Monday, February 21, 2005
THE OLD CATHOLIC CHURCH
There is an interesting history of the Old Catholic Church online, put together by Archbishop Bowman. It begins here.
The series of webpages are based on the writings of an Old Catholic Benedictine brother who lived in an Old Catholic community in Woodstock, New York. The articles were written for publication in the Catskill Mountain Star in 1941.
The history presented the surprising information that the Old Catholic Church is in communion with the Orthodox Church. This had not become apparent in the reading I've done on wandering bishops. For example, in the section titled "Toward Unity: The Restoration Movement" is this passage:
The joint Encyclical the Old Catholic Bishops in America in 1925, in which an outline of a really Christian society was advocated, met with such approval by representatives of the Eastern Orthodox Church that the Metropolitan John of the Holy Synod, of Russia, representing 127 Bishops and Archbishops in Russia, received the Old Catholic Church in America into union with that body in the same year. In 1933, under an agreement jointly entered into, the Orthodox Archbishop of Prague and Czechoslovakia, Savvatios, under the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, placed the Orthodox Czechoslovaks in America under the jurisdiction of the American Old Catholic Archbishop, while at the same time Savvatios wa named Protector of the Old Catholics in Czechoslovakia.
And there is this passage from the section "Beyond 1941":
during and after the Second World War, Mar Georgius I, Patriarch of Glastonbury and Catholicos of the West began unifying the various strands of Old Catholics and independent Catholics. By 1956, through sub conditione consecrations, he had accumulated all sixteen lines of Apostolic succession know to exist: Syrian-Antiochene, Syrian-Malabar, Syrian-Gallican, Syro-Chaldean, Chaldean-Uniat, Coptic Orthodox, Armenian-Uniat, Order of Corporate Reunion, Old Catholic, Mariavite, Nonjuring, Anglican, Russian Orthodox, Russo-Syrian Orthodox, Greek-Melkite, and Liberal Catholic.
Old Catholics ordain women. How do the Orthodox handle that? Old Catholics accept homosexual activity without judgment, as they do divorce. How do the Orthodox handle that? And then there is the matter of some Old Catholic groups that fall into the occult arena. Are the Orthodox accepting of that as well? When this question has arisen in the past, the answer has always been "no", but now it appears as though ecumenism is merging them into a united body in Europe.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know my way around the intricacies of the Orthodox communion. There are small independent Orthodox Churches, though the two quoted passages above do not appear to be about independents. Rather they look to me to be about mainline Orthodox Patriarchies.
