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May 8th, 1908.
FOR some twelve years, we understand, there has been on foot a movement for organising an Old Catholic Church in this country, certain liberal Romanists having grown weary of Vaticanism. After long deliberation the Old Catholic Bishops decided to accept a retired Roman priest, the Rev. A. H. Mathew, as nominee for the Episcopate, and accordingly the Archbishop of Utrecht, together with the Bishops of Haarlem and Deventer, and Bishop Demmel of Bonn, have just consecrated Mr Mathew as Bishop of the seceding congregations of English Romanists. It is a somewhat difficult matter for us to discuss such a delicate question as this of a breach within the Roman communion. What we have some justification for commenting upon is the addition of yet another to the many religious communions in England, which deliberately range themselves outside the Catholic Church of the country. These Old Catholics, however, have just as much, or as little, to say for themselves and their anomalous position as the Romanists with whom they are now parting company. It may be, and we sincerely trust that it will be, that some day they will submit themselves to the Episcopate of these provinces, recognising the impossibility, on Catholic principles, of there being a rival Episcopate, still less of there being two rival Episcopates, in the same country. There would have been something to say in favour of a plan by means of which the seceding congregations might, in communion with the Catholic Church of England, have continued to worship with their Latin rites. As it is, they have simply added to “our unhappy divisions”. |
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