptism etc.).... It is necessary, however, that all these contrary intentions should not be so absolute that they exclude and destroy the other intention (e.g., of consecrating, of contracting marriage etc.). ... It is a question ofdeciding, therefore, which of the two opposite intentions, which cannot both be efficacious at the same time, is the prevailing one.... If a man wills the exclusion of the sacrament, in such a way that, even if the sacramental doctrine were true, he would still will not to consecrate or contract marriage, he cannot, while he has such an effective contrary intention, efficaciously will the consecration or the marriage contract Generally speaking, such an effective ex­ clusion of the sacrament cannot be found, except in a case of de­ liberate and obstinate malice, of a kind very rarely met with in human minds.1

If this presentation of the matter is exact, argue the Anglican spokesmen, and only that rarest kind of contrary intention, one proceeding from a will of anti-Christian malice, can prevail over a general intention of conforming to what Christians do, then it is difficult to see how the invalidity of Anglican ordinations through defect ofpersonal ministerial intention could be proved. It is not Anglicans only who have been persuaded by this argument. Fr. Jeremiah Crowe, writing before the Bull in the Irish Ecclesiastical 1 'Recte did potest valere sacramentum, dummodo minister intentione generali velit conferre baptistnum, ut solent illum conferre Christiani, etiamsi intentione spedali nolitfacere quod Ecclesia facit, id est, nolit ut baptismus, quem vult conferre sincere ceu baptismum Christianorum, sit sacramentum, nolit sanctificare baptizatum, etc., vel nolitfacere quodfacit Ecclesia Romana, quam putet non habere verum baptismum etc.... Has tamen omnes intentiones contrarias oportet non esse ita absolutas, ut intentionem alteram, e.g. consecrandi, contrahendi matrimonium etc., excludant et destruant.... Videndum ergo est, quaenam ex intentionibus oppositis, quae ambae simul non possunt esse efficaces, praevaleat. ... Qui absolute vult exclusionem sacramenti ita ut sub hypothesi veritatis sacramenti nolit consecrare aut contrahere, is non potest aim tali efficaci intentione opposita velle efficaciter consecrationem vel contractum. Generatim loquendo, talis exclusio efficax sacramenti non potest locum habere nisi ex reflexa, obstinata, et rarissime in animis humanis occurrente malitia. 'De Sacramentis in Genere (Rome 1868), pp. 225-6. To widen the Anglican case one could also quote other theologians in an apparently similar sense, and even Suarez: 'Hic autem modus intentionis vix haberi potest, moraliter loquendo: requirit enim nimiam quondam reflexionem actuum ex odio aut maxima quadam per­ tinacia profectam' (De Sacramentis, Disp. ΧΙΠ, see. 2). But see pp. 130-1 below.

24

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (l)

Record, presented it cogently, and concluded that Barlow's ministerial intention must have been sufficient. He considers the possibility of a contrary intention against conferring the power of the sacrament, and complains: 'Considerable confusion is caused by the vague manner in which this aspect of the case is considered by some writers....’ He says that generally speaking such a contrary intention cannot override a basic intention to act as minister of Christ, and adds: An extreme case yet remains. The power to produce the effects mentioned is intrinsic to the Sacrament of Orders. Therefore if in every hypothesis, even in the hypothesis that those effects were instituted by Christ, they be efficaciously excluded, then the con­ secrating prelate ... acts on his own responsibility; he is not a minister of Christ. ... But on this extreme case Franzelin remarks: ... [here he quotes the last sentence in the passage given above] ‘This, then, is an extreme case, a mere hypothesis; and we have no right to assume that it is verified in Barlow’s case. There is no evidence whatever of such perverse malignity on his part; and however here­ tical his beliefs were, and those of his political rulers, we are not warranted in heaping iniquity on his head needlessly and gratui­ tously. It appears to me then that no false doctrine of Barlow dis­ lodged this one dominant idea from his mind, viz, that he was acting as the minister of Christ.1 1 ‘Anglican Orders and the Doctrine of Intention*, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol. XVI.

1895i PP· 7-17. csp. p. 16. This article was later reprinted in the Revue Anglo-Romaine, Tom. Π, 1895-6, No. 17, p. 783 seq.

25

Chapter Two DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (II) (c) The minister s intentio circa significationem formae

Some Catholic writers, seeing the weight of these objections, yet also persuaded that it is the mental intention of the minister that is in question, have attempted to reconcile the difficulties by distinguishing two kinds of ‘intention of the minister’. There is the ‘intention of doing what Christ or the Church does’, con­ sidered in the previous section, and on this score they concede that Anglican ordinations cannot be impugned; but there is also to be considered the ‘intention of the minister determining the otherwise indeterminate language of a form to a defective sense, when the form is ambiguous’.1 It is this latter defective intention, they affirm, that constitutes a root of nullity for Anglican Orders by imparting invalidity to the sacramental form. This is not the same interpretation as that already considered above in section (a), under the heading of the ‘intention of the framers of the Ordinal’, although the two arguments present some similarities. In both cases it is assumed that ambivalent wording of a ritual form can be so determined by a human intention that it becomes substantially defective.2 In the first case, however, it is the original intention of the authors of the rite, Cranmer and his associates, that is held to impart a permanent defect to the other­ wise ambiguous form, whereas in this interpretation it is only by an act of will on the part of the minister actually using the form that it is rendered invalid. On this hypothesis, the form would not 1 Le. one that from its free value is susceptible of either an orthodox or a heterodox significance. ’ And conversely, that ifthe intention is orthodox, the form becomes sufficient for a valid sacrament.

26

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (π)

be permanently vitiated and the defect would have to be proved for individual cases (notably the consecration of Parker), by investigating what the minister concerned intended the ambiguous form to mean when he used it. The principle appealed to here has respectable antiquity and authority. St. Thomas can be quoted in favour of it,1 and the post-Tridentine theologians discuss it and with hardly any ex­ ceptions2 admit it. It is invoked to explain the famous decision which Pope St. Zachary sent to St. Boniface in Germany in the year 746, concerning the position of those baptised by an un­ lettered priest who used the form, ‘Ego baptizo te in nomine Patria et Filia et Spiritus Sancta*. The Pope declared: Si illequibaptizavit, nonerroremintroducens aut haeresim, sed pro sola igno­

rantia rotnanae locutionis, infringendo linguam, ut suprafati sumus dixisset, non possumus consentire ut denuo baptizentur.

If the man who baptised spoke the words we have quoted above, not to introduce some error or heresy, but only on account of ignorance of the T21 tin tongue, making a linguistic mis­ take, we cannot consent that those persons should be baptised afresh

Several theologians explain this decision by saying that the wording of the form was rendered ambiguous by the change made —it could be understood either in its proper sense or as intro­ ducing some strange heresy or absurdity. Which sense it did actually bear depended on the will of the minister. In the case on which Zachary pronounced, it seems that the minister meant to express the orthodox sense, so his mutilation did not make the form substantially defective, but if he had meant by those words to express some Trinitarian heresy the sacrament would have been invalid propter defectumformae.3 For this teaching can be found support from representatives of 1 Summa Theologica, Pars in, quaest. (So, art. 8. 1 Vazquez appears to be an exception, from his remarks in his Commentarium in Tertiam Partem Summae, Disp. 129, cap. 6, infine. 1 So Sylvius, for example, discussing whether the validity of a form can depend ex intentione proferentis, replies: Ίη mutatione quae reddit sensum ambiguum, attendenda est intentio ministri; si enim sua mutatione sic intendat introducere errorem ut non verum sensum formae sed falsum significare velit, mutatio erit substantialis, et ex defectu formae sacramentum non subsistet; ut si baptizans “in nomine Patris et filiae, etc" intenderet significare quod in divinis sit filia.* (Commentarium in Summam, in art. cit.: quoted by Messenger, R.M.P., VoL 11, p. 686.)

27

ANGLICAN ORDERS

all the great schools—John of St Thomas,1 and the Salmanticenses,2 Suarez3 and Franzelin,4 and the Scotist Herinckx,6 as well as from the moralists.® Arriaga makes a convenient terminological distinction, of which much use will be made in the following pages, between the two kinds of ministerial intention—intentio faciendi and intentio circa significationem.1 Canon Estcourt applied this doctrine to the question of Anglican ordinations in his book, The Question ofAnglican Orders discussed, which, published in 1873,8 had a considerable influence on the subsequent controversies. He was prepared to abandon the charge that the Anglican form, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum—Take the Holy Ghost, was per se invalid, in view of what he thought was the fact that the Holy See had admitted as sufficient that very formula in the case of the Abyssinian ordinations.9 This decision he compared to ‘the bursting of a gun among the allied forces so as to lay open the position’, but he believed that by hastening to the defence with the counter-argument which he had prepared he could make the breach safe. By applying the principle just explained, he concluded that because die Abyssinian Abuna, when using those indeterminate words to ordain, was intending to give them an orthodox sense, his ordinations were valid; whereas the sixteenth century Anglican bishops, constrained by their errors on the Sacrament of Order, 1 De Saaamentis in Genere, Disp. 22, a. 8, n. 21 (Paris ed. 1886, Tom. IX, p. 95). * De Sacramentis in Communi, Disp. 2, dub. 6, n. 90 (Paris and Brussels, Tom. XVII, p.164.) ’ De Sacramentis, Disp. 2, sect 5, infine. 4 De Saaamentis in Genere, Thesis 5, corollarium; (Rome and Turin, 1868, pp. 48-9.) • De Saaamentis, Disp. 2, q. 3, n. 20 (Opera, Antwerp 1660, Tom. IV, p. 133)· 4 E.g., Laymann, Theol. Moral., Lib. V, tr. 1, cap. 4, n. 5 (Munich 1630). 7 ‘Non loquor de intentionefaciendi saaamentmn; ab hac enim etsi propositio non sit aeqttivoca, semper tamen pendet saaamenti valor; sed loquor de intentione circa significationem.’ (Disputa­ tiones Theologicae, Tom. VII, Disp. 7, sect. 2; Antwerp 1655» p· 78·) * Burns Oates. His account of the Abyssinian decision is on pp. 190-3. His counter­ argument is developed in Chapter VI, especially p. 241 and pp. 243-4. Estcourt does also at times combine with this the rather different argument from the objective ‘intention of the rite* which will be discussed below. • In this he was mistaken, as Franzelin demonstrated. The alleged decree of the Holy Office of 10 April 1704 was in reality the private opinion of an individual consultor, not a declaration of the Holy See; and the reply of 9 May i860 to the Vicar Apostolic for the Copts was not concerned with the sufficiency of the form at all, but only with the matter used in Abyssinian ordinations. Cf. Report of Cardinal Vaughan's Commission of 1896, pp. 60-1, and S. M. Brandi, S.J., Rome et Cantorbdry (Paris 1898), pp. 214-21 and 281-6.

28

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (π)

did not and could not supply the words with the required ortho­ dox determination, and so their ordinations were null from de­ fect of form. Estcourt had had a precursor in applying this argument to Anglican ordinations, in the celebrated historian of liturgy, Renaudot, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He, however, had used it rather as a retorsio argumenti—if the Anglicans claimed that the indeterminate form could have been determined by the intention of the minister using it, the con­ sequence was against them rather than for them: On pourroit peut-£tre objecter que les paroles de la Forme de I’Ordination de Parker, quoiqu’elles fussent g£n£rales et indeterminees en elles-memes, auroient ρύ etre determinces έ I’Ordination Episcopale, surtout celles-d, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, par 1’intention du Consecrateur ou Ministre de Γ Ordination. Mais bien loin que cette consideration soit d’aucun secours dans le cas present, elle rend la cause encore pire. L’Offidant ou Ministre de I’Ordination de Parker dtoit, scion les Protestants, Barlow.... Or, si jamais on a eu raison de soupconner 1’intention d’un Ministre de I’Ordination d’un Eveque, on a lieu plus forte raison de soupgonner celle de Barlow. ... Au reste, quand je supose que 1’intention de Barlow pouvoit contribucr έ la Nullitd de I’Ordination qu’il donna έ Parker, je ne le dis que supose les paroles vagues et aplicables i route autre c6r6monie qu’l I’Ordination d’un Eveque, dont Barlow se servit dans celle de Parker, suivant le Rituel d’Edouard VLX The unaccustomed yet solidly reasoned solution brought into prominence by Estcourt soon won favour among the more theologically-minded protagonists of the Catholic case in Eng­ land, and in the disputes of the ’nineties it was put forward (as a subsidiary argument) by Fr. Sydney Smith, S.J. A letter of Cardinal Vaughan’s, published by The Times on 5 October 1894, precipitated a heated controversy in those columns, in which the question of intention soon became the chief point at issue. Although Cardinal Vaughan had not in fact meant in that letter to allege the defect of ministerial intention in Anglican ordinations, his opponents understood him to have done so, for a 1 Memoire, printed by Le Quien as an appendix to his La Nullitd des Ordinations Anglicanes ... centre la Defense du R.P. Courayer (Paris X730, Part a, p. 29a).

D

29

ANGLICAN ORDERS

paragraph in his letter was somewhat misleading. They replied with a tw quoque, claiming that the Roman Catholics’ doctrine requiring ‘internal intention’ in the minister rendered all their own Orders and other sacraments uncertain. It was then that Sydney Smith entered the lists. He first denied that Cardinal Vaughan had referred to the intention of the consecrators, and set forth the argument (explained above, pp. 1317) from the ‘intention of the framers’.1 In a second letter, however, while again pointing out that the Cardinal had not re­ ferred to the internal intention of the minister, he took the op­ portunity to explain: We do consider the intention of the minister to be important under this latter aspect.... Standard Catholic writers like Canon Estcourt ... consider what would be the result if a slightly more favourable view of the [Anglican rite] could be taken, and it could be regarded as merely ambiguous. ... In that case the question at once arises whether the intention of the consecrators was such as to determine the ambiguity in a sense favourable or unfavourable to the orders, and the conclusion follows that it is unfavourable, Barlow and his colleagues being all pronounced anti-sacerdotalists.... It is in this bearing, and this alone, that Catholics inquire into the meaning of the early Anglican prelates when they undertook to consecrate.2

Sydney Smith reiterated this argument in more detail in articles in The Tablet and The Month, and especially in a C.T.S. pamphlet entitled, The Doctrine of Intention (1895). Here he again insisted that the Anglicans’ tu quoque about the uncertainty of relying on inner ministerial intention was quite irrelevant to the question under discussion:

As a retort it fails, because the kind of intention which we miss in Parker’s consecrator—the defect which we think would of itself, even if there were no other reason, have nullified the orders he conveyed—is quite distinct from the kind of intention which 1 *The Cardinal has used the word "intention", and your Anglican correspondents... have understood him to refer to the internal intention of such a consecrator as Barlow.... The Cardinal’s reference was not to any internal intention on the part of the consecrator, but to the external intention impressed on the new rite itself by the very nature and pur­ pose ofits construction.. (Letter of 15 October 1894.) ’ The Times, 17 October 1894, p. 7.

30

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (π)

Anglicans think must have been so often missing in the admini­ stration ofsacraments among ourselves... ,1

It is only on the supposition that the words of the Anglican form are ambiguous, and could just suffice to bear a Catholic sense, ifso determined by the minister who used them, that ... we are led to inquire into the intention ofBarlow (and the others). ... We ask whether when he said the words, ‘Take the Holy Ghost, etc.’, he meant by them the interior consecration of a Catholic bishop.... This, and this only, is the aspect under which we raise the question of intention in connection with Anglican Orders, and draw therefrom a conclusion adverse to them.8

In June 1896, while the question of the validity of the Orders was already nearing its decision in Rome, S. Harent, S.J. was urging the same argument in Etudes.3 Anglican ordinations, he maintained, could not be attacked on the ground of defect of the minister’s intentio faciendi quod facit Ecclesia; however his intentio circa significationem was defective, and therefore there was defect of form:

Dans notre cas la forme est Iquivoque, et par consequent son sens dipend de celui qui la prononce; s’il ne 1’entend pas dans le sens voulu par J&us-Christ, le sacrement est mil, faute de forme (ex defectu formae) et non pas, quon le remarque bien, faute d’intention ginirale de faire ce que fait I’Eglise. Cette intention gdnirale, nous ne la refusons pas aux dveqttes anglicans, passis etprisentsf Consequently it is pointless and misleading, he adds, to bring in objections about contrary and predominant intentions: the intentio faciendi and the intentio circa significationem refer to quite different spheres. The former may be completely predominant and valid in its own sphere, as he concedes in the case of the Anglican bishops, but the defect of the second still nullifies the sacrament by inducing a defect of form.6 1 The Doctrine ofIntention, p. x. * Ibid., p. 4. Sydney Smith also reproduced the arguments of his earlier articles in a C.T.S. booklet, Reasonsfor Rejecting Anglican Orders (189$) esp. pp. 142-5. * Tome 68, pp. 177 scq.: 'La forme sacramentelle dans les ordinations anglicanes.* 4 Art. cit., pp. 197-8. Italics mine. 4 Ibid., p. 199.

31

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Despite such confident assertions this argument fell almost com­ pletely from favour after the publication of Apostolicae Curae, and only a few have ventured since to claim that Leo XIII meant the ‘defect of intention in this sense.1 The reasons for this silence are not far to seek. First there is the plain fact that the Bull does refer expressly to the intentio faciendi quod facit Ecclesia. Moreover the Pope declares defective that intention which is always necessary for the existence of a valid sacrament—as indispensable as the sacramental form itself: ‘quam aeque necessario postulat, ut sit, sacramentum*. Now an orthodox intentio circa significationem is not always necessary—it may be quite lacking in a heretic, yet his sacrament may be quite valid. All the authors cited agree that, if the language of the form is unequivocal and accepted by the Church (as in the vast majority of cases), no amount of perverse intentio circa significationem on the part ofthe minister can make the form substantially defective.2 Thus an orthodox intentio circa significationem can hardly be that always necessary intention of which the Pope speaks. Then again, this view makes the defect ofintention not a second, separate defect, but either merely a preliminary stage for estab­ lishing the defect of form, or an additional confirmation ofit. The Pope should not, according to this interpretation, have said that Anglican ordinations were invalid on account of defect of form and also on account of defect of intention, but at the most on account of defect ofform established by two proofs. Against this view there is also the obvious objection that the Pope does not admit that the case of Anglican ordinations is one in which the form is left open to further determination—and the 1A year after the Bull, F. Toumebize, writing in Etudes, assumed that the argument was indudol in the Bull. (Vol 72, pp. 500-3, *La Rdponse des Archdvcques Anglicans έ la lettre de L^on XHI stir les Ordinations Anglicanes.’) Christian Pesch also seems to have retained this explanation in successive editions, even after the Bull, of his Praelectiones Dogmaticae (Vol. VI, p. 226 and note). The view has been revived in recent years by Dr. Messenger (Die Reformation, the Mass and the Priesthood, Vol. II, esp. pp. 686-9 and p. 714). It commends itself to some as a seemingly adequate solution which explains the defect of intention, while by-passing the thorny technicalities of sacramental intention in the strict sense. ’ That does not mean, of course, that they would admit that the sacrament is necessarily valid in such a case. Most of them, as we shall see, would hold that there could be in such a case a defective intentiofaciendi, although not a defect ofform.

32

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(π)

argument under review has no point except on that supposition. He clearly decides that the form as it appeared originally in the Ordinal of Edward VI was permanently defective. To base his argument on the hypothesis that the sense remained open would be to introduce a disjunction into the Bull which is plainly not there. The defect of ‘intention’ would not be found side by side (conjunctus)1 with the already certain defect of form that the Pope has just been explaining, but would be an alternative proof of the defect of form, depending on another hypothesis—namely that the form was ambivalent and its defect not already and per­ manently certain. It is interesting to find that Estcourt’s argument had been sub­ jected to examination by the Holy See twenty years before Apostolicae Curae. After the appearance of his book in 1873 his suggestion that the Anglican form was not per se invalid was taken up by Cardinal Manning, who proposed a dubium to the Holy Office, asking whether from the (supposed) decision in the Abyssinian case of 1704 anything could be inferred in favour of the form used for Anglican Orders. The reply was 'Negative9. Franzelin was the theologian consuitor, and his votum is of considerable interest, as its reasoning about the defectiveness of the Anglican form is strikingly similar to that later adopted in Apostolicae Curae. Extracts from the second part of this votum, concerned with the Coptic liturgy, were published by Brandi after the Bull, but the first part, dealing directly with Anglican Orders, has never been published in full. A copy made by Dom Adnan Gasquet from the records of the Holy Office, in April 1895, is now in the Westminster archives. Franzelin sets forth the evidence to show that the Anglican form was substantially defective in itself, because in its first appearance it manifestly excluded all that signified the power of consecrating, the priesthood and sacrifice. He shows that he does not feel it necessary to consider whether the significance of the form was vitiated by an internal 'intentio circa significa­ tionem* of the minister, since it is clear that it was vitiated by the 1 Cf. p. 7 above, para. (p).

33

ANGLICAN ORDERS

public setting in which the form appeared.1 In this he follows the same reasoning as that which was to be adopted in Apostolicae Curae, (Cf. Chapter Nine below, ‘The Defect of Form’, pp. 186-8, where Franzelin’s argument is quoted fully.) This verdict of Franzelin’s may explain why the commission set up by Cardinal Vaughan in 1895, to present the case against Anglican Orders, did not urge Estcourt’s argument in their re­ port,2 despite the prominent place it had had in the recent contro­ versies in England. Gasquet, who had shortly before made the copy of the votum of 1875, was one of the members of that com­ mission. In their theological argument the authors of the report follow the lines already marked out by Franzelin. Like him, they place the main weight on the objective insufficiency of the form in the original Ordinal. Like him, they do not urge as a cause of in­ validity that the intention of the ordaining ministers imparted a defective sense to an ambiguous form. ★

★

★

★

★

We have seen, then, that the minister’s intentio circa significa­ tionem, determining an ambiguous form in an unorthodox sense, cannot be the defective intention which Pope Leo assigned as the second root ofinvalidity in Anglican ordinations. It is just possible, however, to interpret one phrase in the Bull as containing a re­ ference to the intentio circa significationem. The Pope has declared that, in view of certain facts which he has enumerated, 'tunc palam est, non solum necessariam sacramento intentionem deesse, sed intentionem immo haberi sacramento adversam et repugnantem.9 (See p. 8 above, para, (5)) In this sentence he seems to distinguish 1 ‘Exclusio hate significationis nonest ex interna et occulta dumtaxat Intentione ministri ordi­ nantis, ne ingredi necesse sit quaestionem illam...; sed imo ipse ritus externus totus mutatus est, catholicus repudiatus, novus secundum publicam professionem haereticam adoptatus ad hunc Jinem ut exterminaretur significatio potestatis sacerdotalis... .* (De Decreto Sacrae Congregationis circa formam Sacrae Ordinationis in ritu Coptico eiusdemque decreti relatione ad praetensos Ordines in secta anglicana: Votum P. J. Bapt. Franzelin, S.J. Consultoris. Dated March 187$: cap. 1, p. 8.) * Ordines Anglican!: Expositio Historica et Theologica. Cura et Studio Commissionis ab Em.o et Rev.o D.D. Herberto Cardinali Vaughan ad hoc institutae; printed privately, London 1896. It was to serve for the use of the Roman Commission and as a corrective to the De Hierarchia Anglicana of Denny and Lacey.

34

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(π)

between ‘the intention necessary to the sacrament*, which is here wanting (hence the veritable dejectus intentionis),1 and what seems to be a further ‘intention which is adverse and repugnant to the sacrament’. What does this distinction mean? On a later page (pp. 161-2) a different and, it would seem, far more likely interpretation will be proposed, but here it will suffice to say that it is just possible to read in this last phrase, about an intentio sacramento adversa et repugnans, a passing reference to the intentio circa significationem of Estcourt and Sydney Smith. Even if this be the case, however, it is important to notice what place the Pope assigns to the point Estcourt had put it for­ ward as a principal theological argument. For him Anglican Orders were invalid because the succession had been broken at the outset by a defect of form in the first ordinations; and that defect of form was conclusively proved by the circumstance that the Anglican sacramental form had been rendered ambiguous, and had been vitiated in use by a defective intentio circa significa­ tionem on the part of the early ministers of the sacrament. Pope Leo’s procedure is different. First he has indicated that there is a permanent and objective defect in the Anglican form,2 which is not merely ambiguous and open to further determina­ tion, but substantially vitiated, quite independently of any in­ tentio circa significationem on the minister’s part. Secondly, there is a defect of that always necessary intention, without which the sacrament cannot subsist (and this, as we have seen, cannot be the intentio circa significationem: it is in feet the intentio faciendi of the minister). Those are the two cardinal defects of form and of in­ tention. Then the Pope adds, (‘won solum ... sed immo’) there is even an intentio sacramento adversa et repugnans. On the unlikely hypothesis that that phrase does add a reference to the intentio circa significationem urged by Estcourt, it would be a subsidiary argument, ex abundantia. The form is already known to be per­ manently defective for other reasons, but in the early ordinations there could also be assigned an additional ground of its defeedve1 That is, as will be seen below, defect of the intentiofaciendi. 1 Ad analysis of his argument is given in Chapter Nine below, ‘The Defect of Form.'

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ANGLICAN ORDERS

ness—the heretical sense attached to the form by the ministers will. Even if, then, the intentio circa significationem is here referred to by the Pope, we must mark carefully that it is not one of the two principal reasons on which he bases his condemnation. One or two Catholic defenders of the Bull, who have assumed that it was, have given an opening to the charge of circular reasoning which Lacey was not slow to bring against them in 1896,1 and which others have repeated since. For if the Anglican pre­ lates’ intentio circa significationem constituted the decisive defect of intention, then it must have been applied to a sacramental form which was not yet certainly defective, but ambiguous and awaiting determination. But how are we certain that the ministers* intentio circa significationem was defective? Because, say other Catholic apologists, they used a sacramental form which was certainly defective! Dr. Messenger, who revived the view of Estcourt and Sydney Smith, avoided this circular pitfail,2 but his presentation of die argument is open to the objections outlined above, and to others besides. Sydney Smith and Harent had been carefill to keep distinct the intentio circa significationem from the intentio faciendi, pointing out that they were in quite different orders. Dr. Messenger, however, does not always keep the two clearly distinct, and it must be confessed that his attempts to apply to one the principles that apply properly only to the other, lead to no litde confusion. One can feel a certain sympathy with the bewilderment of Cirlot as he wresdes with the resulting argument.3 1 Cfp.ix above. * Obviously, ifwe were to argue that a form is defective because ofa defective intention, and that the intention is defective because it manifests itself in a defective form, we should be guilty of arguing in a circle. In point of fact Anglicans have made this charge against Pope Leo's Apostolicae Curat, but quite unjustifiably. What Pope Leo, and we ourselves have done is to show that the Anglican form of ordination is, to say the least, ambiguous, taken in itself We must go outside the rite itself to determine its meaning. This meaning can indeed be established by wramining the intention of the Anglican Reformers, but obviously only because their intention has been manifested externally, not only in the ordination rite (which is supposed to be ambiguous), but in other ways which are not at all ambiguous.* (Those ways, he explains, are the other heretical sayings and doings of the Reformers.) R.M.P., VoL II, p. 7S4. • Apostolic Succession and Anglicanism, by the Rev. Felix L. Cirlot (Lexington, 1946). Chap. XXX. To realise that these two ‘intentions’ are governed by quite different prin-

36

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (π)

Moreover, on Dr. Messenger’s premises, there is mo certainty that the Anglican form is finally and irrevocably defective. The form, Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, taken in isolation, he holds to be ambiguous, that is, requiring further determination. It was deter­ mined in a defective sense by the intention of those who used it in the setting of the Reformation. But what if, in the setting of today, a validly consecrated bishop, who could not be suspected of heresy, used the Anglican form with a full and sincere intention of conferring the sacrament of Order, with all its sacerdotal and sacrificial powers? This is an actual case, and one of considerable interest, for in recent years Old Catholic bishops have joined in the consecration of Anglican bishops. In die cases of which we have record,1 an Old Catholic bishop laid hands on the bishops elect at the same time as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and pronounced the words Accipe Spiritum Sanctum. The ceremony was, of course, conducted according to the ritual of the Ordinal. Would the orthodox intentio circa significationem of the Old Catholic bishop be enough to determine the formula Accipe Spiritum Sanctum to a sufficient significance, and so bring about a valid form and a valid sacrament? Dr. Messenger, though reluctant to concede that it would, could not, in accordance with his own premises, answer a definite‘No*: ‘At the most, one might say that there is just a bare possibility that such an episcopal consecration might be valid: there is and can be no certainty on the point.’2 To this may be opposed the words of Pope Leo, who seems to affirm that there is certainty on the point that the Anglican rite can never be valid:

Moreover incapable as [the Ordinal] was of conferring valid orders by reason of its original defectiveness, and remaining as it did in that condition, there was no prospect that with the passage oftime it would dples, one has only to reflect that the ministerial intentio faciendi can be quite vague and general and yet be valid, as in the case of a pagan baptising and intending ’to do what Christians do‘; whereas an intentio circa significationem, if it is to be of any value in de­ termining an ambiguous form, cannot be vague and general, but must specify what sacra­ ment or what grace or power is to be conferred. 1 C£ references on p. ιοί below, n. a. ’ Vol. Π, p. 7*7·

37

ANGLICAN ORDERS

become capable of conferring them.... Even though some of the words in the Anglican Ordinal as it now stands may present the possibility of ambiguity, they cannot be given the same sense as they have in a Catholic rite.1 And the Pope goes on to explain that the formula ‘Receive the Holy Ghost1, as found in the Anglican rite, has been deprived ofall force (‘iatn minime constat*). It will be necessary to say something more about this perma­ nent and irremediable invalidity of the Anglican rite in the chapter on the defect of form. Here it is enough to note that, even if it be true that some ambiguous or indeterminate formulae can be made into valid sacramental forms by the determination of the minister’s inner will, the Catholic theologian has for his guidance Leo XHTs emphatic affirmation that the Anglican form is not one ofthem. We have seen enough of the intentio circa significationem to realise that it is not the quarry of our present pursuit. If not alto­ gether a red herring drawn across the trail, it has at least had the effect of confusing the search, ever since Estcourt first brought it on the scene eighty years ago. Still, the time spent in tracking it down is by no means lost, for now we shall no longer be misled by a false scent. The notions here clarified will also be found usefill when we come to inquire into the defect ofform. *****

(d) The antecedent motive of the minister, influencing his choice of matter andform

After the appearance of the Bull, Canon Moyes, one of the three members of the Westminster Commission (who also served on the preliminary Roman Commission of 1896), pro­ duced still another variant interpretation of the Pope’s pro­ nouncement on intention. An expert on liturgical history, he dealt ably with the defect of form through sixteen long articles in The Tablet, in the first half of 1897, and when at last, in the seventeenth, he turned to the defect of intention, he showed him1 Apostolicae Curae, see p. 5 above, para. (0, and p. 6, pan. (mi),

38

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS

(π)

self aware of and somewhat embarrassed by the difficulty of explaining it. He allows that it is the intention of the ordaining minister that is referred to by the Pope. Yet it cannot be the sacramental inten­ tion in the ordinary sense—the ‘intention to act as minister for Christ’, the intentio faciendi, for the Reformers may well have had that, he thinks, and their heretical designs could not overthrow it: When, therefore, the Bull Apostolicae Curae declares Anglican Orders to be null and void, and adduces among the grounds of such in­ validity ‘defect of intention it must not be imagined that by in­ tention is here meant the attitude of mind in the minister towards the inward work. ... It is quite true that any unbelief or perversity which may exist in my minH as a minister consenting to act for Christ will not enable me to spoil the inward work which is done by Christ Himself.1 Canon Moyes admits accordingly that there are two kinds of intention of the minister*; but not wishing to maintain that Leo ΧΙΠ relied on the argument from the inner intentio circa signifi­ cationem, as advanced by Estcourt, Sydney Smith, Harent and others, (for that would be to admit that the form was not per­ manently defective, contrary to what he has demonstrated in his previous articles), he proposes as the second kind, not a deliberate intention giving determination to ambiguous language, but the motive which leads the minister to the actual use of this or that matter and form. Because of the Protestant mind and purpose of the early Anglicans, they were led on to adopt in practice a form which was, even if they did not realise it, invalid. It was in this sense, the author claims, that a faulty intention was the cause, at least mediately, of the invalidity ofthe sacrament:

The Bull, as its terms very clearly imply, speaks of Intention, not as it bears direcdy on the inward work—for the Intention of the minister need never do that. But it speaks of Intention in so much as it bears upon the outward work, the use and choice of the Matter and Form 1 The Tablet, 3 July 1897, p. 7. It is evident that the common teaching of theologians would require some qualification of the author's statements. Cf. p. 59 seq. below.

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ANGLICAN ORDERS

I may not believe in spiritual regeneration, and I may detest the doctrine, and wish to exclude such an effect, but if I intend to act for Christ and use the outward sign, my heretical animus will hurt only myself and not the Sacrament.... But my unbelief and perversity may affect that part of my intention which directs itself to the use of the Matter and Form. They may influence that intention in such a way that I no longer intend to use the Matter and Form which Christ defacto instituted.... In this case, it is plain that my intention, in so far as it bears upon the use ofthe Matter and Form instituted, is defective. The Sacrament is rendered invalid. Its invalidity is primarily and proximately due to defect of Matter and Form. But connected with this defect and lying behind it, there is a defect which pertains to the sphere of intention. To wit, that part of Sacramental intention which directs itself to the use of due Matter and Form... has been deficient.1

This explanation, somewhat involved yet at the same time somewhat sitnpliste, does not meet the case. Apart from the ob­ jection that it reduces the defect of intention to a mere preamble to the defect of form, there is the difficulty that the division of ministerial intention into the two members distinguished by Canon Moyes is not an accepted theological use, and it is to the first only that theologians give the name of ‘sacramental in­ tention.2 The Church would hardly consider it necessary or use­ ful to declare defective the second kind of intention he describes. In his theory this secondary intention affects neither the primary intention of acting as a minister of Christ nor the intrinsic validity of the sacramenti rite, but at the most explains one of the his­ torical frctors which led to the use of the latter. Granted that it has been shown that the Anglican form was used and that it was invalid in itself it seems to add nothing material to the theological issue to go on to declare that the motives that led men to use it were reprehensible. If an ignorant and irreverent priest, thinking it valid matter for the Eucharist, were to use some cheap substi­ tute for wine because he intended to spend as little as possible on 1 Ibid., p. 7. Italia mine. * The author himself concedes: 'Questions concerning Sacramental Intention, treated by theologians, become almost always confined to that which we have described as the chief element—the subjection of the minister to Christ as the ChiefAgent.' (P. 7.)

40

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (π)

the service of the altar, the sacrament would be invalid propter defectum materiae, but who would say that the unworthy motive that led the minister to choose what was de facto invalid matter constituted a defectus intentionis in the technical sense? In point of feet, Mgr. Moyes’ interpretation has won no sup­ port from other commentators, and in his rejection of the doctrine of internal intention, he is at variance with die standard authors of today.

41

Chapter Three

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (III) (e) The external intention: i.e. the corporate intention of the Anglican Church ' For some or all of the reasons considered above, many have concluded that Pope Leo cannot after all have been referring to the personal intention ofthe ordaining ministers. Most Anglican authors, scouting the idea that sacramental validity could depend on the private will of an individual, assume that the intention referred to must be the general intention of the Anglican Church, which, as a corporate institution, has a per­ manent intention directing the conferring of sacraments within her communion. This notion is in accord with the rather un­ exacting requirements of Anglican divinity in the matter of sacramental intention, according to which it can be held that the inner state ofwill of the minister is irrelevant, his private intention disappearing in the general intention of his Church, which suf­ fices to supply any defect. This doctrine of ‘external intention’, for which is claimed the support of the sixteenth-century theo­ logian Catharinus, is now, in its extreme form, abandoned by Catholic theologians. (Even those few who in recent years have reacted towards the ‘Catharinian view cannot deny, in practice, that if the minister mentally excludes the sacramental intention he nullifies the sacrament, however correct his behaviour may appear externally.) Anglican divines, however, from the time of the first controversies at the end of the sixteenth century, have always viewed with favour the ‘externalist’ doctrine, also seeing therein a ready defence against the arguments already being brought, by the Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon and others, against the defective intention oftheir first ordaining bishops. 42

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

It is sometimes maintained that the defect of intention was an after­ thought of the Roman controversialists brought in as a substitute ob­ jection when the Nag’s Head story could no longer be defended. Yet we find defect of ministerial intention and defect of form as the two chief theological objections brought by Fitzsimon in his disputes with Francis Mason in the reign ofJames I. Replying to his opponent, who had urged that even heresy could not affect the episcopal powers of the consecrators, and therefore there could have been no impediment to validity in the first Anglican ordinations, Fitzsimon wrote: Ego ... iam superius indicavi impedi­ mentum grande, sublata nimirum vera ordinationis sub Eduardo sexto forma, debitaque intentione faciendi quod facit Ecclesia, tam in ordinante quam in ordi­ nato, impedimentum oppido ingens, quod nullae machinae Reformatorum amoliri valeant, hoc ipso ostenditur. Utroque enim deinceps intendente, explicitaque ac solemni declaratione profitente, sacer­ dotium verum se ac sacrum verum abiurare, et detestare; nulla ordinatio nisi forte informis, inopinata, cassa, irrita, inanis, concipi possit.1

I have already pointed out above a great impediment to validity, namely that under Edward VI there lacked die true form of ordination, and the intention of doing what die Church does—both in the minister and in the subject of ordination. There is an im­ pediment of gigantic size, which no engines of the Reformers can de­ molish. The matter is plain, for since both minister and subject intended, and professed with express and solemn declaration, to forswear and abhor the true priesthood and sacrifice, there could be no possibility ofordination— except perhaps an ordination which was invalid, of no account, defective, null and empty.

Mason replied to this, contending that inner intention could not vitiate the sacrament, in his Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae.* The same contention was vigorously repeated by the Anglicans’ eighteenth­ century French ally, Le Courayer.8

While Catholic theology has firmly asserted, especially after the condemnation by Alexander VTH of the Farvacques proposi­ tion in 1690,4 the importance of the personal will of the minister in sacramental efficacy, the Church of England has continued to require no more than a serious outward performance of the rite. 1 Britannomachia Ministrorum, Douay 1614, p. 319* * London, 1625, pp. 223-6. * A Defence of the Validity of Anglican Orders, trans, by D. Williams, London 1728, pp. 158-61. a Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1318; c£ p. 63 below.

43

ANGLICAN ORDERS

Jewel had written: ‘This is the very dungeon of uncertainty. The heart of man is unsearchable. If we stay upon the intention of a mortal man, we may stand in doubt of our own baptism.’1 Hooker, likewise: ‘What every man’s private mind is, as we cannot know, so neither are we bound to examine ..and ‘If Baptism seriously be administered in the same element and with the same form of words which Christ’s institution teacheth, there is no other defect in the world that can make it frustrate.’2 One of the most influential works from the Anglican side in this long controversy about orders was that of A. W. Haddan, Apostolical Succession in the Church of England, published in 1869. Many of the standard arguments of later apologists were taken, directly or indirectly, from this book.3 What Haddan has to say about intention is illuminating. It serves to explain why Anglicans and Catholics are so often at cross-purposes today when they argue about intention—because although they are using the same terminology they are not talking about the same thing. In an earlier passage, when dealing with the sufficiency of the Anglican form, Haddan remarked: ‘Behind this, no doubt, there still re­ mains the question, what is the intention of the English Church in giving this commission respecting the Sacraments, and inclusively the Holy Eucharist? and since the intention of the Church must be determined by her doctrine, what is her doctrine on the subject?’4 When he comes to treat specifically of‘intention’, he says: ‘But grant the sufficiency of the outward rite, ... there yet remains, besides matter and form, another requisite to the validity of orders, viz. a sufficient intention. That is to say, the words and act of ordina­ tion are not a charm, which imprints a character by the mere material use of the syllables of the one, and by the mere physical movements of the other; but they are the outward expression of a reasonable official transaction, by which the body of die Christian 1 Reply to Harding, 1611, p. 26; (quoted by Keble in a footnote to his edition of Hooker's Works, Oxford 1836, Vol. Π, p. 334). ’ Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. V, 58 and 62 (quoted by Langford-James, The Doctrine of In­ tention, p. 61). Works, edit. Keble, Vol. Π, p. 333. • C£ W. J. Seabury, in the preface to his Lectures on Haddan's Apostolical Succession (New York 1893, p. 3). 4 Op. cit. (Rivingtons 1869), p. 260.

44

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

Church, through its appointed ministers, and in the way sanctioned by divine authority, transmits, and intends to transmit, die promised grace of God for the special office of the ministry. The Church, then, must mean to convey the diaconate, or the priesthood, or the Episco­ pate. It may be indeed, and is, a question, up to what point a de­ fective conception of the office may go on the part (not of the individual ordainer, which matters nothing, but) of the Church in whose name he acts, before such defect must necessarily be taken to defeat the meaning of the act altogether. ... But, on the whole, it seems common sense, that orders which are conferred by a Church that does not in any sense mean to confer what ought to be meant by orders, must be, not indeed of necessity invalid absolutely, but certainly invalidfor the time and under the circumstances. [Italics mine] Intention, then, in some sense at any rate, is essential to ordination. ‘Let it be said, however, at the outset, that such intention, whatever it be, is the intention of the Church as expressed in her formal acts, not of the individual minister who ordains. What the private theological opinions of the ordainer may be, or what perverse thoughts may pass through his mind in consequence of these opinions or for any other reason, cannot possibly affect the validity of an act, which does not depend upon his will or power, but rests upon the promise of Christ; any more than his moral character can affect it. Popes like Alexander VIII may tell us, if they will, that a minister invalidates the rite by withdrawing his interior intention from it, even while complying with and enacting the whole range of the out­ ward expression by act and word. But common sense, and the mere mischief of such a position, sufficiently put aside a doctrine so pre­ posterous. . . . We need not concern ourselves, therefore, in the present case, with the opinions of individuals in the Church of England. Neither can the faulty theology of Bishop Barlow or of anyone else affect their official acts as Bishops, when those acts were performed duly and with every outward appearance of a serious performance of diem. . . . The formal intention of the Church, however, stands on another footing.’1 In Chapter Four it will be argued, in reply to contentions such as Haddan’s, that we can and must concern ourselves with the personal intentions of individuals in the Church of England, and of Bishop Barlow in particular; and that in Apostolicae Curae the term ‘defect 1 Ibid., pp. 265-9. P°r a similar doctrine about ‘corporate intention*, among nineteenths century German Protestants, see Schmidt, Symbolik (Leipzig 1890), pp. 321,455.

b

45

ANGLICAN ORDERS

of intention* does refer directly to the intention of the individual minister. In Catholic theology there is, it is true, an accepted use of the expression ‘intention of the Church*, but it is not the use em­ ployed by Haddan. Just as there is only one unchangeable and inde­ fectible Church, the one Mystical Body of Christ, so there is only one unchangeable and indefectible ‘intention of the Church* concerning the sacraments. There is never any need to test die validity of that intention, for it is the intention ofChrist Himself. There is no question of making that intention conform to some other norm, for it is itself the norm to which the intentions of all individual ministers of the sacraments must be conformed. (This is the use of the expression, for example, in the Legatine Faculties of Cardinal Pole, which he delegated to the Bishops of England in 1555. The Orders of the English clergy could be recognised, even if conferred by heretics and schismatics, 'dummodo in eorum collatione Ecclesiae forma et intentio sit servata (cf. R.M.P. 11, pp. 122-3)). theological language the term ‘intention of the Church' refers to the normative intention of the Catholic Church, not to the policies or doctrines of separated sects or bodies. Those policies and doctrines may be clearly heretical, and yet the personal intention of individual ministers of those sects may be sufficient for sacramental validity. On this point Haddan's view is more rigid than that of the Catholic theologians. It finds parallels, however, in the writings of Eastern Orthodox authors. Chrestos Androutsos, a Greek theologian, considered that not only ordinations but even baptisms performed in a church which has fallen into heresy are invalid (The Validity of English Ordinations from an Orthodox Catholic Point of View, trans, by F. W. Groves Campbell, London 1909» PP· 9-i8)· J· A- Douglas, in the preface to his translation of The Validity of Anglican Ordinations by Archbishop Chrysostom Papadopoulos of Athens, says: ‘Something very like a consensus of opinion exists among the Orthodox that Orders are dcfectible and can be invalidated by heresy’ (Faith Press 1930, p. xxvii). It is rather ironical that the Anglicans who agree with these rigid assertions are returning to an opinion which has been dis­ credited in the Western Church since the days of St. Augustine— and even earlier, from the time of Pope Stephen.I (cf. Denzinger, nn. 46-7); and particularly so, since the rigorist view opens a new vulnerable flank on which they must defend their Orders, a flank which is secure if they adopt the traditional teaching of the Roman Church on the matter! 46

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

E. Denny gave the ordinary view in the Church of England on ministerial intention when he wrote, three years before Apostolicae Curae, in his Anglican Orders and Jurisdiction:1 ‘All that is required is that (the minister) will to perform the external rite in a serious manner.’ (This work was afterwards used as the basis for the more famous Latin apology, the De Hierarchia Anglicana, of Denny and Lacey. This out-and-out extemalism was mitigated in the Latin work, intended to persuade the Catholic theologians.)2 Strong criticism of the Roman Catholic doctrine of internal intention was made in The Times correspondence in the autumn of 1894, and about the time of the Bull that doctrine was again rejected as ‘revolting’ in the Church Historical Society tract, The Doctrine of Intention, with special reference to the validity of Ordinations in the English Church.3 The externalist view has been endorsed in recent years in the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Doctrine in the Church of England:

The minister's intention is sufficiently declared by his outward acts in administering or celebrating what publicly appears and purports to be the sacrament of the Church. Where such a publicly apparent intention exists we are unanimous in holding that the sacrament cannot be invalidated by any merely private intention on the minister's part.... (The doctrine of intention maintained above is that technically known as the doctrine of ‘External Intention*; it is substantially die same as that put forward by Catharinus in the sixteenth century.... It has never been formally condemned by the Church of Rome.)4 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ It was evidently with the presupposition that the intention re­ quired for a sacrament is the collective intention of the Church to 1 S.P.C.K. 1893. 1 Cf. De Hierarchia Anglicana, n. 137 seq. • S.P.C.K. 189$ or 1896. 4 S.P.C.K. 1938, p. 133. A similar principle is applied to matrimonial consent in the Report of the Commission on the Nullity of Marriage, appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1949. ‘The Roman Catholic Church recognizes defective inten­ tion and conditional consent in certain circumstances as constituting ground for nullity. ... In English ecclesiastical law no agreement or private determination is allowed to nullify a marriage, even though it involves the frustration of one of the principal ends of matri­ mony.' (The Church and the Law ofNullity in Marriage, S.P.C.K. 1933, pp. 26 seq.)

47

ANGLICAN ORDERS

which the minister belongs that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York interpreted Leo XHl’s pronouncement, in their Re­ sponsio to the Bull.1 Rather boldly they asserted: Nor do we part company with the Pope when he suggests that it is right to investigate die intention of a Church in conferring holy orders 'in so far as it is manifested externally’. For whereas it is scarcely possible for any man to arrive at a knowledge of the inner mind of a Priest, so that it cannot be right to make the validity ofa Sacra­ ment depend upon it, the will of the Church can both be ascertained more easily, and ought also to be both true and sufficient.2

They contend that in the present case the corporate intention of the Anglican Church, on which they assume that the Pope is here passing judgement, is not to be gathered by inferences from the changes and omissions made by the compilers of the Ordinal, which were not significant, but from the authentic declarations, teaching and practice of that Church.3 It is sufficient, 1 Responsio Archiepiscoporum Angliae nd Litteras Apostolicas Leonis Papae ΧΙΠ de Ordina­ tionibus Anglicanis (Longmans 1897: English translation published simultaneously). The literary author of the Responsio vns Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury. He made evident and ample use ofHaddan’s work. ‘ Ibii, sect. VO. Italics mine. The same assumption—that Leo was not referring to the personal intention of the minister—is found in other sections of the Responsio: e,g, sect. XVII and XX 1A similar outlook is found in the remarks of Orthodox writers who commented on the controversy. In accordance with the Orthodox theory of the *oikonomia\ if a church seeking communion has sound doctrine, the Orthodox Church may be prepared to extend a kind of retroactive convalidation to its sacraments. So V. Sokoloff, professor in Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, wrote in 1897: ‘The voice of the Church and the expression of her established teaching must be sought for, not in separate exceptional facts, but in those which have a general character. Such we must, of course, before all others, acknowledge the Confessions of Faith of the Anglican Church to be.' He admitted, however, that there remained some ambiguity about the faith of the Anglican Church on the subject of Orders, and concluded: ‘in our opinion... this hindrance may be acknowledged to be the only one which exists ... to the recognition of the validity of the Anglican hierarchy.' (An Enquiry into the Hierarchy of the Anglican Episcopal Church—Sergicff Posad 1897: one chapter translated by W. J. Birkbcck: Church Printing Co. 1897, p. 25 f.) A similar ap> proach was adopted by Professor A. Bulgakoff, of Kiev (The Question ofAnglican Orders in respect of a Vindication of the Papal Decision, which was drawn up by the English Roman Catholic Bishops at the end of 1897—Trans. Birkbcck: Church Historical Society tract No. LV. pp. 45-6); and by Professor Androutsos (op. cit., chap. 5). Since those days there has been brought about, for a number of reasons, a notably more favourable attitude to­ wards the Orders of the Church of England on the part of the Eastern Orthodox churches. It is not, however, accurate to say: 'The Orthodox churches have now recognised Anglican Orders as valid'; but rather: 'Several of those churches have declared that they are pre­ pared, by an exercise of the Economy, to validate the orders of Anglican clergy who desire tojoin them.'

48

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (in)

therefore, for proof of sacramental validity to demonstrate that the Anglican Church plainly shows and states that she intends her ministers, when they confer the sacraments, to do what Christ intends. She does make that plain, the Archbishops affirm, when she exacts an express promise to that effect from her ordinands, and when she prays constantly in her liturgy that her clergy may administer God’s sacraments ‘rightly and duly’. This is a rather surprising interpretation, not least in the point on which the Archbishops claimed to agree with the Pope. For he did not say that it was ‘the intention of a Church’ that must be investigated. In accordance with the strict terminology of Curial documents, the Pope nowhere in Apostolicae Curae (nor in the previous eirenic epistle, Ad Anglos) refers to the Anglican body as a ‘church’. In strict technical usage the term ‘church’ is reserved for a community which has valid orders and hierarchy and the point of Apostolicae Curae was to declare that the Anglican body was not such. When Leo refers to the Anglican clergy, he does so in the careful phrase *qui religionis ministri in communitatibus suis habentur. It is likewise evidently improbable that the Pope should have contradicted Iris predecessor Alexander VEH, by subscribing to the principle that sacramental validity cannot depend on the inner intention of the priest. 'Leon XIII ne pense pas du tout ce que vous pensez* retorted a French theologian to the Anglican Arch­ bishops at the time.1 In Chapter Four below the true meaning of those sentences in the Bull, which Anglicans have interpreted in a Catharinian sense, will be examined more in detail. For the present it is enough to point out that, even if Pope Leo had wished to refer to the ‘intention of the Church of England’ by the phrase in question, the Anglican case would not be strengthened. The key time to be investigated is 1559—for that was the date ofthe found­ ing of the Elizabethan hierarchy. Later formularies cannot be in­ voked to give the setting to an intention in an ordination which 1 Jules Didiot, canon of Lille: Lettre d'tin Pretre Catholique Romain aux MAropolitains Anglicans de Cantorbdry et York sur leur Rdponse au Pape Lion XIII (Arras 1897). In the same place (p. 14) he says: ‘Et ne croyez pas que 1‘intention individuelle ne soit pour rien dans la validity des sacrements. En insinuant cette thise ... vous allez contre I'enseignement de 1'Eglise entiire, de ccllc qui a conservi la notion et la pratique veritable des sacrements.*

49

ANGLICAN ORDERS

took place before they existed. Where then was the Anglican Church officially directing the intention of Barlow and his three assistants at the consecration of Parker, and how was its purpose manifested with authentic voice? The legitimate hierarchy of English bishops had, to a man, refused to take part in that ordina­ tion, and all but one were under arrest or in exile. Moreover on every single occasion that offered during the months they re­ mained at liberty, both in Parliament and in Convocation, they had shown uncompromising opposition to the ideas and policy ofthe party represented by Barlow and his friends. (Cf. Messenger. RMP., Π, Chaps. ΠΙ-VI.) Or even if it were a matter ofcounting heads (which it is not), it cannot be seriously doubted that the sympathies of the greater part of English churchmen in 1559 would have been with the Catholic bishops in their stand,1 and they would not have ac­ cepted the four consecrators of Lambeth as the true spokesmen of the Church in England. (Even by English law the Edwardine Ordinal had at that time no force or authority, as Cecil himself pointed out.)2 Many Anglican writers have followed the Archbishops in attri­ buting to Leo ΧΠΙ a purely ‘externalist’ doctrine ofintention,3 and there were several at the time who fastened triumphantly on what they took to be a most damaging concession on the Pope’s part, which had put him in contradiction with the traditional Roman teaching. The Archbishops had noted with restrained satisfaction that they were at one with the Pope on the principle involved, 1 In the Deviafor the Alteration ofReligion, drawn up by Cedi in December 1558» among the ‘dangers that may ensue upon the alteration* is reckoned: ‘Bishops and all the clergy will sec their own ruin. In confession and preaching, and all other ways they can, they will persuade the people from it.' (Strype, Annals, Vol. I, pt. ii: quoted by Messenger, R-M.R, Π, p. 175.) * In an annotation made to the minute of Proceedings for the Consecration of an Arch­ bishop. (Slate Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, 1559: reproduced in facsimile by Estcourt, op. cit.,p. 86.) ’ F. E. Brightman had already written, in What Objections have been made to Anglican Orders? (S.P.C.K. 1896): ‘The public actions of the ministers of a Church are a sufficient index of their intention in performing them* (p. 175). Η. B. Swete urged the same prin­ ciple in A Lecture on the Bull Apostolicae Curae (Cambridge 1896), pp. 21-4. So also, in another contemporary tract, V. Staley, Are our clergy rightly ordained? (Mowbray 1896, pp. 15-18) and J. H. Overton, Anglican Orders: a sermon preached in Lincoln Cathedral 20 December 1896, published at the request ofthe Lord Bishop ofLincoln (Lincoln 1897, p. 10).

50

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (ni)

but there was considerably less restraint in the manner in which their redoubtable supporter Arthur Lowndes expressed his satis­ faction at the papal admission, in the massive two-volume Vindication of Anglican Orders which he published in New York that same year. After quoting the sentence of the Bull which he takes to imply that the personal intention of the individual cannot affect sacramental validity, and that the Church does not judge of it, he exclaims: If this sentence means what it says, then there is no sentence in the whole Bull which Anglicans will welcome more heartily. For it is a flat contradiction of Roman theology for centuries. If the intention of the priest... is judged wholly by what he does, and not by what he thinks or is believed to think, then we have a most wide-reaching revolution in Roman casuistry and moral theology.... Leo XIII has incurred the anathema of his predecessor, Alexander Vin, who in 1690 condemned the following proposition: [quota­ tion: see p. 63 below] ... He is also rebuked by the rubrics of his Missal, inserted by Pius V, and declaring that if a priest does not intend to consecrate all the wafers before him, then only those are validly consecrated which he had so intended.... Contradicting Popes and Councils, Doctors and theologians, Leo ΧΠΙ has ranged himself and all under his obedience side by side with Jewel and all Anglican theology.1

Similarly, the author of an article in the Church Tinies of 9 October 1896,2 after dilating on the dangers of the Roman doctrine of internal intention, wrote: ‘We may put these con­ siderations aside for the present, for they find no place in the Bull which we are considering. It is, indeed, one of the few good features of this document that it sides definitely with the saner view about intention.* The same assumption is found in almost all the Anglican writings on the question in the years immediately following the Bull. J. Bainbridge Smith, for example, wrote: ‘A few words may be said as to Intention. By it is not meant the intention of the individual Priest. This none but himself can know, and if the validity of a sacrament were to depend on that, the most 1 Vol. II, pp. 492 and 497. 3 Pp. 353-4· 51

ANGLICAN ORDERS

painful uncertainty would exist on all sides. But “Intention” is the intention of the Church, whose minister he is, and whose words he is using. And this intention, as the Archbishops say in their “Answer”, “must be ascertained from its public formularies and definite pronouncements”.*1 T. A. Lacey, in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,2 affirms that the Pope ‘laid down a principle which in practical effect differs little from that of Catharinus’, and F. W. Puller, in his Essays and Letters on Orders andJurisdiction,3 states:

When the Pope speaks of a defect of intention, he appears to be alluding not so much to the private intentions ofindividuals as to the public intention of the English Church in her corporate capacity. But in fret the public and corporate intention of the Church carries with it and determines the intentions ofindividual officiants. After maintaining that this corporate intention was adequate and manifest, he finally turns to dispose of what he considers an irrelevant objection—that the heretical intention of individual ministers could have invalidated some ordinations. This, he says, is ‘an objection sometimes raised by our adversaries, to which it is well to reply here, although the Bull makes no mention ofit’.4 The arguments he uses to refute this objection are the standard ones, already mentioned—the decree on Methodist baptisms, the opinion ofFranzelin, etc. Other Anglican authors who have taken the Pope’s words to refer to the ‘intention of the Church of England’, rather than to the intention of individual ministers, are G. F. Holden, in The Special Basis of the Anglican Claim;5 W. L. Knox, in Friend, I do thee no Wrong,3 who considers that ‘the line taken by the Bull is entirely contrary to all received Catholic theology’, and that the 1 Ordinali Past and Present and their witness to the Validity of English Orders, London, James Parker, 1898, p. 101. 2 Article on ‘Intention*, Vol. VII, p. 382. * Longmans, 1925, p. 125. Puller reproduced here what he had said in his articles in the Guardian, in September and October 1896. 4 Ibid, p. 136. • Mowbray 1916, p. 121. 4 Society of SS. Peter and Paul, 1919, pp. 14-38.

52

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

charge of defective intention thus formulated is ‘a charge never previously made’; and J. G. Morton Howard in the tracts, Epistola ad Romanos,1 and Holy Orders in the Church ofEngland.2 The authors listed under section (*£*) below (see p. 73, note 2) make the same general presupposition.

★

★

*

*

★

The controversy about the South India scheme, and especially Convocation’s approval inJuly 1955 of‘limited inter-communion between the Church of England and the Church of South India, brought many references to Apostolicae Curae, and renewed dis­ cussion about ‘intention’. Mr. Hugh Ross 'Williamson, who then took a prominent part as an Anglo-Catholic spokesman in these controversies, assumed that the validity of ordinations was de­ cisively regulated by the ‘intention of the church* (i.e. in Haddan’s sense) and that it was this intention that Leo ΧΙΠ had declared defective. In the Report of the Joint Committee of the Convo­ cations of Canterbury and York there is the same acceptance of the term, and the authors are at pains to defend ‘the valid inten­ tion’ of the Church of South India. In a sermon at the church of St. Magnus Martyr, on 6 July 1955, Mr. Williamson declared: ‘One thing has been made inescapably dear by the unanimous decision of the Bishops to admit the validity of South Indian orders. That thing is this: after today, all ordinations in the Church of England are almost certainly in­ valid’.3 From the report of his sermon, he appears to have con­ sidered that because the credal orthodoxy of the Church of South India was unsatisfactory, and because its constitutions did not require the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, ordinations con­ ferred in that body must for those reasons be defective. Similarly, the Church of England, by officially agreeing even to limited inter-communion with it and by recognising its Orders, had com1 London, Talbot and Co., 1933; on pp. 4-5 the author also judges it relevant to con­ sider Queen Elizabeth's intention! * Council for Defence of Church Principles, 1943. ’ Report in the Catholic Herald, 8 July 1955.

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ANGLICAN ORDERS

promised its own orthodoxy and intention, so that from thence­ forward this defective ‘intention’ would result in the invalidity of Anglican ordinations. Mr. Williamson repeated these considera­ tions in a letter to the Catholic Herald:1 The Convocation decision, by officially sanctioning a doctrine of intention which claims that valid orders can be bestowed on members of a body which does not accept the full Christian Faith, marked the end of the Church of England as we have known it. For that de­ cision must surely (I speak under correction from competent Catho­ lic theologians) invalidate any subsequent ordinations, even if past ordinations, resting on the doctrine of intention expressed in the Prayer Book (which specifically demands assent to the Creeds, in­ cluding the ‘Quiamque vult*) be considered valid.

If the decision of Convocation were not officially revoked, the writer concluded, ‘time will have proved and the Bishops, clergy and laity of the Church of England will have officially admitted that Apostolicae Curae is right.’2 We should respect and admire the courage and fidelity to principle of those who made those spirited protests, and agree with much that they had to say; but we must make some re­ servation about the opinion that the official adoption of heretical tenets—even about the sacrament of Order—by a church or sect necessarily invalidates the Orders conferred by members of that sect. The ordinary teaching of Catholic theology is that if a properly constituted minister of a sacrament uses due matter and form, with at least the minimum personal intention necessary, his . sacrament is valid, even if he adheres to a sect which is openly heretical. The ‘intention of his church’ cannot vitiate his own ministerial intention to do what Christ, or Christ’s Church, or 122 July 1955. pp. i and 6. See also his article. *A Convert Explains', in The Month, November 1955. 1 Similarly ‘Pastor Anglicanus’, whose original letter to The Tablet had started a long correspondence in that journal on the prospects of reunion, commented on the South India decision as follows: ‘In talcing this decision, therefore, the Church of England has belatedly and implicitly acknowledged the truth of Apostolicae Curae, in so far as that document was concerned with intention. Form and matter alone are now considered adequate for the transmission of valid orders, even when the form is emptied of its validity by authoritative statements of an intention which is clearly inadequate* (Letter to The Tablet, 23 July 1955, p. 90).

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true Christians do.1 Nor does heresy in the mind of the minister himselfnecessarily invalidate his sacraments. The Catholic theologian, of course, holds that Anglican orders and ordinations were already invalid long before the South India decision; but if (as in the Anglo-Catholic hypothesis) they were supposed not to have been invalid previously, there seems no convincing reason why they should begin to be invalid after that decision. This is doubtless a relatively minor point, compared with die fundamental issues of faith and Church unity which were brought into clear focus for a number of Anglo-Catholics on the occasion of the South India controversy. It illustrates once more, however, the complications to which the term ‘intention can give rise. It is easy to be led into imprecise statements when one assumes that the ‘intention’ referred to in Apostolicae Curae is the official policy of a church or sect. Dr. E. L. Mascall, in his otherwise skilful defence of the Con­ vocations’ decision,2 did not escape the prevalent confusion of terminology. His appeal to the Holy Office decision about Methodist baptisms in Oceania was wide of the mark because that document referred to personal ministerial intention, whereas in his controversy with his domestic opponents it was the ‘corporate intention of the church*, in Haddan’s sense, that was at issue. It is irrelevant to apply to the latter ‘intention’ the principles of Cath­ olic theology which refer to the personal will of the minister. On the other hand a pointed argumentum ad hominem can be drawn from the South India decision, for those Anglo-Catholics who had previously held that the personal intention of the minister is irrelevant, and that the validity of ordinations in a church depends on the current orthodoxy of its official ‘intention’. This was well pointed out by one who was then still of their number, in The Month of August 1955:3 1 This does not deny the view, held by some theologians of repute today, that the Catho­ lic Church can, by an express and authentic act, invalidate a sacramental rite in use by heretics. Cf. the opinion of Dr. Schillebeeckx, O.P., quoted on p. io above, note I. In that supposition, however, the invalidating defect would be one of ritual form, not of minis­ terial intention. a The Convocations and South India (Mowbray, 1955, pp. io-ii). ’ Mr. Walton Hannah (‘Pastor Anglicanus*); pp. 124-7.

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In defence of South Indian orders from the Anglican standpoint it can only be urged that they derive without lineal breach from Anglican orders, and that it is unlikely that the subjective intention of ex-Anglican consecrating bishops after the schism of the South Indian dioceses would be different from their former intention as Anglican bishops. But this is trying to have it both ways. In England we have long urged that the objective intention of the Church over­ rides subjective private intention. In South India we can only hope that the subjective intention of the bishops may over-ride die de­ clared and explicit absence of valid objective or formal intention which our previous Archbishops, agreeing with Leo ΧΙΠ, bade us rdyon.

(/) The external intention: i.e. the outward purport of the ministers actions While the champions of the Church of England have appealed to the doctrine of external intention’ to defend her Orders, there have been on the other hand a few Catholics who have appealed to the same doctrine to defend Apostolicae Curae. Not only is the Catharinian view not condemned, they would claim, but it is the only one that offers a satisfactory explanation of the Bull’s declara­ tion on intention! According to this solution, the intention of the minister is so tied to his use of the matter and form of the sacrament, that if he seriously uses the correct rite his intention is unassailably sufficient for validity, and conversely if he uses invalid matter or form his intention is automatically defective. Thus it is immaterial what the Anglican ordainers may have thought or willed as they performed the ceremony: the form they used was in fact invalid (as is shown in the earlier part of the Bull) and so their sacramental intention could not but share the like fatal defect. It follows that this defect of intention is found not only in the sixteenth-century ordina­ tions, but wherever the Anglican Ordinal is used. It is not a root of invalidity which can be separated from the defect of form, but stands or falls with the proof of the latter. In favour of this interpretation are cited the words of the Pope himself, ‘De mente vel intentione ... etc.’, which, as the Anglican 56

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

scholars also point out, seem to express the Catharinian doctrine. Canon 1086, § 1, oftheCodeof Canon Law is also invoked to show the Church’s traditional discipline. This canon deals with inten­ tion in the sacrament of matrimony, but the principle it lays down is applicable to all sacraments: bitemus animi consensus semper praesumitur conformis verbis vel signis in celebrando matrimonio adhibitis.

The internal consent of die mind is always presumed to be in conformity with the words or signs used in cele­ brating the marriage.

There is also the support of all the earlier theologians who de­ fended the Catharinian doctrine of ‘external intention’, which, it is again urged, has never been condemned, and for which a re­ putable modem author such as Priimmer sees signs of a return to theological favour.1 In the newly published Stinniia of the Spanish Jesuit theologians,2*De Aldama allows a less severe censure even to the opinion of thorough-going ‘externalists’ such as Contenson, Drouin, Serry and Toumely. Now whatever was the real opinion of Catharinus himself,8 it is undeniable that later authors who appealed to his authority held that sacramental intention was so tied to the outward use of the matter and form that no private contrary intention could reverse the intention 1 'Tantum abest ut sententia Λ intentione externa jit damnata, ut econtra haud parvum pondus acquisierit per Constitutionem Leonis XIII de ordinationibus Anglicanis. En verba Summi Ponti· ficis: "De mente vel intentione ...etc.... conferatur.” Doctrina de intentione externa non vide­ tur in praxi multum differre ab his verbis Summi Pontifici? (Manuale Theologiae Moralis, Tom. III, n. 67, Freiburg 1928). 1 Sacrae Theologiae Summa, Tom. IV, p. 87. note 8 (Bibliotcca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid 1951). • Did Catharinus himself hold that a contrary internal intention could never nullify an apparent intention expressed in the serious outward performance of the rite? For four centuries both opponents and supporters have understood him to hold that view, and certainly some of his expressions arc hard to understand in any other sense. Salmeron, his ally at the time of the controversy of the mid-sixteenth century, has a strong passage which seems not to differ in substance from the later Farvacqucs view. (In Epistolas B. Pauli, Lib. 1, Pars 3, Disp. 2: Cologne, 1604, Tom. ΧΙΠ, pp. 186-90). Recently, how­ ever, in a detailed study, 'L'oggetto delVintenzione sacramentale tiei Teologi dei secoli XVI e XVIT, Fr. G. Rambaldi, S.J., suggests that Catharinus has been misrepresented. But even this author makes a significant admission in a footnote from which it appears that the majority opinion was not after all without foundation (Analecta Gregor1ana, Vok 33, Rome 1944, p. 83, note 65). Cf. also Gregorianum 1946, pp. 444-58. Prescinding from this discussion, I use the term 'Catharinian* in these pages in the accepted sense—to refer to the thorough-going externalist doctrine. ■

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manifested publicly by the serious performance of the rite. Here, for example, is one of Serry’s numerous pronouncements on the matter: Tales tibi ministros exhibet Catharinus, ritum externum libere, serioque cele­ brare volentes, ac re ipsa serio cele­ brantes, in iis maximis circumstantiis ex quibus determinantur ad agendum tanquam Ecclesiae ministri, illiusque no­ mine. Hos valide Sacramenta conficere docet, licet intus occulta mente Sacramenta ud Sacramenta conficere nolint, totumque quod exterius agunt secreta mente retractent.

Catharinus considers the case of ministers who wish, freely and seriously, to perform the external rite, and do in fact seriously perform it, in those special circumstances which mark them out as acting as ministers of the Church and in her name. He teaches that such men validly perform the sacraments, even if in their inner mind they should will not to perform them as sacraments, and should by a secret in­ tention withdraw everything that they do outwardly.1

Scrry argued that this opinion did not fall under the censure of Alexander VIII, on the plea that the condemnation of 1690 was aimed only at thp Protestant opinion that did not require even the intention of a serious performance ofthe outward rite.2 Now if, it is urged, this wholly ‘externalist’ opinion is still tenable, why not take it as the simple key to the solution of our present problem? The Anglican ordainers used a defective rite, therefore their intention, inseparably bound to the use of the rite, was ipsofacto defective. No further inquiry is necessary. Why have rivers ofink been poured out in quibbling about the Anglican de­ fect of intention when such a simple and complete answer lies ready to hand? In spite of all these considerations, however, this solution is 1 Vindiciae Vindiciarum Ambrosii Catharini (3rd Edit., Venice 1742, cap. V. n. i: italics mine). Even more clearly he concedes later (cap. DC, n. 8) that provided all is correctly performed outwardly, ‘sacrilegus, impiusque minister Sacramentum. . . nequaquam irritat, tametsi secretam, occultamque irritandi voluntatem animo gerat, ac secum ipse interna mente stulte, impieque deliberet: "Non intendo facere quod facit Ecclesia." ’ Similar statements are found in the works of the earlier Catharinians. So Scribonius held: ‘Vere est baptizatus, etsi minister internam intentionem Ecclesiae non conformem habuerit, modo externam conformem habuerit* (Quoted by Sylvius, In Summam, III, q. 64, art. 8, Antwerp 1618, p. 493). Pasquaglio and Contcnson have similar expressions. * 'Ea quippe proscripta propositione, Catharini sententia ac nostra minime continetur.... Nulla seriae, et ab omni joco semotae administrationis mentionefacta, valere Baptismum affirmat, si ritus externus quomodolibet administretur: atque ita juste ferulam meruit. . . . Non itaque sententia nostra eo telo petita est, sed Calvini et Lutheri doctrina.. .* (ibid., cap. DC, η. i.).

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(ni)

dearly insufficient. First there is the decisive objection that it makes Leo Xin’s declaration on the defect of intention depend wholly on acceptance of the doctrine of external intention, so that it cannot be satisfactorily defended by those—the great majority of Catholic theologians both today and at the time of the Bull—who hold that sacramental intention is not inseparably tied to the serious outward performance of the rite. . Indeed, the doctrine of internal intention has been for so long securely in possession in the Schools, and put into practice in canonical decisions of the Holy See, that it is unthinkable that Leo ΧΙΠ should have equivalently rejected it, as those few apologists daim, and should have suddenly sanctioned as the only tenable doctrine a view long abandoned by the main current of Catholic theology. And if, per impossibile, he did sanction such a radical change, it is almost equally strange that the Schools took no notice of the Papal pronouncement, but have continued unper­ turbed to teach the discredited view. It is difficult to defend the opinion that sacramental intention is inevitably determined by what the minister does publicly in per­ forming the rite, even if we prescind from the dedsive weight of Catholic tradition and the official practice of the Church, which stands against the ‘externalist’ view. The fundamental reason for requiring an internal intention, the one on which the greatest theologians have insisted since it was clearly formulated in the twelfth century1 by Hugh of St. Victor and others, is that the minister of the sacraments must perform a truly vicarious action on behalf of Christ; he must be not merely an automaton acting irrationally, or, worse, with a will to frustrate Christ’s sacrament, but a true instrumentum animatum, acting in a human manner. The mere externals of the rite are not enough to determine whether a sacrament is being effected or not, even if they be per­ formed in a serious fashion. Hugh of St. Victor gave as an example a parent bathing a baby, ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost’, pronouncing the words merely as a pious formula, ‘as a man might do also in eating, ploughing or 1 When it was already the common doctrine: the only dissidents of any note were Pullen, Gandulph and Bandinelli.

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sowing’. In such a case, he says, it is dear that the baby has not been baptised, but merely bathed. ‘ Veni ad aquam non ut baptizarem, sed ut balnearem.... Tu venis et dicis mihi, quod baptizatus estfilius meus? Ego balneatum scio, baptizatum nescio.*1 Or to take a more practical case, a priest demonstrating to a student the manner of saying Mass might seriously and exactly perform every outward detail of the rite, yet he would not have consecrated—because he did not intend to. *****

If the question is looked at objectively, and the dust of con­ troversy allowed to settle,2 it must surely be admitted that the common Catholic teaching on internal intention is the one more in accord with Christian right reason. The opposing opinion, which holds that the external words, actions and matter will infallibly produce the sacramental effect quite independently of and even against the positive will of the person using them, seems to border on a belief in a kind of magical efficacy in irrational elements. Christ certainly ordained that His sacramental graces should be conferred through external signs, but He entrusted His sacraments not to mere material elements but to human beings, to be ad­ ministered by human wills. The tu quoque of Dr. Littledale3 and other Anglican apologists, that all sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church are doubtful because we can never be certain that there has not been an in­ ternal withholding of ministerial intention, either in the priest who conferred the sacrament or somewhere in the chain of ministers through whom his Orders were mediated, provides no serious difficulty. The Church watches diligently over the administration of her sacraments, and over those whom she authorises to dispense 1 De Saaamentis, Lib. 2, p. 6, cap. 13. Migne, Patrot. Lat., 176, col. 459-60. * The objection—that the Catholic doctrine on the need for internal intention makes us uncertain whether we have received any sacrament—has been a favourite one of Protestant controversialists ever since Calvin formulated it in his Acta Synodi Tridentinae cum Antidoto (Corpus Reformatorum, 35,946.) ’ Cf. his Words for Truth (London 1888), pp. 68-9, resuming the arguments of his earlier Plain Reasons againstjoining the Church of Rome (S.P.C.K., 1880). 00

DIFFERING INTERPRETATIONS (m)

them,1 and normally the faithful have adequate warning, from her disciplinary measures against individuals, of the ministers they should avoid. Even an unbelieving minister who continues to per­ form his duties will almost always have the minimum general intention sufficient for validity. In practice he will hardly ever have an adequate motive for willing—by a special positive act of the will2—to frustrate the sacrament of whatever force it may have. The possibility of such a frustration does remain, but this hoary bogey (which loomed unduly large in the minds of Catharinus and Salmeron, too), need cause no alarm to the faithful, who can have moral certainty of the validity of their sacraments. A child has no absolute certainty that his mother has not poisoned his supper, but in practice he need feel no anxiety when he comes to eat it. Moreover the Church and her frithful are not left unguided and unprotected in these matters. Relying on the promises of her Founder, the Church knows that the Holy Spirit will provide that no serious breach will occur in her succession of Orders and valid sacraments. If in rare individual cases a sacrament is vitiated by a rebellious human will, and the faithful seek grace, in good faith, from what is not in reality a valid sacrament, we can be confident that God will not send them away unheeded. *****

From the documents of the Church and the writings of theolo­ gians, it is not difficult to show that an exclusively ‘externalist’ view on intention cannot now be sustained by a Catholic. That an internal contrary intention could nullify correct outward per­ formance of the rite was the common opinion in Catholic 1 There is more likelihood of invalidity in the sacraments of ministers who reject the strict sacramental discipline of the Church. Such men may well be careless of the correct matter and form of the sacraments, and thus substantially vitiate them. Some non-Catholic ministers are known to take little care, when administering baptism by sprinkling, to en­ sure that the water touches the baptizand. To take another example, Bishop Jewel admitted that some clergymen in his time had been known to omit the words of consecration in the Eucharist for many years together. These defects may be just as unknown to the recipient ofthe sacrament as the intention of the minister. a Merely concomitant heresy or error in his intellect does not vitiate his sacramental intention. Failure to grasp this important principle is at the root of most of the Protestant objections to the Catholic doctrine of intention.

v

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theology even long before Pope Alexander VflTs condemnation of Farvacques’ proposition in 1690. In the Roman Missal of Pius V (De Defectibus, η. VII), it was laid down that hosts even present on the altar are not consecrated if not included in the mental intention of the consecrating priest. Then there can be cited two other decisions of the Holy See, which although less well-known than the later decree of Alexander VIII in 1690, are even more explicit. They were practical judgements in individual cases, but they make clear the theoretical doctrine on which they were based. The first was a reply of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, dated 23 January 1586 and expressly approved by the Pope (Sixtus V), in which it was resolved that, in accordance with the common opinion, a candidate below the canonical age for orders, ordained by a bishop who had declared beforehand that he intended not to ordain any such, had not received a valid sacrament.1 Cardinal Lambertini (Pope Bene­ dict XIV) dtes this reply,2 as also a similar and still more instructive decision made by the Holy See in the seventeenth century. A Bishop Gonzalez, of Charcas, in South America, had affirmed with an oath when ordaining that he intended not to confer Orders on any subject whose forbears within four generations had been of native blood. Several of these, however, did present themselves among the ordinands, and received the rite, in all externals correcdy, at his hands. Their case was referred to the Holy See, which, while gravely reprobating the Bishop’s policy, pronounced their orders invalid.3 This reply of the Sacred Congregation was dated 13 February 1682. 1 ‘Quaesitum fuit an ordinati ante aetatem legitimam ab Episcopo, qui ante ordinationem in Ecclesia publico edicto protestatus est, quod non intendebat ordines conferre nisi iis qui in aetate legitima erant constituti, receperint vacuam manus impositionem. Responsum fuit ex communi sententia, recepisse vacuam manus impositionem* Lambertini adds: ‘Resolutio anni z 586 approbata fuit a Summo Pontifice in Consistorio, qui etiam iussit antequam exsecutioni mandaretur, scribi ad Episcopum, ut edicti a se promulgati formam mitteret, quo cognosci posset num Episcopus revera intentionem habuerit non ordinandi eum.* 1 De Sacrosancto Missae Sacrificio, Lib. ΠΙ, cap. X (Opera Omnia, cd. Prati, 1843, Tom. 8, pp. 178-9). * ‘Exponitur Fratrem Gonzalez de Acuna, episcopum civitatis Charciensis in Indiis Occidentali­ bus sub dominio Regis Catholici, sacras ordinationes habiturum, edicto cavisse ne quis trahens originem ab Indis, seu, ut vocant, Mulatis, intra quartum gradum, auderet accedere ad sacros ordines suscipiendos, quia ipsius mens et intentio erat hujusmodi personis sacramentum ordinis non conferre: quam protestationem denuo atque expressius ore proprio emisit in actu ordinationis, Jurejurando affirmans se neque actualem neque virtualem intentionem habere, aut habiturum fore, ordinandi praedictas personas, sed habere dumtaxat intentionem ordinandi sanguine puros; quod et postea conjirmavit, dum interrogatus ... an quidam comprehensus intra gradus ab eo prohibitos esset valide ordinatus, absque ulla haesitatione respondit negative ex defectu intentionis. Plura hinc

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In the light of this decision there can be no ambiguity about the sense of the decree of Alexander VIII, which followed eight years later. The proposition censured was: Valet baptismus collatus a ministro, qui omnem ritum externum formamque bap­ tizandi observat, intus vero in corde suo apud se resolvit: *Non intendo quod facit Ecclesia*1

Baptism is valid when conferred by a minister who observes the whole ex­ ternal rite and form for baptising, but inwardly in his heart resolves: ‘I do not intend what the Church does.'

To pretend, as did Serry, that because there was no mention in the proposition of a serious outward performance of the rite, the con­ demnation was aimed only at the Lutheran view, which held even a sacrament performed in open mockery to be valid, is surely a mere subterfuge. Ever since the decision of Alexander VIH, Catholic theology, aiding and aided by the canonical practice of the Holy See, has continued to affinn and clarify the principle that it is the internal sacramental inten­ tion of the minister that is decisive, and that when this is at variance with the apparently correct 'intention' expressed by his outward actions, the sacrament is invalid. It is true that the code of Canon Law, Canon 1086, § 1, dealing with matrimonial consent, lays down the principle that interior intention is always presumed to be conformed to the words and signs used out­ wardly in the ceremony. But that this is a revocable presumption that yields at once to truth is shown by what follows immediately in § 2 of the same canon. If the interior intention is in fact contrary to the out­ wardly correct expression, that inner intention prevails. A man who has inwardly withheld matrimonial consent, for example, even though outwardly performing all that the Church requires for validity, must seandala et inconvenientia orta sunt. Multi enim originem trahentes ab Indis, seu, ut vocant t Mutatis (aim inibi pauci sint sanguine puri), ordines susceperunt, et subinde Missas celebrarunt, confessiones audierunt, aliaque susceptis ordinibus congruentia munera exercuerunt: et e contra non desunt in populo qui sic ordinatos effugiunt ac uti male promotos digito ostendunt. Dubia proposita haec sunt: 1. An hujusmodi personarum ordinatiofuerit valida? 2. An actus ab illis vigore susceptorum ordinum exercitifuerint validi; et quatenus negative, 3. Quonam remedio hisce malis consuli debeat? Responsum Sacrae Congregationis, die 13 Feb. i6i2,fuit: Ad ium at2um—Negative; Ad 3 um—Ad mentem. Et mens est, supplicandum esse SSmo, quatemisjubeat omnibus Indiorum episcopis, ne deinceps praesumant... etc* This account was reproduced by Benedict XIV from the archives of the Sacred Con­ gregation, in his De Sacrosancto Missae Sacrificio, loc. cit., η. 0. 1 Denzinger, n. 13x8.

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hold himself in conscience as not married, and if his inner defective intention can also be confirmed by reliable outward indications, the Church will rule the marriage null in foro externo also. Many Rota decisions hinge on this principle.1 And conversely a man may go through a marriage rite which is in fact null through lack of some circumstance required by the Church for validity, and yet have an intention which is per se sufficient for the sacrament, and which is recognised as such by the Church when she uses* the same intention, virtually persisting, for later convalidation ofthe marriage—even without renewal ofconsent.8 So it is likewise an insufficient explanation of the words of the Bull to say that Pope Leo is only stating a presumption of de­ fective intention, in the same way that there would have been a presumption in favour ofvalidity if the correct rite had been used. For if the Pope’s decision were only presumptive in the sense alleged, it would yield to truth if the inner ministerial intention could be inferred from other considerations to have been suffi­ cient, or at least it would cease to be conclusive if probable argu­ ments could be adduced from the other side. Once we admit— as it seems we have to—that the minister’s internal intention can be independent ofand different from the outward ritual expression, we have to consider not only the rite used, but also the evidence about the inner ministerial intention of Barlow and the others. And once we begin to do that, we cannot avoid considering the weighty objection, based on the so-called ‘Franzelin opinion’ described above, that no matter what particular heretical purposes those ministers had, they also had at least the minimum general in­ tention of acting as Christian ministers, which must have pre­ dominated unless they were infected with incredible malice. Their intention, it is urged, must therefore have been per se sufficient for sacramental validity. It is certainly a justifiable presumption that Barlow and his associates held heretical opinions and had no wish to confer the sacrificial priesthood; but that is not enough to render their sacramental intention necessarily null. (Cf. pp. 18-25 above.) A mere conjectural presumption of defective intention, taking no 1 Eg. Parisiensis, 7 March 1885, A.S.S. xviii, p. 14; Massiliensis, 1 June 1911, A-A.S. iii, p. 525; and passim: C£ the decisions quoted on pp. 144-8 below. * C£ Codex luris Canonici, Canons 1085, and 1139, § 1.

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(m)

account of those serious counter-objections (well known in Rome in 1896) would have been an unsure prop on which to rest the solemn and definitive decision ofApostolicae Curae. Then again, if the Pope was basing his condemnation on the principle that the minister’s intention must be presumed to be defective merely because the form he used was defective, why did he avoid saying so? In that case, surely he would have phrased his explanation thus: If, in order to effect and confer a sacrament, a person has seriously and correctly used the due matter and form, he is for that very reason presumed to have intended to do what the Church does; but ifhe does not use the due matter orform he is presumed not to have intended to do what the Church does. Instead of choosing this latter conclusion which would be a simple converse to the first statement, he embarks instead upon a long sentence of intricate construction, in which three further qualifying clauses are included, all of them bearing on the purpose of the minister in using a changed rite.1 Merely to know the fact that a defective form was used, or that the ministers concerned were heretical, is then not enough for a conclusive judgement on the intention. Further considerations must be introduced. And when he comes to pronounce his conclusion from all this, the Pope no longer says 'praesumitur or 'censetur , but uses a categori­ cal 'palam est*—*it is plain’. There is a passage in the Summa of St. Thomas which has often been cited in support of the externalist opinion (Illa Pars, quaest. 64. art, 8, ad. a).a Whatever be the explanation of that controverted statement, it is evident from other texts that St. Thomas held the necessity of an internal intention. So, for example, he explains that a demon appearing in the form of a man and performing a baptism, would not confer a sacrament because only men can be ministers of the sacraments. And x Cf. p. 7, para, (r) and p. 8, para. (s). * *Alii melius dicunt quod minister sacramenti agit in persona totius Ecclesiae, cujus est minister; in verbis autem quae profert exprimitur intentio Ecclesiae; quae sufficit ad perfectionem sacramenti nisi contrarium exterius exprimatur....’ Various explanations have been offered by Cajetan, De Lugo, Billot and others to show that St. Thomas does not mean these words in an externalist sense. Catharinus, Judnin, Serry and others have, on the other hand, made great play with this text. But it cannot stand against St. Thomas’s clear teaching in other places, nor in any case against the authoritative acceptance by the Church of the prin­ ciples ofinternal intention.

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he adds a second consideration: ‘Even ifhe went through the ceremony of baptising, there would always be the fear that he did not do so with the intention of baptising, which is necessary for the sacrament, but with the intention of deceiving; because it would not be probable that he would secure for a man so great a good as spiritual rebirth.’1 From which it is reasonable to conclude that St. Thomas held that a mere internal withholding of intention, even if the outward rite were duly performed, would invalidate the sacrament.

As to the appeal to the authority of recent authors to show that the doctrine of external intention is still tenable today, it makes little to the purpose. The assertion of Prummer cited above cannot be used here without petitio principii, for the reason he gives for rehabilitating the ‘externalist’ doctrine is no other than our passage from Apostolicae Curae, which he thinks can only be interpreted in a Catharinian sense. That such an interpretation is by no means required will be argued later when we come to analyse more closely the wording of the Bull. On this opinion of Priimmer’s, Cappello exclaims that he fails to see how the author can hold it—'Quomodo id merito dici ac sustineri queat, percipere non valemusl’2 And Doronzo likewise takes Prummer severely to task over the ‘external intention’ view: 'Inepte Prummer earn ab omni censura absolvit, imo laudat.*3 The other authors who have recently viewed the Catharinian opinion with a more benign eye, Rambaldi, Lennerz and De Aldama, do not wish to maintain that the validity of the minister’s intention is decided automatically by his outward use of matter and form, but their endeavour is to show that Catharinus himself and his school did not hold that extreme view. And it is only on the extreme view that the ‘externalist’ opinion can provide a defence ofwhat is said on intention in Apostolicae Curae. Pesch points out that even if some degree of probability were still to be accorded to the theory of external intention, it could 1 In Lib. IV Sententiarum, Dist. V., quaest. 2, art, 3, sol. 1. St. Thomas’s doctrine is quite dear in his Opusculum V, De Articulis Fidei et Ecclesiae Sacramentis. Cf. also Lib. IV Sent., Dist. VIE, quant. 2, art. 4, sol. 3, ad. 2; also, Dist. VI, quaest. i, art. 2, 'Utrum intentio baptizantis ad baptismum requiratur*; Dist. XXX, quaest. i, art. 3, ad. 3; Summa Theologica, Illa, q. 65, a. 10, etc. * De Saaamentis, VoL x, n. 39 (Rome 1945). 1 De Saaamentis in Genae (Milwaukee 1946), p. 453.

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not in any case be used in practice, as probabilism may not be used where the validity of the sacraments is in question. He holds that where a defect of internal intention is proved, the sacrament must be repeated absolutely.1 Similarly J. Bittremieux, replying to the assertion of the Anglican Commission on Doctrine that the Catharinian opinion had never been condemned by the Church of Rome, replies that it is irreconcilable with the declarations of the Church, and can be said to have been implicitly rejected.2 And in the new Italian Encyclopedia Cattolica3 Rambaldi passes this judgement on the external intention: *E opinione non sicttra e da abandonarsi in pratica e non seguita in teoria.* L. Renwart concludes that ’the Church has with good reason condemned the theory of external intention. It involves, in effect, a latent contradiction: on the one hand its supporters affirm the necessity of a true intention of doing what the Church does; on the other they deduce infallibly the presence of this intention from external indications which do not at all afford that degree ofcertitude’.4 For these reasons, hardly any Catholic writers can be found today who defend a thorough-going ‘externalist’ interpretation of Apostolicae Curae. A somewhat modified solution has, how­ ever, been put forward by some, in order to reconcile that inter­ pretation with the decree of Alexander VIII and the common teaching of the theologians. It is proposed that although, in accordance with the decree of 1690, the outward performance of a per se valid rite may be found associated with an actually de­ fective sacramental intention, the converse is not possible—namely that the performing of an actually defective rite should be found associated with a per se sufficient sacramental intention. Therefore Barlow’s intention could not but have been defective. 1 ‘Imrno cum sententia intentionis externae hodie iam vix tenuissima probabilitate/ruatur, si de defectu intentionis internae certo constat, videtur sacramentum simpliciter repetendum* (Prae­ lectiones Dogmaticae, Tom. VI, n. 287: Freiburg-im-Breisgau 1914)· 1 ‘De Intentione Ministri in Sacramentorum Administratione iuxta Ecclesiam Anglicanam’, (Ephemerides Theol. Lovanienses, 1938, p. 103 scq.). • Art. Intenzione, Vol. VII, p. 72 (Vatican City 1951). 4'Intention du ministro ct validity des sacrements’, in Nouvelle Revue Thdologique, September-October 1955, p. 821. The author argues that there is no difference in essentials between the view of Catharinus and that of Farvacqucs.

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This explanation was advanced by Fr. Jeremiah Crowe, in a second article in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, written after the appearance of the Bull. Elsewhere he had disallowed the thorough­ going Catharinian view, but now he wrote:

When one does what the Church does, and what was instituted by Christ, one is rightly considered to have the intention of doing what the Church does, and what Christ instituted. If he does not do what the Church does, then he has no intention of doing so. . . . Now the Anglican rite is not the one which gives grace: for there is an essential defect ofform in it; therefore is induced the defect of intention.1

According to this view, there is automatic defect of intention in all Anglican bishops who have ever used the Ordinal, including men like Cheyney, Laud and Catholic-minded prelates of today. It would follow that even the Dutch Old Catholic bishops who recently participated in Anglican ordinations, with the apparently clear intention of transmitting Orders as valid as their own, should bejudged not to have had that intention in reality. This explanation is open to the objection that it is based on a principle which is not certain, nor generally accepted by Catholic theologians, as our Anglican friends will naturally point out They may say: you hold that sacramental intention is not automa­ tically tied to the outward rite: why do you now make an excep­ tion in the present case? How can the Catharinian cake be eaten on the one hand and kept intact on the other? Sacramental in­ tention, as your own theologians maintain, depends on the actual inner state of the will, not on external interpretation or legal con­ vention. The supporters of this eclectic view reply that, although suffi­ cient intention does not always accompany the use of due matter and form, it can never accompany the use of invalid matter and form, because then the minister’s intention is implicitly in con­ tradiction with the intention of Christ and of His Church. This, they say, is true even when the minister tries consciously to con­ form his intention to Christ’s. Vazquez can be cited in favour of 1 ‘The Papal Bull on Anglican Orders*, I.E.R., 1896, VoL XVII, pp. 970-1. The same supposition has been nude in recent yean by Dr. J. Donovan (seep, in below).

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this principle,1 and a number of modem apologists assume its truth when writing of the Anglican Orders controversy.2 Because of these considerations it may be admitted that this solution is not without ‘theological probability’, and consequently may succeed in rendering the intention in Anglican ordinations doubtful, from the canonical standpoint. Nevertheless we must admit that the contrary opinion also has ‘probability*. Against the authority of Vazquez can be set that of other theologians who, when defending the doctrine of internal intention, make the logical conclusion that intention is not automatically vitiated whenever there is defect of matter or form. Indeed Harent and others held that the ministerial intention could be perfectly valid in itself even when there was defect of form induced by a de­ fective intentio circa significationem,3 Normally, of course, this question of the per se sufficiency of the intention in an invalid sacrament is of no practical consequence, except in the sacrament of matrimony. There, as we have seen, the same consent, vir­ tually persevering, which has previously been given to a sacra­ mental contract which was in fact invalid, can avail for a later sanatio by the Church—even without the knowledge of the partners). There are other reasons for doubting the certainty, or at least the universality of the principle defended by Vazquez, Crowe and some others. If a priest, for example, full of zealous desire x ’Posterior regula est quoties mutatio quovis modo facta corrumpit verum sensum formae, et in hoc introducitur error, sive scienter, sive ignoranter, quamvis aliquis expresse velit facere id quod facit Ecclesia vera, quaecumqtie illa sit, non efficit verum sacramentum. Tum quia deficit vera forma, quae ad sacramerM substantiam et essentiam necessaria est, deficiente vera illius significa· tione: tum etiam, quia ille non potest vere habere intentionem Ecclesiae, licet id expresse contendat; quia non utitur debita forma instituta a Christo, qua utitur semper vera Ecclesia,' (In Tertiam Partem Summae, Disp. 129, cap. 7, n. 112: Lyons 1631, p. 171.) 1A theologian friend who finds in this principle an adequate explanation of Pope Leo's words, phrases it thus: 'In sacraments, the object willed by the minister must coincide with the object willed by the Church; and the reason for that is that there must be real ministeriality, real submission of the will of the minister to the will of Christ’s Church. Now if in fact the object willed by the minister and that willed by the Church is not the same—and the defective form shows that it simply cannot be—then there is dissonance of will and defect of intention.' • See quotation on p. 31 above. Cf. also the statement of Brandi (whose exposition of the Bull was praised by Pope Leo himself), quoted on pp. 108-9 below: 'the defect of due intention in the Anglican minister is not deduced from the simple fact that he makes use of an invalid form when ordaining... *

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to do what Christ and His Church require, risked his life to bap­ tise a dying infant, and then in the stress of the moment pro­ nounced the wrong formula (e.g. the short formula for Extreme Unction), the sacrament would suffer a defect of form, but how could it be said that the minister’s intention left anything to be de­ sired? Vazquez held that the substitution of an invalid form ‘whether done knowingly or through ignorance’ inevitably in­ duced a defect of intention: but it would seem safer to say that we must always take account of the minister’s purpose in making the substitution. To do that is to shift the decisive arena to that of the minister’s inward mind, and there juridical presumptions may be reversed. There the issue may be affected by conditional or con­ flicting intentions, which make the solution not so simple. The general arguments used against the Catharinian view also have an application to that of Vazquez. The principle of Vazquez is not the same as that of Catharinus, but it seems to have a certain affinity with it. To affirm that a defect is automatically induced in the minister's intention if he uses a defective form, whatever his conscious purpose may be, seems to be not easily reconcilable with the principles of internal intention. And even though that view—that a defective intention is always ‘implicit’ in the use of what is objectively a defective rite—may be admissible, it is not certain. Evidendy it will not do to make the decision on intention in Apostolicae Curae rest on an opinion that is only probable. It seems that for an adequate explanation of the Bull we must go further than a merely juridical presumption of defective intention, and that we cannot ignore the nature of the minister’s real con­ scious purpose. Once we take account of that, however, we again come up against the objection based on the so-called ‘Franzelin opinion’, which eventually we shall have to meet fairly and squarely. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ If it is unsound to insist that Apostolicae Curae can only be justified on the Catharinian doctrine, it does not follow that the Bull excludes that doctrine. Even though it had been practically abandoned by Catholic theologians, it would have been quite contrary to the practice of the Holy See to go out of its way in a 70

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document such as Apostolicae Curae to reject an opinion which a few authors still considered theoretically admissible,1 and which there was no present necessity to condemn. The debate about the external intention was not necessarily involved in the issue of Anglican Orders. It is then not surprising if the decision of the Bull can be reconciled with the Catharinian view, even though it does not depend on it. It may well be that the condensed language of the passage dealing with intention, which has seemed puzzlingly obscure to some critics, was purposely chosen so as not to pass an explicit censure in that debate. This long digression has not been without its fruit. If the doctrine of external intention cannot be appealed to from the Catholic side to provide an adequate solution to our inquiry, it nevertheless causes no embarrassment. The Anglican Archbishops and many later apologists have relied on it as a means to expose an inconsistency in the Bull; but if it is rigorously applied it leaves the Pope’s statement wholly coherent. For on strict Catharinian principles the external intention of the Elizabethan consecrators was automatically null because of the sacramental form they used. The proof of the nullity of that form is established independently; this proofwill receive further attention later.

(g) The objective intention ofthe rite in itself

One last interpretation of the paragraph in the Bull remains to be considered. It combines elements from the interpretations already explained, and is a refinement which commends itself to those who are impressed by the apparent insufficiency of any of the other solutions. For if the intention that Leo ΧΙΠ referred to and declared de­ fective was neither that of the framers of the Ordinal, nor, (it 1 In England Catharinism lingered perhaps longer than elsewhere. Successive editions of Addis and Arnold's Catholic Dictionary continued to expound it (as an Anglican corre­ spondent pointed out in The Times controversy of 1894), and traces of it can be found in the statements even of the English Catholic theologians who took part in the discussions of 1895-6 (Cf. the views of Mgr. Moyes, cited on pp. 39-40 above). This may explain why a few of them, even after the Bull, thought that the Pope had not meant to refer to the personal intention of the minister.

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seems), that in the mind of the minister using it, nor the motive that led him to use a faulty form, nor the corporate intention of a church, nor necessarily the ‘Catharinian’ intention, what or whose intention was it? The remaining interpretation to be considered is that it was the ‘objective intention of the rite’. The Anglican ordination rite, as set forth in documentary form, is held to have a kind of impersonal ‘intention’ of its own, which is to be dis­ covered by examining its language together with the historical setting in which it appeared, and the way it was interpreted at the time. Not a few English Catholic authors have dwelt on the con­ vincing reasons (which Leo ΧΙΠ himself brought out in the Bull) which show that the unmistakable meaning of the Anglican Ordinal was the exclusion of the Catholic sacerdotal office, which heretical meaning deprived the form of any possible validity. This ‘defect of meaning’ being crucial, they assume that it is identical with the ‘defect of intention’ which the Bull links with the defect ofform. So Fr. (later Mgr.) A. S. Barnes, in The Popes and the Ordinal,1 commented: ‘This “intention”, it must be observed, is not the inward intention of the consecrating Bishop, locked in his breast and known only to himself and God ... it is the “intention” of the Ordinal itself....’ And again in No Sacrifice No Priest:2 ‘Nor is this omission the result of an accident. It is intentional.. . . The Anglican Ordinal is fatally defective alike in its “form” and in its “intention”.’ Fr. Joseph Rickaby, S.J., followed a similar inter­ pretation: ‘We must observe that there is not here question of the mere internal intention of the minister, but of an intention extemated and put into the rite.’3 Fr. M. Bdvenot, S.J., in the earlier editions of his C.T.S. pam­ phlet, Are they Priests? also favoured this interpretation: One of the reasons why Anglican Orders were declared invalid by Leo ΧΠΙ was because of‘defect of intention’. Many Anglicans have 1 Browning 1896, p. 34. * C.T.S. pamphlet, p. 13. • What Cranmer meant to do and did (C.T.S. pamphlet), p. 7. So also Fr. L. J. Walker, S.J., in The Problem ofReunion (Longmans, 1920), p. 136.

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taken this to mean merely the personal intention of the ordaining bishop.... They have said that perhaps the ordaining bishops had the proper intention all the time, even in the sixteenth century: nobody could tell then, nobody can tell now: in fine, that is not the sort of filing the Pope can judge at all. Which is all perfectly true, only it happens to be completely beside the point (p. 5).

Later (pp. 12-13) he explained what is meant by the ‘intention of the document’, and noted: ‘It is this intention which Pope Leo declared defective. Not, then, what might possibly be going on today in the ordainer’s mind, as suggested above; nor yet, strictly speaking, what had gone on in the minds of the compilers; but the purpose and meaning of what had come out of those minds, as generally understood at the time... .’x There have been Anglicans, too, who have readily accepted that the Pope’s phrase refers to this ‘intention of the rite’. The author of A Treatise on the Bull 'Apostolicae Curae9 (S.P.C.K. 1896) wrote: ‘The reasoning of the Bull is not quite dear, still less is it convincing; but this seems to be what it means. A defective in­ tention was supposed to be expressed in the Ordinal itself’.2 Dom Gregory Dix, assuming this to be the correct interpretation, saw 1 In the 1933 edition, however, Fr. Bivenot modifies these conclusions, and the view he there adopts is in agreement with that developed in the second part of this study. The author is indebted to Fr. Bdvenot for helpful advice and criticism in the presentation of the present work. • P. 37· A similar opinion was voiced by A. H. Benson, The Pope's Bull on Anglican Orders (Dublin 1896, pp. 68-73). He considered that Leo ΧΙΠ, by adopting this sense of 'intention' had put himself in contradiction with the 'constant and established rule of the Roman Church, (p. 44). R. C. Moberly, in Ministerial Priesthood (London 1897, p. 348). concludes that the alleged defective intention, or animus of the Ordinal, and the defective form are one and the same thing, and he criticises the Bull for loose expression when it seems to refer to them as two defects. Many have combined this view with the interpre­ tation of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Thus Bishop Headlam, in the Bampton Lectures of 1920, summarised the Pope's statement: 'The Church of England did not in­ tend to do what the Church had done, and therefore the rite was defective in intention.' (The Doctrine ofthe Church and Christian Reunion, Murray 1920, p. 251.) The same interpro· tation of the defect of intention was assumed by the author of the C.H.S. tract, Priesthood In the English Church: a study of the Vindication of the Ball 'Apostolicae Curae' (S.P.C.K. 1898, pp. 37-9); and by F. N. Oxenham, in Some considerations suggested by the Letter ofLeo XIII on Anglican Orders (tract, London 1896, pp. 20-x) and by C. A. Briggs, Church Unity (New York 1910, p. 115). Cf. also H. Beevor, The Anglican Armoury (Centenary Press, x934)> P· 61; W. L. Knox, The Catholic Movement in the Church of England (Philip Allan, x923)» p. 197; Bishop K. E. Kirk, The Apostolic Ministry (Hodder and Stoughton 1946)» pp.34-5.

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here an opportunity for springing a theological mine under the Bull’s conclusions. Putting firmly aside what he considered to be the irrelevant discussion about Cranmer’s heterodox purpose, which he was quite prepared to admit,1 he insisted that the inten­ tion that appears objectively in the wording of the rite is quite enough to satisfy the minimum intention of "doing what the Church does’, or "what Christ does’. He expressed amazement that Leo ΧΙΠ should have judged the intention defective in this respect, seeing that the Preface to the Ordinal asserts explicitly the intention to do what the Church of Christ has done from Aposto­ lic times, mentioning "these orders of ministers in Christ’s Church, Bishops, Priests and Deacons ... and therefore, to the intent these orders should be continued and reverently used and esteemed in this Church ofEngland... etc.’ There, he commented, "is a statement of the “Intention” of the rite of the most unambiguous clarity.... It is almost unbelievable, but Apostolicae Curae makes no reference of any kind to the existence of this Preface in its discussion of the Anglican “Inten­ tion”. Here that ""Intention” is stated in so many words.... It is not something new that is intended, but what has been “since the Apostles’ time”—that and no more and no less. It would be diffi­ cult to state the Catholic “Intention” on Ordination more suc­ cinctly, more clearly or more broadly than that*.2 But this strange oversight in Apostolicae Curae would not be so unbelievable if, when the Pope referred to ‘the intention necessary for a valid sacrament’, he was not after all referring to the wording of the ritual document used. In point of fact the so-called ‘intention asserted in the Preface was very well known in Rome in 1896, and was frequently referred to by writers on both sides (See 1 See quotation on p. xix above. So too Lacey had written: ‘The compilers were incapable of imposing any meaning of their own upon the Ordinal; its true sense was determined by other and less personal forces.... Now it is a fixed rule for the interpreta­ tion of public documents that they are to be understood, not in any esoteric sense which the words may bear, but in the sense in which the words are generally used by the com­ munity.’ (The Interpretation of the English Ordinal: Church Historical Society, tract L, 1898, p. 5). And a Church Times reviewer (17 July 1936, p. 79) wrote: ‘Nothing that Dr. Messenger can allege to show that Cranmer held erroneous views concerning the ministry has any bearing on the intention of the Ordinal.’ * Ibid., pp. 81-3. Dix returns to his charge later (p. 88) in a passage of strong irony. His argument has been reproduced io the tract Infallible Fallacies (S.P.C.K., p. 12).

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Chapter Nine). In the commission presided over by Cardinal Mazzella, it was strongly urged in the Anglicans’ favour by Duchesne.1 The difficulties against this interpretation are the ones we have already met; such a defect of meaning, although relevant to de­ termining the defect ofform, cannot be itself an invalidating defect of intention in the theological sense. In any case it is only in an applied sense that a document can be said to have an ‘intention of its own. In a recent polemical booklet2 the Rev. K. M. Ross finds here an opportunity to score some tactical points against opponents who hold ‘this strange hypothesis’, namely that ‘what Leo ΧΙΠ condemned was the intention of the rite itself.... What is this intention, if it is not the intention of the compilers of the rite or of those using it? “I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!” A disembodied intention is like a disembodied grin.* The ‘intention of the rite’ is by no means irrelevant to the question of Anglican ordinations, although the choice of the term may be not altogether fortunate. Documents and formulae do acquire an objective purport from the setting in which they are current3 and in another place in Apostolicae Curae* Leo XIII does appeal to this criterion to show that none of the suggested formulae in the Ordinal could serve as an adequate sacramento' form. But all that still pertains to the defect ofform, whereas ou: present quest is for the defect of sacramental intention. Another misconception has arisen from the frequent mention by certain authors of the ‘intention of the rite’, and by their use of such phrases as ‘The Anglican rite was defective both in its form and in its intention.’ This manner of speaking suggests that, in order for a sacramental rite to be valid, it must have, as well as a 1 Cf. Shane Leslie, Cardinal Gasquet (Bums Oates 1953), P·