When I asked about Anglican ordinations, Jesuit Canon lawyer Father Reginald “Rex” Mananzan, SJ, the associate judge of the national tribunal of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) said, “Yes, they are valid.”
About 50 clergymen from the Church of England participated in a service of Holy Communion celebrated at the high altar of the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome. These Anglican priests belong to a tiny, quasi-traditionalist organization called “The Society.”
They oppose the ordination of women, have a high view of the sacraments and rituals, and they participate in a system of pastoral oversight that allows the clergy and congregations to get around the authority of unorthodox or otherwise unsuitable diocesan bishops. Some of them even use the Roman Missal instead of Anglican liturgical books.
Nonetheless, these Anglicans, like all other Protestants, although not in full communion with the Roman Church and not entitled to worship in a Roman Church, were accommodated by the cathedral church of the Diocese of Rome, the Pope’s own ecclesiastical home base.
Mercifully, Rome has acknowledged that the service should never have happened. Bishop Guerino Di Tora, vicar of the archpriest of St. John Lateran, called it a “contravention of canonical norms,” as well as “a regrettable episode” resulting from a “failure in communication.”
The personnel at St. John Lateran must not have understood that the group was not in full communion with Rome, but the Anglicans certainly knew better. Indeed, the whole affair was a display of ecumenism.
By the 1820s, being Anglican was no longer a de facto part of almost every Englishman’s identity, and the old High Church party within the Protestant establishment became an “Anglo-Catholic” movement within “Anglicanism,” one of the many new isms of the age.
Led by the future St. John Henry Newman and several Oxford colleagues, the movement produced written tracts that proposed a “branch” theory of the Church, where Anglicans occupy one arm of a large tree of faith whose trunk is the Roman Catholic Church. It was providential, they argued, that the orders of bishop, priest and deacon had endured. Communion was still celebrated. Dioceses and parishes still existed to organize the faithful. Catholicism had not died, they said, but changed and not unrecognizably to the ancient Faith.
And so despite this there arose a curious situation in which a significant group of Protestants were asking if they were actually Catholics by virtue of being Anglican. Actual Roman Catholics now lived openly alongside them for the first time in centuries.
In 1994, St. John Paul II elaborated further in his encyclical on ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint, singling out Anglicans and describing “the elements of sanctification and truth present in the other Christian Communities” and “a recognition of the degree of communion already present.”
Therefore, Anglicans are not nothing and they may even be more Catholic than a lot of other Protestants.