On 18 September 1896 Pope Leo xiii promulgated the encyclical Apostolicae curae, declaring that after due examination of the historical evidence by a curial commission, he deemed Anglican orders to be absolutely null and utterly void. While the encyclical raised questions about the lawfulness of ordinations and consecrations in the early 1550s, and noted the breach with papally-sanctioned appointments, Leo based his conclusion squarely on one issue: the use of the Edwardine Ordinal and the absence of sacrificial language in forms used for priestly ordination and episcopal consecration. According to Apostolicae curae, the loss of forms that ‘express the sacred Order of Priesthood [sacerdotium] or its grace and power’, which is chiefly the power ‘of consecrating and offering the True Body and Blood of the Lord’, made Anglican orders without efficacy and episcopal consecrations invalid. These forms were lost because the English Church considered the eucharist a ‘bare commemoration of the sacrifice offered on the cross’.Footnote 1 Because the episcopate represents the sacerdotium in the highest degree, and because the English Church had removed the sacerdotium of Christ from all its rites, it had invalidated its own episcopal consecrations as well.Footnote 2 Tracing this judgement back to documents issued by Julius iii (1550–5) and Paul iv (1555–9), Leo xiii declared that his judgement conformed to, and confirmed, the papal judgement of more than three centuries. In language difficult for the inheritors of this document to appreciate, Leo expressed hope that this adjudication of Anglican orders would result in the mass conversion of Anglicans to the one true Church of Christ. Instead, it launched over a century of anguished and tortured efforts on the part of Anglicans, Episcopalians and Catholics to circumvent or qualify away Leo's declaration that his conclusions were forever ‘valid and in force and shall be inviolably observed both juridically and otherwise’.Footnote 3
Also in September 1896, halfway around the world, in a city approaching its zenith in civic pride and international influence, the Roman Catholics of Saint Louis, Missouri, still mourned the recent death of the only archbishop that they had ever known. Archbishop Peter Kenrick arrived in Saint Louis in 1841 and at age thirty-five began to shepherd a territory 40 per cent larger than the whole of Catholic Europe. In his fifty-five years of archiepiscopal service, he oversaw the reorganisation of his charge into five archdioceses and twenty dioceses. He witnessed the city's growth from a muddy dock town on the Mississippi to a bustling metropolis that aspired to be the Paris of the American Midwest. His most noted, and for some his most notorious, theological contribution was at Vatican I as a strident opponent of papal infallibility and harsh critic of Henry Manning. His last conciliar speech – smuggled out of Rome by Lord Acton and published in Naples – proved a sensation in Europe and the United States, for he declared that papal infallibility could not be defined as dogma, even by an ecumenical council. Kenrick narrowly escaped public censure and excommunication, and remained under a cloud of suspicion during the last twenty-five years of his life.Footnote 4
Yet Kenrick's most lasting and least known theological legacy was his polemic over the validity of Anglican orders. Indeed, his work set the agenda for the half-century-long debate which resulted in Apostolicae curae and the papal rejection of Anglican orders. Kenrick's promotion to the episcopate in 1841 was based in part on the publication that year of his The validity of Anglican ordination and Anglican claims to apostolic succession examined. Kenrick's predecessor had commended him to the Curia in lavish terms, noting among his many accomplishments that, ‘he has already published works highly regarded for their piety as well as for their usefulness in controversy’.Footnote 5 The reaction from Episcopalians and Anglicans was so visceral and aggressive that Kenrick was obliged to publish a heavily revised and expanded second edition in 1848. While much of this reaction focused on his spurious assertions that Matthew Parker was not validly consecrated, it was his attack on the sacrificial character of Anglican priesthood that proved the more significant polemical strategy. It was this theme that gained momentum in succeeding decades, culminating in Apostolicae curae.
Over the last fifty years, scholars and churchmen have explored the origins of the nineteenth-century controversy over Anglican orders. Francis Clark located the origins of this controversy in the Oxford Movement, above all in Pusey's Tract 81 and Newman's Tract 90.Footnote 6 John Jay Hughes began his account in 1890, with the chance meeting of Viscount Halifax and Abbé Portal on the island of Madeira.Footnote 7 Elizabeth Stuart found the locus belli in Pusey's Eirenicon (1865) and the Roman Catholic reaction to it.Footnote 8 Yet there is one common element that binds all these accounts together – the absence of Peter Kenrick.
How could such a crucial voice in this debate disappear from the narrative? The answer lies in a complex web of nineteenth-century developments that demonstrate how a dynamic exchange of theological ideas that originated in the United States criss-crossed the Atlantic, shaping key concerns in the Oxford Movement and priorities for the Curia in Rome. The fact that this ferment had its origins in the United States, influenced the works of Edward Pusey and others, provoked a polemical response from Peter Kenrick that set Rome's polemical agenda for the next century and a half is – to say the least – intriguing.
The task here is not to provide a comprehensive account of this complex web of developments, but rather to explore a key element of this transatlantic theological debate – the absence of sacrificial language in the ordination rites in the Edwardine Ordinal – and consider why this polemical dispute began in the American context. This involves first an examination of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century work of Samuel Seabury and John Henry Hobart, American Episcopal theologians and bishops, whose work on the sacrificial character of the American Episcopal eucharistic rite attracted the attention of those who helped to shape the Oxford Movement. This emphasis on priestly eucharistic sacrifice found a prominent place in the thought of Hugh James Rose and the men who gathered at his Hadleigh rectory to plan what became the Oxford Movement. These ideas became enshrined in tracts by Edward Pusey, Arthur Perceval and others. Second will be a consideration of how in 1841 Peter Kenrick mounted a book-length assault on this High Church Episcopalian and Oxford Movement claim to catholicity, making the deficiency of form in the Edwardine Ordinal the lynchpin of his argument. Finally, the flurry of publications in the latter half of the nineteenth century that focused on this subject – and which culminated in Leo's encyclical on Anglican orders – will be discussed. Thus it will be demonstrated that it was the ‘forgotten’ disputes between American theologians over the sacrificial character of the Anglican orders – and not Rome's reaction to Oxford Movement claims to apostolic succession – that sparked the polemical flame and resulted in Apostolicae curae.
Seabury, Hobart, Rose and the Oxford Movement
On Sunday 14 November 1784, in Aberdeen, Samuel Seabury received episcopal ordination from the Right Reverend Robert Kilgour, bishop of Aberdeen and primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Right Reverend Arthur Petrie, bishop of Moray, Ross and Caithness and the Right Reverend John Skinner, bishop coadjutor of Aberdeen. As bishop of Connecticut, Seabury became the first Anglican bishop on American soil. A convention of Connecticut clergy meeting in Woodbury, Connecticut, on 25 March 1783 had elected him as their bishop and sent him to England to seek ordination from English bishops. Seabury arrived in London in July 1783 with testimonials and evidence of his election, but met one objection after another from the archbishops of Canterbury and York. To assist his efforts the General Assembly of Connecticut passed an act averring that the state would raise no objection to his consecration. Nevertheless, negotiations failed to produce the necessary act of parliament setting aside the state oaths required of a bishop in England.Footnote 9
Seabury had already made overtures to the Episcopal Church in Scotland; and so in October 1784, when it became clear that the English Church would not consecrate him, he turned to the bishops north of the border. The Scottish bishops understood Seabury's position as bishop in a non-established Church. During its long and troubled history, the Episcopal Church in Scotland had been established and disestablished more than once. After the Glorious Revolution, the Scottish bishops refused to abjure their oath of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy, and so King William established the Presbyterian Kirk as the state Church of Scotland. Thus persecuted and marginalised, the Episcopal Church in Scotland made common cause with the non-jurors in England. Freed from the compromises inherent in being an established Church, many in the Scottish Episcopal Church reverted to the ‘Laudian’ Book of 1637.Footnote 10 While others continued to use the English Prayer Book of 1662, no state restrictions impeded liturgical revisions or innovations. Many in the Scottish Episcopal Church admired the scholarship of the English non-jurors, particularly the ‘Usagers’,Footnote 11 and adapted the liturgy accordingly. The Usagers sought to restore four ‘usages’ intended to return the eucharist to a more Catholic form: the mixing of water and wine in the chalice, the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the elements, a prayer of oblation over the elements and prayers for the dead.Footnote 12 Usagers connected these four usages with a sacrificial understanding of the eucharist. They argued that the second Edwardine Book (1552) and subsequent books had suppressed the usages to meet Calvinist objections to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Footnote 13 All four of these usages found their way into the Scottish communion service of 1764.Footnote 14
When the bishops of Scotland consecrated Samuel Seabury in November 1784, the parties signed a concordat of union between the two Churches.Footnote 15 In its fifth article Seabury agreed to ‘endeavor all he can … to make the celebration of this venerable mystery [eucharist] conformable to the most primitive doctrine and practice in that respect, which is the pattern the Church of Scotland has copied after in her Communion Office’.Footnote 16
In 1786 Seabury published his own communion service book for use in the diocese of Connecticut. He reproduced the Scottish service of 1764 exactly. The offertory sentences made it clear that people as well as priest offered their gifts. The rubrics directed the priest to ‘humbly present [the offering] to the Lord’. They also instructed the priest to mix a little water with the wine in the chalice. In the oblatory prayer, after the words of institution, Seabury capitalised the words ‘which we now offer unto thee’. Finally, the priest invoked the Holy Spirit over the gifts ‘that they might become for us the Body and Blood of thy most dearly beloved Son’. While the consecrated gifts remained on the altar, the priest said the prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church, which included a petition for the faithful departed.Footnote 17 Despite the generally Evangelical tenor of the American Church, Seabury succeeded to a surprising extent in gaining acceptance for the Scottish service. The communion office in the first approved American Book of Common Prayer of 1789 differed only in one line from that of the Scottish Church.Footnote 18
Seabury argued that the whole eucharistic act constituted a sacrifice commemorative of the one sacrifice of the cross. The priest, in offering the bread and wine at the altar, did what Christ did at the last supper, offering his body and blood:Footnote 19 ‘He began to fulfil the divine decree by offering up himself [at the supper] for the sins of the world; which offering was fully completed and rendered effectual, when he yielded up his life on the cross.’Footnote 20 Seabury argued, from John xvii.19 (‘for their sakes I sanctify myself’ [Seabury emphasis]) that Christ consecrated his sacrifice of himself at the last supper.Footnote 21 When the Church celebrated the eucharist, it pleaded that sacrifice before God: ‘The Eucharist is … a true and proper sacrifice, commemorative of the original sacrifice and death of Christ – a memorial made before God … to plead with him the meritorious sacrifice and death of his dear Son.’Footnote 22 It followed for Seabury that if Christ commanded his disciples to ‘do this’, he also gave them the authority to accomplish sacrifice and to pass it on to the Church.Footnote 23 For Seabury, ‘an altar implies a sacrifice and a sacrifice a priesthood’.Footnote 24 Only the eucharist of the successors of the Apostles and those ordained by them communicated the benefits of Christ's passion to its partakers.Footnote 25 This link between eucharistic sacrifice and apostolic commission informed all Seabury's eucharistic writings.
This tightly reasoned understanding of the eucharist and episcopacy made sense in the American context. The Episcopal Church had to appeal to the distinctiveness of its episcopal order to attract members who could easily choose a Church with a much more republican organisation. In many colonies before the war with Britain, and eventually in all of the states after the Revolution, the American Episcopal Church did not have the force of establishment on its side. In article ii of the concordat, Seabury and the Scottish bishops had stated that bishops, the ministers of the spiritual society of the Church, the mystical body of Christ, exercise their office independently of all lay powers. Lay government could not deprive them of their spiritual authority and jurisdiction.Footnote 26 This understanding of episcopacy rejected the erastianism of the Church of England, and proved a cornerstone of the Episcopal Churches of Scotland and of America.
John Henry Hobart (1775–1830), who came of age as the Episcopal Church was groping to understand its mission, embraced Seabury's vision of the distinctive character of the Church's work and gave the concept of sacrificial priesthood its fullest expression in the American context. This did not occur without controversy. As a young man he proved a brilliant student, and the Princeton theologians appointed him to be a tutor in their faculty, despite his strong loyalty to the Protestant Episcopal Church and his determination to receive ordination in that communion. Princeton not only gave him many of his closest friends – men who distinguished themselves in American Presbyterianism – but also provided a forum to hone his understanding of ecclesiology and High Church sacramentality in opposition to more Protestant alternatives. His Church's connection with the Scottish Episcopal Church proved a great boon; for it was a communion that was disestablished, marginal and required by circumstance to justify its existence. Hobart developed an ecclesiology that looked to the persecuted pre-Constantinian Church, where he found not only episcopal government, but a core justification for the Church's survival – a sacrificial priesthood. Alhough ordained by the Low Churchman William White, on 3 June 1798,Footnote 27 his heart was with Seabury who had died two years earlier.
In 1804 Hobart published two works that played a central role in defining the identity of the American Episcopal Church in its new circumstances. In his Companion to the altar, Hobart acknowledged his dependence on Samuel Seabury for his views of the holy eucharist.Footnote 28 In the Companion, Hobart laid out his understanding of the eucharist as a commemorative sacrifice, efficaciously communicating grace to the recipient:
The Eucharist therefore is not only a sacrament, in which, under the symbols of bread and wine, according to the institution of Christ, the faithful, truly and spiritually receive the Body and Blood of Christ; but also a true and proper sacrifice, commemorative of the original sacrifice and death of Christ for our deliverance from sin and death: a memorial made before God, to plead with him the meritorious sacrifice and death of his dear Son for the forgiveness of our sins, and all other benefits of Christ's passion. The Eucharist, as its name imports, a sacrifice of thanksgiving, the bread and wine after they have been offered or given to God, and blessed and sanctified by his holy [sic] Spirit, are returned by the hand of his minister to be eaten by the faithful, as a feast upon the sacrifice. Footnote 29
Like Seabury, Hobart linked the sacrificial nature of the eucharist to the apostolic succession of the ministry of the Church. Since the sacraments communicate grace to the recipient, their efficacy must depend on the power of God. The recipient can only rest assured that the power of God accompanied the sacrament by receiving them from ministers duly appointed by God, namely, those episcopally ordained.Footnote 30
In the second work published that year, A companion to the festivals and fasts of the Church, Hobart rehearsed his argument that episcopal ordination conferred the necessary power for celebrating the eucharist.Footnote 31 He devoted a whole section of the work to the nature of the Church, admitting his dependence on Charles Daubeny's A guide to the Church.Footnote 32 As a well-formed and regular society, the Church must have recognised officers; as a spiritual society, these officers derive their authority from appointment by Christ; as a visible society, these officers derive their authority from the Church, rather than from personal charism; and as a universal society, one form of government will exist across the Church. The government of this society takes the form of episcopacy, which Hobart defined as the presence of three orders of ministry, bishop, priest and deacon, with only the bishop having the power of ordination.Footnote 33 Hobart then adduced an array of scriptural passages and early church Fathers to show that Christ intended episcopacy as a permanent and positive institution for the Church ‘until the end of the ages’, and any attempt to change it amounted to schism.Footnote 34
Not surprisingly, Presbyterians and others took exception to Hobart's arguments. Within a year, the Revd Dr William Linn, a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, New York, published a series of ‘Miscellanies’ in the Albany Centinel [sic]. Linn specifically attacked the claims Hobart made in Festivals and Companion. Several Episcopal authors answered Linn in the pages of the Albany Centinel, taking the noms de plum ‘Layman’ (Thomas Yardely How) and ‘Cyprian’ (Revd Frederick Beasley). Hobart answered for himself under the names ‘Detector’ and ‘Vindex’.Footnote 35 The arguments expanded Hobart's own in Festivals.Footnote 36 Linn, in his first Miscellany, had claimed that a Presbyterian form of government fitted better with the institutions of civil government in the United States than an episcopal form. Hobart, as Vindex, took up this argument and compared the constitution of the civil government with the constitution of the Episcopal Church. The governor corresponded to the bishop, the legislature to the convention, with the senate and clergy as the upper houses. He pointed out that in the American Church, the conventions elected their bishops. Episcopacy consisted only in the presence of the three orders, capable of adaptation to the exigencies of time and place. The American episcopal system avoided the danger of prelacy, and preserved Hobart's Church from the appointment of bishops by a foreign pope as in Roman Catholicism and from the erastian dilemma faced by the Church of England.Footnote 37 The controversy conducted in these articles demonstrates the intellectual effort to adapt the inheritance of the Church of England to the American circumstance.
Within a few months the Revd Dr John M. Mason, who served on the board of trustees of Columbia College with Hobart, answered the Essays with the first number of The Christian's Magazine. Hobart replied with a series of letters to Dr Mason, which he published in a volume entitled, An apology for apostolic order.Footnote 38 This volume condensed Hobart's thoughts on episcopacy and served as his last published work on the subject. In the Apology, Hobart focused and intensified his argument that ‘the connection between the visible Church and the “Lord of all” can only be kept up by a visible ministry, administering visible sacraments; and this ministry can derive its authority from Christ only, in that mode and order originally constituted’. Only in this way can the Church have the assurance that Christ remains with her always, even to the end of the world.Footnote 39 Like Seabury, Hobart linked apostolic succession and the sacrificial nature of the eucharist as the means of grace communicated to the believer.
While Hobart found justification for his theology in the works of High Church English divines like Daubeny, his writings possessed a distinctive vigour and coherent vision. Daubeny and other English divines insisted on the lineal continuity of the Anglican succession, but lacked an emphasis on the eucharistic sacrifice as an essential expression of Anglican priesthood. In his Guide to the Church, Daubeny laid stress on the outward sacraments as the means of spiritual communication between God and humanity, and the necessity of a lawful commission for the administration of those sacraments.Footnote 40 However, Daubeny emphasised that the efficacy of the sacraments depends not simply on the ‘mere performance of the ministry’, nor the elements, but upon the spirit of God accompanying the ordinances.Footnote 41 Nowhere did he use language of eucharistic sacrifice that even approximated to Hobart's understanding of the eucharist: that communion was a ‘feast upon the sacrifice’ performed through the work of a sacrificial priesthood.
Hobart's freedom to elaborate on the sacrificial character of Anglican priesthood may reflect the absence of erastian constraints. In England, competing positions fought for the support of the state. The need to accommodate this diversity within the established Church may have inhibited English divines who might have used sacrificial language in their reflections on the priestly office and the eucharistic liturgy. Whether under the Tudors, Stuarts or Hanoverians, the stakes were high, because establishment or tolerance depended on royal approval – a lesson that the Episcopal Church of Scotland had learned the hard way. Yet Scottish Episcopalians had discovered through suppression and marginalisation a freedom to shape their liturgy and theology in ways that conformed to their understanding of early Christian worship.
In the American context, Hobart understood himself as in a contest for the very life of the visible Church. He aligned himself and his Church with the primitive Church in a way many High Church English divines did not. These divines looked to the martyrs of the Reformation or the courage of the non-jurors, claiming that the Catholic character of Anglicanism had come down to them through the venerable history of the Church in England. Hobart made his case in a hostile environment and an indifferent state. He turned to the primitive pre-Constantinian Church as the basis for the ordinances and ministry that distinguished his Church from other ecclesial communities.
In December of 1807 Hobart sent several copies of his Apology to Archdeacon Charles Daubney of Bath, asking him to keep one and distribute the rest to others of his choosing. Daubney responded warmly, thanking Hobart for the gift and praising his work.Footnote 42 A copy of the Apology also came into the hands of John Skinner, bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, one of the three who had consecrated Samuel Seabury in 1784. In a letter to Hobart dated 26 February 1816, Skinner acknowledged the similarity in circumstance between the American Church and the Scottish Church and noted the recent improvement of circumstances for the Scottish Church.Footnote 43
In 1818 an important English friendship began when the Revd Henry Hadley Norris wrote to Hobart to introduce himself. He had become familiar with Hobart through Charles Daubney, who had put a copy of Hobart's Apology into his hands. Norris had heard of Hobart's refusal to participate in an ecumenical Bible Society, forming instead his own society for the distribution of Bibles and prayer books. Norris and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had done the same in England. Norris corresponded with Hobart concerning Hobart's Episcopal Tract Society in New York,Footnote 44 and Hobart sent Norris the society's pamphlets along with journals of convention. In 1819 Norris thanked Hobart for the works he had sent, but above all for his information regarding convention: ‘I rejoice in your convention, and in the wisdom which governs all its deliberations … Alas! Our great grievance is, that we have not, like you, a convention. Our convocation is only the pageantry of what formerly so materially contributed to the purity and consolidation of the Church.’Footnote 45
In September 1823 Hobart travelled to Europe to recuperate from an illness; and in late October arrived in Liverpool. Norris took his travels in England in hand, arranging transportation and lodging. He organised visits to several clergy who knew Hobart through correspondence, and introduced him to Henry Nelson Coleridge, a nephew of the poet and editor of the Christian Remembrancer, to the Revd Archibald Campbell, editor of the British Critic, to Bishop William Howley of London, to Archdeacon John James Watson and his brother Joshua and to Dr William Van Mildert, bishop of Llandaff.Footnote 46 Thomas Sikes wrote to Joshua Watson in August of 1824:
He is vastly pleasant and brim full. He made a thousand apologies for talking so much but we should have been very sorry had he talked less. O! it was funny to see honest democracy and sincere episcopacy fast yoked in this man's mind, and perpetually struggling for his heart.Footnote 47
Others of the Hackney Phalanx had an equally difficult time reconciling Hobart's insistence on the apostolicity and political independence of the American Church with their own Tory High Church principles.Footnote 48
Hobart also travelled to Scotland and met Scottish Episcopal bishops and clergy. Correspondence concerning the visit to Scotland confirms that Hobart's writings, particularly the Apology, enjoyed a wide circulation. Some of the older clergy had witnessed the consecration of Samuel Seabury, and expressed their delight that the American Church continued to thrive.Footnote 49 Bishop Skinner wrote a letter of introduction for Bishop Hobart to Dr Nicol, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford; and while there he passed some time as the guest of Dr Copleston, Provost of Oriel.Footnote 50 The British Critic took note of Hobart's presence in England,Footnote 51 writing approvingly of his church principles, and quoting from one of his sermons at length. The article concluded that if American clergy should receive education in such orthodoxy as the sermon displayed, the American Church could trust in its certain future.Footnote 52
After publishing his sermons in a British edition, Hobart felt the need to relax from the stresses of vacationing. He passed the winter of 1824–5 in Rome, and there met Hugh James Rose. They travelled back to England together.Footnote 53 Hobart gave Rose copies of his books; and Rose, a great champion of the High Church cause, came to rely on Hobart's writings, quoting them at length in his own works. Rose became an important friend and defender of the New York bishop both during the remainder of his European sojourn and after his return to America.
When Hobart returned to America, he preached a sermon at Trinity Church, New York, entitled The United States of America compared with some European countries, particularly England.Footnote 54 While Hobart admired the culture and architecture of Europe, he expressed a preference for America's natural beauty. He also praised the many clergy and bishops he had met in England, but offered several criticisms of the English Church in comparison to the American. He pointed out that the system of livings in England functioned like property, and individuals as well as the government could buy and sell them. Also, because of the complications of that system, the owner of a living could advance an unworthy clergyman over the objections of his bishop. In America, congregations chose and supported their own clergy which Hobart believed led to a much stronger and more intimate bond between pastor and people, while the bishop had a more direct oversight over his clergy. Hobart also pointed out that in England the prime minister and cabinet often appointed bishops with an eye to parliamentary influence, while in America dioceses elected their own bishops in convention. The American Church governed its own affairs through the General Convention. In contrast, Convocation had not met in England for over a century, leaving the government of the Church to parliament, a body that included dissenters.Footnote 55 Hobart also pointed out with some pride that the American Church had recently established a theological seminary for the education of its clergy, while the Church of England had no such institution.Footnote 56 Although he admired the heritage of the Church of England which the American Church shared, he found the American Church more nearly approximated to the primitive Church, while the erastianism of the Church of England worked to its detriment.Footnote 57 Hobart's list of criticisms would all make their appearance in one form or another in the writings of the Oxford Movement a decade later.
When the sermon appeared in London, it generated controversy. The London Quarterly Theological Review published a review in June 1826.Footnote 58 Labelling Hobart ‘an abuse hunter’,Footnote 59 the review carried the tone of injured pride, as if the sting of the criticism struck too close to home. Shocked by the admixture of democracy with ecclesial life, the reviewer accused Hobart of abandoning the dignity of the cloth for the ‘sovereign mandate of his majesty, the mob’.Footnote 60 Democracy in America subjected those in authority to the despotism of the mob, while the ‘hereditary wisdom, power and prudence’ of the English nobility protected her from the tyranny of the masses. Slinging epithets both harsh and overreaching he called America ‘the land of swamp, the yellow fever, and universal suffrage’.Footnote 61 He accused Hobart of having overlooked the tireless efforts of 10,000 humble English clergymen, toiling faithfully in obscurity when Hobart attacked the system of livings and tithes: ‘This American prelate, dispensing his Sunday sermon to his city congregation in his fashionable chapel, little knows the life of the measureless majority of the clergy of England.’Footnote 62
Hugh James Rose defended his friend in a published response that appeared in the Christian Remembrancer in September 1826.Footnote 63 While acknowledging differences with Hobart, Rose expressed his shock at the tone of the review. To accusations of abuse hunting and pandering to the mob, Rose responded that Hobart's ministry had been defined by the ‘most extreme high church principles – principles not likely to be popular in America’.Footnote 64 To the charge of preaching in the luxury of his ‘city chapel’, Rose encouraged the reviewer to take down his map of New York and measure the distance from Manhattan to the Falls of Niagara, which constituted the extent of Hobart's regular visitations.Footnote 65 Rose accused the reviewer of an overweening English pride that could see nothing good outside of England; and this chauvinism prevented him from reading Hobart fairly, or acknowledging the truth of two crucial points in his critique: ‘that the church has no legitimate legislature, but … is placed under the superintendence of two lay bodies, in one of which the presiding officer may be a dissenter, and of the other many dissenters are notoriously members – and finally, that there are scarcely any public provisions for theological education, and for the ministry of the English Church’.Footnote 66
Rose took up the issues that Hobart had raised and began to speak out. In 1826 he preached a series of sermons at Cambridge that outlined concerns later championed by the Oxford Movement.Footnote 67 In his Commission and consequent duties of the clergy, which went through multiple editions, Rose argued for the necessity of a visible Church, with visible sacraments, administered by a duly commissioned priest to communicate the grace of God to the believer.Footnote 68 He quoted sermons by Hobart to strengthen his case, using Hobart's response to the charge that this argument unchurched other Christian sects.Footnote 69 Further in the volume, Rose argued that Christ had established the episcopal order to answer this necessity, and again incorporated long quotations from Hobart, particularly from his Apology for apostolic order. After a three-page quotation, Rose stated that ‘the preceding passage from Bishop Hobart contains all that is requisite on the subject’.Footnote 70 Rose asserted that Hobart had stated more clearly than any other English divine before him the views of episcopalians, and quoted approvingly the Hobartian formula that ‘the connection between the visible Church and the “Lord of all” can only be kept up by a visible ministry, administering visible sacraments; and this ministry can derive its authority from Christ only, in that mode and order originally constituted’.Footnote 71
In a second edition of his book, published in 1831, Rose reorganised the notes, giving Hobart's work greater prominence and – by placing his work among a pantheon of celebrated High Church divines – bestowed on his work an authority no other American theologian had achieved. Most interestingly, Rose added an appendix reviewing some Roman Catholic objections to the validity of Anglican orders,Footnote 72 and took great pains to argue that the English Church had always understood the eucharist as a sacrifice.Footnote 73 The Hobartian influence is evident. This point is crucial to note; for it was Hobart's critique of Anglicanism, his vision of a disestablished Church modelled on primitive Christian practice, and claims for a validly ordained priesthood offering eucharistic sacrifice, that inspired Rose and motivated him to help to create a movement that would change the Church of England.
Hugh James Rose proved a key instigator of the Oxford Movement. In 1832, with the advice and help of Joshua Watson and several other members of the Hackney Phalanx, he launched the British Magazine as an organ of High Church views. In this same period Rose counted John Henry Newman, John Keble and William Palmer among his regular correspondents.Footnote 74 In February of 1833, after the Ministry had introduced the bill suppressing ten Irish bishoprics in parliament, Rose wrote from his rectory at Hadleigh ‘That something is requisite, is certain. The only thing is, that whatever is done ought to be quickly done.’Footnote 75 William Palmer convinced Rose to come to Oxford, to encourage many of Palmer's friends to contribute to Rose's British Magazine. Rose met Hurrell Froude and Arthur Perceval, among others.Footnote 76 Between 25 July and 29 July 1833, Rose invited a number of like-minded men to Hadleigh to consider how to respond to the parliamentary bill. Froude, Perceval and Palmer attended the ‘Hadleigh Conference’, though Newman and Keble did not.Footnote 77 Rose mediated the influence of the American Church, especially Bishop Hobart, to the progenitors of the Oxford Movement. John William Burgon wrote:
To read of the Great Church Revival of 1833 as it presents itself to the imagination of certain writers, one would suppose that in their account the publication of the earliest of the ‘Tracts for the Times’ had the magical effect of kindling into glory the dead embers of an all-but-extinct Church. The plain truth is that the smouldering materials for the cheerful blaze which followed the efforts of 1832–34 had been accumulating unobserved for years. … Not only here in England had there been many to bear faithful and fearless witness, but the great American Church had done her full part in ‘preparing the way.’ Bp. Hobart of New York – Bp. Doane of New Jersey – Bp. Whittingham of Maryland – are names which readily present themselves.Footnote 78
While Rose may have introduced Hobart's ideas to the men who led the Oxford Movement, they ran with them. Indeed they embraced them so enthusiastically that the American influence was forgotten and all but dropped from the narrative.
Edward Bouverie Pusey's Tract 81, published in 1838, illustrates this point.Footnote 79 In his preface Pusey rehearsed the history of revisions of the eucharistic prayer in the English Church, and the gradual suppression of sacrificial language in the prayer.Footnote 80 He traced the restoration of sacrificial ideas in liturgies to the Scottish and American Churches, stating that the Scottish divines had intended their revision to influence English doctrine, ‘had the miserable violence of the times permitted’. Yet it was the American revision that reflected the true state of English doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice.Footnote 81 The American Church, according to Pusey, ‘embodied, it may be concluded, the doctrine of the whole Anglican Church (had she been at liberty to express it)’, in restoring the oblation of the Scottish Church and the non-jurors.Footnote 82 The eucharistic prayer of the American Book was among the authorities included in his catenae.Footnote 83
Later, however, in his sermon, ‘The holy eucharist a comfort to the pentitent’,Footnote 84 Pusey drew on Samuel Seabury's eucharistic writings without acknowledgment. Like Seabury, he argued that only through the reception of the sacraments could the penitent receive the assurance of forgiveness and that frequent communion strengthened habits of virtue and holiness.Footnote 85 He duplicated Seabury's argument that Christ acted as a priest when he consecrated himself in his oblation of his body and blood in the bread and wine at the last supper. Christ commanded his Apostles to ‘do this’ and gave them power to accomplish it.Footnote 86 In this same sermon, Pusey lamented that the Church so infrequently celebrated the holy eucharist, using Seabury's argument – from his Earnest persuasion – to suggest that the English Church had originally intended weekly celebrations.Footnote 87
Arthur Philip Perceval also echoed the works of Hobart in his writing, although he never cited him as his source. In Tract 35, The people's interest in their minister's commission, Perceval made many of the same arguments that Hobart had made in his Companion. Like Hobart, Perceval argued that the sacrament of the eucharist strengthened the soul of the believer and brought it into union with Christ, and through it received the benefits of Christ's sacrifice.Footnote 88 Sacraments only had this effect, however, when administered by persons with the proper apostolic warrant; celebrated by any other, the sacraments had no effect. Anyone who took this warrant upon himself without proper ordination by the bishop practiced schism.Footnote 89 This argument closely parallels one found in Hobart's Companion.Footnote 90 Both argued that only through the succession of commissioned ministers and sacraments does Christ fulfill his promise to remain with the Church ‘to the end of the ages’.Footnote 91
Perceval's dependence on Hobart is even more evident in his 1839 Apology for the doctrine of apostolical succession, published in America by the Protestant Episcopal Tract Society, which Bishop Hobart had founded.Footnote 92 In order and substance Perceval's arguments are those found in Hobart's Apology.Footnote 93 Perceval reproduced Hobart's language too closely to allow for coincidence, and his use of Rose's examination of the sacrificial character of Anglican orders in the Commission offers further evidence of the American-Anglican connection. He sought to strengthen the claim to a sacrificial priesthood by reproducing ancient rites of ordination of presbyters and bishops, which connected the validity of the offices with a sacrificial understanding of the eucharist.Footnote 94 This effort by an English theologian to expand on, and augment, a theological argument received from an American divine, which Perceval published in America, is a striking example of the transatlantic collaboration that was occurring.
The twin emphasis on a eucharistic sacrifice that communicates the grace of God to the recipient, but only when administered by an episcopally-ordained priest, had allowed the American Episcopal Church to distinguish itself from other American Churches. Seabury and Hobart invested much theological reflection in adapting the concept of apostolic episcopacy to the American circumstance, and identifying the distinguishing feature of their Church's ministry – a worthy eucharistic sacrifice administered by validly ordained clergy. Because of their freedom from the constraints of an establishment preoccupied with balancing competing truth claims among its adherents, they could stress the sacrificial nature of the eucharist and the priesthood in a way that English divines before them had not.
For keen Roman Catholic observers of developments in the American and English Churches, it was these two concerns – episcopacy and a sacrificial priesthood – that seemed to be key issues. If it could be demonstrated that apostolic succession had been broken in the sixteenth century and valid orders had been compromised by Protestant reforms of ordination and consecration rites, it might be possible to attract some into the Roman Catholic fold.
Peter Kenrick and The validity of Anglican ordinations examined (1841)
The years between 1839 and 1841 were painful for Peter Kenrick. During much of the 1830s he had given devoted service to his older brother, Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia. Serving as a parish priest, professor and then rector of the diocesan seminary, as well as vicar-general of the diocese, Peter assumed responsibilities rarely entrusted to a priest fresh out of seminary. Yet his older brother expected and demanded much more. Francis Kenrick had distinguished himself as a scholar, even during his years in the Kentucky mission, where he regularly visited parishes in a thousand-mile circuit. During that period Francis Kenrick became a controversialist who combined knowledge of ancient sources with frontier experience to meet Protestant challenges to the Catholic faith. His prodigious capacity for intellectual work, amidst the distractions of a diocese in constant turmoil, made his expectations of Peter Kenrick onerous and taxing.Footnote 95 By 1838 Peter required rest from his labours and during travels in Europe became convinced that he should enter the Society of Jesus. However, yielding to enormous pressure he relented and reluctantly returned to Philadelphia in December 1839, where he continued to anguish about his vocation.Footnote 96 As if to distract himself from interior struggles, Peter plunged into a flurry of literary projects. In 1840 he published pamphlets on Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, a translation of Lacordaire's Apology for religious orders and wrote his most popular work, The month of Mary, modelled on the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and full of references to Ignatius and Jesuit saints. In 1841 two more works appeared in print. The holy house of Loretto was a flawed effort to argue that evidence supported the historicity of the miraculous translation of Jesus' childhood home from Nazareth to a wood outside Recanati, Italy – via Rauniza, on the coast of Dalmatia (Croatia) – where it moved a total of three times during the year 1294 before resting at what is now Loreto, Italy.
The second book, The validity of Anglican ordination examined, had a more lasting and far-reaching impact. While the reviewer for the Episcopal Recorder (31 July 1841)Footnote 97 dismissed it as the work of a childish imagination, it proved the beginning of a polemical debate that stretched over fifty-five years and resulted in more than a hundred publications.Footnote 98 This book continued work already begun by his older brother in the 1830s. Francis Kenrick had engaged in a series of published exchanges with the American Episcopal bishops B. B. Smith of Kentucky and J. H. Hopkins of Vermont.Footnote 99 These works distinguished him as a major Roman Catholic apologist confronting the claims of Hobartian Episcopalians and Oxford Movement Anglicans.Footnote 100 Francis co-opted his younger brother, directing his publishing endeavours toward this polemical struggle. The Kenrick brothers hoped to draw Catholic-minded Episcopalians and Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church by casting doubts on claims to apostolic succession and a sacrificial priesthood.Footnote 101 Though mass conversions did not occur, Peter Kenrick's book met with more success than either could have imagined.
Peter Kenrick explained in his preface that prominent among his reasons for writing had been the theological assertions made by contemporary American and English divines, and a reported plan to republish Fr Pierre Le Courayer's Dissertation sur la validité des ordinations des Anglois (1723) in the American Episcopal series, The Churchman's Library.Footnote 102 Following closely Le Courayer's outline of the issues, Kenrick reduced the matter to two questions. First, did Matthew Parker, the first English Protestant archbishop, receive consecration from a validly consecrated bishop (William Barlow); and second, did the liturgical forms used in consecrations and ordinations do what they were intended to do?Footnote 103 The greater portion of this work was devoted to historical arguments that impugned the valid consecration of Matthew Parker.
Kenrick's historical analysis of Matthew Parker's consecration was as convincing as the case for the historicity of the translation of the holy house from Nazareth to Loreto. Yet he stated clearly that his argument really hinged on whether, since Edward vi and Elizabeth, English clergy had received their orders using a valid form. According to Kenrick, without valid forms, there could be no true priestly ordination. Without valid ordinations, there could be no apostolic succession surviving past the first generation of English Protestants. This became the pivotal issue for Apostolicae curae.
Kenrick's attack on the Edwardine Ordinal was not novel. He traced this line of argument back to John Lewgar's Erastus senior (1662).Footnote 104 If the eighteenth-century Catholic historian Charles Dodd [Hugh Tootel] can be believed, Catholics during the reign of Mary Tudor considered the orders conferred using the Edwardine Ordinal of 1552 null and void, because – among other deficiencies – the power of ‘offering sacrifice’ was not conferred.Footnote 105 In the early seventeenth century Francis Mason published his defence of the validity of Anglican orders and the sacrificial character of Anglican eucharistic celebrations against Roman Catholic attacks.Footnote 106
Yet in early nineteenth-century polemics this question had not been central to arguments made by Catholics.Footnote 107 The only polemicist of note to employ this argument was John Milner in his The end of religious controversy, which went through five editions between 1802 and 1827. However, Milner devoted only two pages to the subject in a book of 180 pages.Footnote 108 Nicholas Wiseman made no reference to the invalidity of Edwardine forms in his The High-Church claims (1839).Footnote 109 The same year that Peter Kenrick published his book, Thomas Butler, an English Catholic priest and former chamberlain to Pope Gregory xvi, produced several pamphlets that called into question the validity of Anglican orders – although the focus of his attack was the historical veracity of Matthew Parker's consecration.Footnote 110
However, Kenrick found the deficiency of form in the Edwardine Ordinal an effective wedge in the early 1840s, in part because the contrast between the English and American Prayer Books became part of the American Episcopal and Anglican discussion. More important, Oxford Movement tracts conceded ground that previously had been hotly disputed. Indeed Pusey's acknowledgement that the American liturgy best reflected Anglicanism's understanding of eucharistic sacrifice made Kenrick's argument for deficiency of form a credible assertion.Footnote 111
Noting that the Roman Catholic Church had consistently recognised the validity of Orthodox ordinations, despite the breach in communion, Kenrick asked the rhetorical question: Why have Anglican orders never been recognised by Rome?Footnote 112 Starting with the restored bishops of Mary Tudor's reign, Kenrick recounted historical precedents from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries in which Anglican orders had been judged invalid, because of the deficiency of the Edwardine forms of ordination and consecration.
Referring to the ‘large body of Anglican divines … in our day’ who stress the need for apostolic succession, he noted that they also emphasised the sacrificial nature of the eucharistic celebration. Quoting liberally from Pusey's Tract 81, Kenrick demonstrated that this was the view of seventeenth-century Anglican divines as well. He went on to explain that their assessment concurred with Roman Catholic teaching – that ‘the power of offering sacrifice is what essentially constitutes the character of priest’. Yet citing the language of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the second Edwardine Prayer Book, Kenrick stressed that the eucharist is nowhere declared to be a sacrifice. Indeed, he quoted Pusey's observation that under Hooper's influence, after his years in Zurich, ‘the whole doctrine of the Eucharist was altered’.Footnote 113 Kenrick used Thomas Ward's Errata of the Protestant Bible (1688) to illustrate that even in biblical translations ‘temple’ had been substituted for ‘altar’ to avoid association with the Catholic eucharistic sacrifice.Footnote 114 Kenrick approvingly contrasted the sacrificial language of the American Prayer Book with the non-sacrificial language of the English Book of Common Prayer. Yet he added this to evidence of a problem recognised within the Anglican communion itself.Footnote 115 Even in the case of the American Episcopal Church he found evidence that denied the sacrificial character of Episcopal priesthood and eucharistic celebrations. Quoting liberally from Bishop William White's Lectures on the catechism of the Protestant Episcopal Church (1813), he found repeated instances where Bishop White flatly rejected the concept of a sacrificial priesthood and denied that the eucharist is a sacrifice offered to God.Footnote 116 The conclusion that Kenrick drew from all of this was that the Edwardine intention was to deny eucharistic sacrifice and therefore sacrificial priesthood and altars.Footnote 117 He found that the intent to exclude this understanding of priesthood and eucharist had continued through the centuries, even down to his own times. It was evident to Kenrick that High Churchmen like Pusey shared his critique, and that the anti-sacrificial position was defended with episcopal authority in the American Church.
Kenrick acknowledged that efforts had been made to address this problem. Indeed, he emphasised that in 1662 the forms used for ordaining priests and consecrating bishops had been altered. Kenrick approved of the words added: ‘Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God’ and ‘Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a bishop in the Church of God’. However, he noted with emphasis that ‘the change came one hundred and three years TOO LATE’.Footnote 118 Kenrick used Newman's anonymously published words from Tract 1 against him and like-minded Anglicans and Episcopalians. He rejected Newman's assertion that it was the laying on of hands and not any form of words that mattered. Kenrick declared this defence ‘singular and novel … and untenable by any one who seriously professes to adopt the principles which Christian antiquity recognized’.Footnote 119
Because the forms had been long lost and the intent to ordain men to a sacrificial priesthood had not been present, Anglican ordinations and consecrations had forever lost their validity. No alterations or corrections could restore what had been rejected and intentionally excluded from the form of the ordination rite. On these grounds Kenrick concluded that Anglican orders were absolutely null and utterly void. A polemical weapon that had rested, virtually unused, for generations became a lively part of the debates again. Peter Kenrick shot the first volley of what became a heated debate well into the 1890s, culminating in Apostolicae curae.
The debate over Anglican orders and Apostolicae curae
In the early 1840s there was no doubt among initial respondents that Kenrick's book was a new threat in the polemics waged between their communions. While an Anglican cleric, John Fuller Russell, focused on Kenrick's analysis of the historical evidence for Matthew Parker's episcopal consecration, others turned their attention to Kenrick's appeal to the deficiency of form in the Edwardine Ordinal.Footnote 120 Hugh Davey Evans, in a lengthy response to Kenrick, published in 1844, observed that Kenrick was ‘a distinguished divine of the Romish communion, who we believe has since [the book's publication] been elevated to her episcopate’. Evans went on to note that ‘It is the only American work on the subject as far as we know, and we believe the latest published in any country. It cannot be denied to be sufficiently plausible to require some notice.’Footnote 121 Although he devoted almost 200 pages to the historical facts of Matthew Parker's consecration, Evans recognised that Kenrick's argument hinged on the validity of forms found in the Edwardine Ordinal and composed a thirty-five-page chapter to refute it. He quoted Kenrick to establish this: ‘“The rejection of English ordinations by the [Romish] Church, is grounded solely on the insufficiency of the form, and not upon any historical fact … the judgment and practice of the [Romish] Church is exclusively founded on the nature of the form, which being insufficient of itself, suffices to invalidate the act of which it is so essential a part, no matter by whom performed.”’Footnote 122 After a lawyerly rebuttal of each element of Kenrick's argument against the Edwardine Ordinal, Evans concluded by emphatically rejecting Kenrick's assertion that an intent to deny eucharistic sacrifice and a sacrificial priesthood had been the reason for altering the 1552 Ordinal. To the contrary, Evans insisted that ‘we have shown that the Church of England then regarded the Eucharist as a sacrifice – we believe she does so still, although she now speaks in a less decided tone than of old’.Footnote 123
Therein lay the challenge and the source of tension in much of the polemical literature published during the decades that followed. Whatever the veracity of Kenrick's argument, he had found a point of division in the internal debates among Episcopalians and Anglicans, and exploited it. He reopened a hitherto marginal line of argument that became a recurring theme in Catholic critiques of Anglicanism, until it was enshrined in Apostolicæ curæ in 1896. It is worthy of note that he used this argument in the American context, where the Episcopal Church had a long-standing tradition of emphasising the sacrificial character of its priesthood. The Oxford Movement's rediscovery of this tradition as part of its Anglican heritage made it a particularly effective tool in the battle to sway wavering members of the Anglican communion.
Indeed, in 1846, the recent Oxford Movement convert, J. Spencer Northcote, employed arguments that echoed those used by Kenrick, although the bishop's name and book were not invoked. Northcote was received into the Catholic Church on 7 January 1846, just three months after Newman. By the end of that year he had published a substantial polemical attack on the Church of his birth that employed an argument from deficiency of form in the Edwardine Ordinal, and asserted that the Church of England rejected eucharistic sacrifice and a sacrificial priesthood. Northcote stated, ‘Consider the doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice, that, as you know, is not only utterly disbelieved by your people, but was formally and advisedly expunged from your prayer-book.’ Like Kenrick, Northcote cited Pusey's Tract 81 as evidence that this problem was known among Anglicans.Footnote 124 While no direct evidence ties his approach to Peter Kenrick's book, the fact that he took up this line of attack in this period suggests that Kenrick's argument had already become a part of the larger polemical ethos. E. C. Harington's answer to Northcote devoted almost eighty pages to defending the Edwardine Ordinal and fewer than forty to the historical questions around Matthew Parker's consecration – a striking shift in emphasis.Footnote 125
As if to wage a polemical war by proxy, many of the original works upon which Kenrick's argument depended appeared in print in the 1840s for the first time in the nineteenth century. On the Anglican side, in 1844 an Oxford press published Le Courayer's Dissertation sur la validité des ordinations des Anglois, in a new and critically annotated English translation.Footnote 126 No edition of that work had appeared since the 1720s. Also in 1844, in the Anglo-Catholic Theology series, volume three of John Bramhall's Works appeared, the first half of which consisted of his ‘The consecration and succession of Protestant bishops justified’ (1st edition, 1658).Footnote 127 On the Catholic side, Erastus senior, a response to Bramhall and others, appeared in 1844 for the first time since its original publication in 1662. In 1848 it was published in Sydney.Footnote 128 Also in 1848, more Protestant-minded Episcopalians republished Bishop White's 1833 commentaries on the ordination liturgy, in which White affirmed ‘That in England, every thing of this sort [sacrifice, altar, and priest] was designedly dropped at the Reformation.’Footnote 129
Tension over this issue was not limited to published controversy, but became the subject of threatened legal action in American courts. In a letter dated May 1847 Francis Kenrick urged his younger brother to finish revisions of the expanded second edition of his book. He explained that
A preacher, Johnston by name, in the town of Milledgeville in the state of Georgia, is threatening me with a suit in law on this question [of Anglican ordinations]. The occasion [for this threat] is found in a letter which I wrote to a Catholic woman, who is living with him [the preacher], in which I answered some [of her] queries. I shall, therefore, eagerly look for the support of your work, that it may overcome the enemy without a struggle and leave him utterly vanquished.Footnote 130
When Kenrick's second edition appeared in 1848, he had augmented it by more than 120 pages. He responded directly to the critiques of Russell and Evans, bolstering his points with greater documentation and arguments refined in the heat of polemical battle. That same year he was elevated to the archiepiscopate, and other duties demanded his attention. He did not return to this field of combat; but others carried on the battle.
Much ink has been spilled in analysing the half-century of debate that followed Kenrick's book. John Jay Hughes and other able historians and theologians have untangled the documentary and doctrinal confusion that followed. It now seems evident that Kenrick's parsing of the Edwardine forms was as defective as his historical analysis of Matthew Parker's consecration. Yet it is strange that the instigating protagonist, whose argument on the deficiency of form was replicated by Roman Catholic polemicists and addressed by Anglican and Episcopal apologists, should have disappeared from the received narrative. It is remarkable that, like Kenrick's argument, Apostolicæ curæ hinges its argument on the deficiency of Edwardine forms rather than historical arguments against Parker's valid consecration; yet no mention of Kenrick or his book can be found in the record of curial deliberations compiled by André von Gunten.Footnote 131
Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacle created by Leo's encyclical Apostolicae curae, ecumenical conversations have continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Especially between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, a sacrificial understanding of the eucharist and the resultant understanding of the ministry of the Church as a sacrificial priesthood have taken a central place in those conversations.Footnote 132 The standard narratives of these conversations usually suggest that they began with renewed emphasis, at least in Great Britain, in the wake of the Oxford Movement, and faltered after Apostolicae curae.
One might easily succumb to the temptation to suggest that Peter Kenrick's contribution to the debate over the validity of Anglican orders disappeared from the received narrative because of the unpopular stance he took at Vatican I. One could just as easily assume that partisan historians of the Oxford Movement passed over Hobart's contribution to a recovery of the eucharist understood as sacrifice – building on Seabury's foundation – because the American institution of lay involvement in legislative and electing conventions did not conform to Anglican traditions. Whatever the reasons, twentieth-century historiography has largely overlooked both the American Episcopalian reassertion of a sacrificial understanding of the eucharist and Peter Kenrick's reintroduction of the argument that the Edwardine Ordinal eliminated the sacrificial nature of Anglican priesthood, rendering its orders absolutely null and utterly void. This oversight is evidence of the historian's temptation to locate the origins of major theological controversy at the presumed centres of ecclesiastical influence and authority. The story of nineteenth-century tensions over the sacrificial character of the eucharist and Anglican orders illustrates that the narrative can sometimes become far richer and more complex when one looks beyond the standard historiography and follows the evidence toward unlikely loci of theological discourse.
