Catholics without Rome

Old Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, and the Reunion Negotiations of the 1870s

Bryn Geffert, LeRoy Boerneke

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780268202415
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Catholics without Rome examines the dawn of the modern, ecumenical age, when "Old Catholics, " unable to abide Rome's new doctrine of papal infallibility, sought unity with other "catholics" in the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches.

In 1870, the First Vatican Council formally embraced and defined the dogma of papal infallibility. A small and vocal minority, comprised in large part of theologians from Germany and Switzerland, judged it uncatholic and unconscionable, and they abandoned the Roman Catholic Church, calling themselves "Old Catholics." This study examines the Old Catholic Church's efforts to create a new ecclesiastical structure, separate from Rome, while simultaneously seeking unity with other Christian confessions. Many who joined the Old Catholic movement had long argued for interconfessional dialogue, contemplating the possibility of uniting with Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox. The reunion negotiations initiated by Old Catholics marked the beginning of the ecumenical age that continued well into the twentieth century. Bryn Geffert and LeRoy Boerneke focus on the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875, including the complex run-up to those meetings and the events that transpired thereafter. Geffert and Boerneke masterfully situate the theological conversation in its wider historical and political context, including the religious leaders involved with the conferences, such as Döllinger, Newman, Pusey, Liddon, Wordsworth, Ianyshev, Alekseev, and Bolotov, among others. The book demonstrates that the Bonn Conferences and the Old Catholic movement, though unsuccessful in their day, broke important theological ground still relevant to contemporary interchurch and ecumenical affairs. Catholics without Rome makes an original contribution to the study of ecumenism, the history of Christian doctrine, modern church history, and the political science of confessional fellowships. The book will interest students and scholars of Christian theology and history, and general readers in Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches interested in the history of their respective confessions.

CHAPTER 1

Nineteenth-Century Ecumenism

SCHISM

Historians still debate how to weigh the various causes of the Great Schism in the Christian church—the divisions between East and West that persist to this day. Some trace the schism’s origins back to the first century, noting the different influences Roman culture and Greek culture exerted, respectively, on the Western and Eastern Christian traditions.¹ Others emphasize the division of the Roman Empire in the fourth century into an Eastern Empire and Western Empire, thus isolating religious and other cultural development to distinct regions that would grow increasingly remote.² Some suggest as key the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 as Roman emperor in the West, arguing that Frankish alliances with the papacy widened a breach between Constantinople and Rome.³ Others stress the bitter doctrinal controversy over the Filioque—the Western Church’s addition of a single word to the Nicene Creed, indicating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (Filioque)—and the ensuing struggle (a struggle both political and theological) between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius late in the 800s.⁴

All of these explanations have merit; none are self-sufficient. It is impossible to isolate a single cause of the schism, just as it is impossible to date the moment of absolute rupture. Dissension coursed from many causes, all of which combined to make collegial communication all but impossible by the sixteenth century. Numerous squabbles—theological, administrative, and political—preceded the spectacular (but not definitive) breech in 1054, when the papal legate, Cardinal Humbert, excommunicated the Eastern patriarch, Cerularius, who responded in kind. This incident serves as an easily identifiable highlight in the long conflict over papal primacy and authority, but most modern historians discount its importance, arguing that it holds little more than symbolic significance.⁵ More significant is the conquest of Constantinople by Western troops in 1204, when looting and pillaging soldiers of the Fourth Crusade left a legacy of hatred and mistrust toward the West in their wake. Today many Easterners point to that crusade as a chief cause of the schism.⁶

After expelling the Latin crusaders from Constantinople in 1261, the Eastern Empire found itself face-to-face with a new threat: the incursion of Ottoman Turks. The Council of Florence of 1439, designed to bridge the schism between East and West—and viewed by the East as a chance to establish Christian unity in the face of this Muslim threat—represented the last major attempt to heal divisions separating the papacy and the West from patriarchs in the East. Representatives of the Eastern Church made theological concessions to Rome under pressure from their Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, in return for promises that the pope would rally Western military might against the Muslim Ottomans.⁷ These promises fell flat. What little help did materialize proved entirely insufficient, and the church in Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

It is important to note that the Muscovite state (emerging as a rival to Constantinople as the locus of power in the Eastern Orthodox world) rejected the agreement of Florence and considered the terms a betrayal of the Orthodox faith. This rejection marked just one move in a series of moves in the centuries to come by which Muscovy and then Russia distanced itself from Constantinople, seeking freedom from Constantinople’s oversight.⁸ By the 1500s—when Muscovy freed itself from Mongol rule—Moscow began to envision itself as a “Third Rome,” as successor to the “Second Rome” of Constantinople. In fact, some in Russia believed Constantinople succumbed to Muslim rule because of its “apostasy” at Florence.⁹

In the centuries that followed, Rome and Constantinople remained virtual strangers. Each regarded the other as schismatic.¹⁰ Disputes about papal primacy and the Filioque continued to fester. Each party defined itself in part by condemning the other.

To the Eastern Orthodox mind, Protestants who appeared in the 1500s represented ideologies even more distant from the East than did Roman Catholics. Protestants had, in the Orthodox imagination, doubly removed themselves from the true Eastern faith, first when the Western Church strayed from the Orthodox East, and second when the Protestant Reformations of the 1500s moved Protestants further from the initial remove: the papacy split from the East, and then Protestants split from the papacy.

CONTACTS IN THE 1800S

But contacts never ceased. And they began to multiply in the 1800s. The phenomenal growth of missionary activity—activity made possible by the expansion of empires—brought various denominational representatives into contact and competition in foreign locales, including in India, China, the Near East, Africa, and parts of the Western Hemisphere. Cognizant of their common mission to spread the Christian faith, missionaries sought ways to work as joint laborers in the vineyard, a common front with a common mission to convert the heathen. Denominational representatives also recognized a need to minister to their own members scattered throughout the world: breaking down or paving over denominational barriers might make it easier to minister more effectively to Christians far from their home countries and churches.

Attempts at cooperation abounded. The Prussian Union Church (formed by the merger of the Lutheran Church and Reformed Church in Prussia) joined the Anglican Church in establishing a joint, Anglo-Prussian bishopric in Jerusalem in 1841, a move designed to counter Roman Catholic influence in the Mideast and to support Christian missionary work among Jews and Muslims.¹¹ Under the agreement, England and Prussia would take turns appointing the bishop.¹² That leaders of both confessions proceeded in the face of opposition from their own members indicates the resolve with which church hierarchs were willing to attempt uncomfortable, ecumenical experiments.

When Russia sold Alaska to the United States and the Russian Holy Synod transferred the Russian episcopal see from Sitka to San Francisco, contacts between the Orthodox and the American Protestant Episcopal Church increased markedly. During the 1860s these two bodies discussed the possibility of a single priesthood to serve members of both. Although the discussions came to naught (Russians, as we will see, could never agree among themselves whether Anglicans held a valid priesthood), these discussions helped familiarize the two churches with one another.¹³

Increased travel in the nineteenth century—military, diplomatic, commercial, or recreational—also reduced religious isolation. Russian students trekked to Germany, France, and the Holy Land, and travelers from Western Europe visited Orthodox lands in growing numbers. As nations increased the size of their diplomatic missions, they recognized a need to minister to citizens sojourning in foreign lands. Attaching priests or ministers to diplomatic missions offered one solution. The large number of British subjects in the Ottoman Empire—diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, sightseers—presented a special challenge, prompting the Anglican Church to seek recognition from Constantinople’s ecumenical patriarch, so that Anglicans could receive sacraments from Orthodox priests, and, if necessary, be buried in Orthodox cemeteries.¹⁴ The Russian historian and theologian Georges Florovskii termed this latter request, granted by Patriarch Gregory VI in 1868, “the first step toward the rapprochement of the Churches in a purely ecclesiastical matter.”¹⁵ Josef Altholz noted somewhat more wryly that “the only permanent result of the nineteenth-century quest for intercommunion was this: inter-burial.”¹⁶

ANGLICAN DISCOVERY OF EASTERN ORTHODOXY

English interest in the Orthodox Church grew rapidly in the middle decades of the 1800s, thanks in part to English publicists such as John Mason Neale, William Palmer, and Arthur Stanley. Neale, a prodigious writer, resolved to produce a complete history of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Two volumes on the patriarchate of Alexandria appeared in 1847,¹⁷ and two more followed within three years.¹⁸ Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and Tsar Nikolai I commended Neale for his sympathetic treatment of their faith. In 1851, Tsar Nikolai I granted Neale a stipend of £100 through the chaplain to the Russian embassy in London. Neale’s sympathy for Orthodox positions on controversial theological issues undoubtedly facilitated Orthodox appreciation for his work. In fact, Neale went so far as to propose that Anglicans drop the Filioque from the Nicene Creed. Although Neale never visited Russia, church bells in the country tolled at his death.¹⁹

Neale also became acquainted with the Church of Utrecht during his travels to the Continent in 1851 and 1854. The history of this rump Catholic church in the Netherlands—a church that claimed independence from Rome in 1724 when it consecrated its own archbishop without papal authorization—is too complicated to cover here.²⁰ But the Church of Utrecht plays an important role in our narrative, because a century and a half later it consecrated an Old Catholic bishop in Germany, thereby allowing Old Catholics to claim apostolic succession for their church. This Dutch church impressed Neale, and he authored its first substantial history, making known to English-speaking Christians an apparently successful path away from Rome that did not jettison important Catholic commitments.²¹ In 1863, Neale helped found the Eastern Churches Association (joined by Edward Pusey), which published a variety of work on the liturgy and doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox.²²

William Palmer (1811–79) also worked tirelessly to familiarize the English with the Eastern Orthodox.²³ A deacon of Magdalene College at Oxford, Palmer made his first visit to Russia in 1840 and a second in 1842. Palmer subscribed to the branch theory of the church, an assertion that Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican bodies all constituted true “branches” of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. In service to this theory, Palmer attempted while in Russia to secure recognition for himself and Anglicans as members of the true Christian church. He failed. “The Church should be perfectly one in belief,” the metropolitan of Moscow told Palmer, and, as was obvious to the metropolitan, the Church of England and the Orthodox churches were not perfectly one in belief.²⁴

Palmer conducted a spirited correspondence between 1844 and 1854 with the Russian lay theologian Aleksei Khomiakov,²⁵ with whom he shared admiration for some aspects of Roman Catholicism and contempt for others. Palmer told Khomiakov he had concluded that unity with Rome was not now possible, but by uniting the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches, union with Rome might become possible.²⁶

In 1846, Palmer issued an eirenicon of sorts, seeking to reconcile Church of England doctrine with that of the Orthodox Church.²⁷ He told Khomiakov, “I am perfectly sure of the existence in the Anglican Church of an element of faith and doctrine not only like, but identical with, the faith and doctrine of the Eastern Church.” But he also recognized that the Anglican Church is “made up of conflicting and undeveloped tendencies, partly orthodox and partly heretical,” and thus union with the Eastern Church would be possible only if the “orthodox element of the Anglican Church” gained ascendency and expelled “its heretical antagonists.”²⁸

As he aged, Palmer found himself drawn more and more to Eastern Orthodoxy. At one point in 1845 he asked Khomiakov why no Orthodox church had sent “ at least one Missionary to England.”²⁹ Eventually Palmer decided to convert to Orthodoxy, but he grew frustrated upon learning that even though Russian Orthodox hierarchs regarded his Anglican baptism as valid, the Greeks did not.³⁰ How could a national church (Russian) in a confession that demanded a perfect, single set of beliefs (Eastern Orthodoxy) differ from another national church in the same confession (Greek) on such an important qu...