I would have thought that by Canterbury & Utrecht being in communion the rest would fall into place…

Then again, looking at the original post… it doesn’t always work that way.

Rather like ELCA before the concordat with TEC: they renamed their district superintendents bishops years before they started being consecrated by Episcopalians. (And didn’t believe the office was permanent; they reverted to being simply pastors when they left office as I think Methodist bishops do. That’s changed in ELCA.)

(The Evangelical Church in Germany - AFAIK mostly Lutheran but a 19th-century merger with the Reformed there, forming the country’s official Protestant church - likewise calls them bishops but they don’t claim apostolic succession.)

So the ex-state church clergy forming the Nordic Catholic Church would have had to be ordained de novo by the PNCC.

I think the Swedo-Catholics consist of one Church of Sweden bishop who belongs to Forward in Faith and goes to its meetings and a priest and parish here and there. They have a little Benedictine monastery and convent. That must be lonely, in a country even more secularist than England. I’ve been told by someone who lived there that Sweden is very anti-Roman (RCs are a microscopic minority that tends to try and blend in). AFAIK there’s no independent Swedo-Catholic church with the PNCC.

Finland, Estonia and some African churches got their orders from Sweden.

As Iceland was long a Danish colony I’ll assume they don’t claim the succession either.

The PNCC entered into communion with PECUSA (at the time) in 1946 based on Bonn. The Prime Bishop of the PNCC called off intercommunion in 1976 (about) based on PECUSA/Anglican Church of Canada’s ordination of women. That was confirmed at the General Synod of 1978.

As to PNCC intercommunion, The Roman Church allows PNCC members to receive the Eucharist on request, based on need (no local PNC Church to serve them etc.). Members must respect the PNCC discipline toward the sacrament (two hour fast, no communion in the hand, try to receive from an ordained clergyman if at all possible). Roman Catholics may receive in a PNC Church under more limited circumstance (if they respect their Church’s discipline - most do not). This arrangement is not true intercommunion and AFAIK Rome does not have a true intercommunion arrangement with anyone who does not fully accept Roman dogma. Others (Orthodox, Oriental, Old Catholic, and in more limited circumstances even Protestants) may simply receive the Eucharist in an R.C. Church. The converse is not true for Roman Catholics - there are many more conditions.

The Roman Church fully respects the PNC Church’s orders and other sacraments, save marriage. We have a different sacramental understanding of marriage. The Roman Church’s recognition of our sacraments includes the Sacrament of the Word of God.

The PNCC is in communion with the Nordic Church (NCC - mentioned above) and the Polish Catholic Church in Poland.

I cannot say for sure, but I believe the NCC’s Lutheran orders were considered valid - again I could be wrong on this - but most Scandinavian Lutherans maintain valid succession.

On the Old Catholics (legitimately styled - not vagantes in the U.S. and Canada) the PNCC was in impaired communion for several years. The PNCC could not countenance women’s ordination nor homosexual marriages/blessings. The split was finalized in 2005 I believe. For more see this Touchstone article. The PNCC still adheres to the Declaration of Utrecht as normative.

BINGO!

(Though however small, the AOC was a real church with a few generations of adherents rather than a church of one, so Villatte a first gen vagante, was the only vagante in the equation…) We see each other’s points.

Could it possibly be because as recently as just before World War II Anglicanism indirectly had much more clout thanks to the British Empire?

Good point, Father, about the French succession. I picked up that bit from some defence or other of Anglican orders.

BTW the best such argument I’ve come across was from the sound (he was a Thomist) Anglo-Catholic priest Eric Mascall who pointed out that Rome recognised the baptisms of the Oceanic Methodists (in the Pacific) even though they read aloud a statement before baptising that specifically, deliberately denied baptismal regeneration.

Most of the rest of your conversation with Simple Sinner is pretty new to me so I sit on sideline taking it in.

On point on Talleyrand, though. I do realize that he was privately an atheist even as he ordained other bishops and that his case is a brilliant example of ex opere operato. Still, I am scratching my head at the claim that all the French church’s lines depend on him.

I have personally attended the episcopal ordinations of three men. Two of those ordinations included among the consecrators the papal nuncio whose line is traceable to the Petrine very closely.

My point is that at least in the 20th Century the idea of national lines of succession has vanished in Catholicism. While I have no idea how national such lines were before modern travel, the presence of Italian nuncios in the modern period is not only a question of an Rome based diplomatic corps, but has the additional effect of tying lines very directly to Peter.

My point was that if any group could have made a case for their orders and “churchness” being recognized after wholesale return or acceptance to ortho-praxis, this would have been the group with the strongest claim.

Not to belabor and beat to death the point, but the position on the possibility of corporate return to ortho-praxis by Anglicans leading to Orthodox recognition of orders should have played out here of all cases if that was the in practice the working approach to such matters.

Father Serge Kelleher recently wryly noted that one his wiser seminary professors pointed out it is always very smart to read about what a church says, but than take a look at what they do.

(A comment made amidst an argument between a radical Catholic and radical Orthodox who were equally outraged that back “in the old country” intercommunion for visiting families of Orth/Caths was so much the norm no one ever raised a fuss about it there! On paper what should never happen, seems to happen all the time…)

…the Constantinople/Bucharest assessments of Anglican orders’ (for lack of a better word) potentiality seems to have been confined to paper.

Of course! Corporate entry of the whole Anglican Communion into Orthodoxy never happened - in Orthodox eyes the potentiality was never acted upon - so following their own terms those assessments remain confined to paper.

I’ve never heard of the Orthodox officially recognising an Anglican’s orders and only one case of an Oriental church (the Armenians) so doing, from a man with a penchant for making stuff up.

The founding of sub-Saharan African convert Eastern Orthodoxy was not related to this issue at all - they didn’t come in as Anglicans in a communionwide conversion - but rather was a case of ‘lines of succession’ from vagantes which as you know mean bubkes to the Orthodox.

Apologists for AO and a select, select few EO contra-distinctionists of the West make effort to point to an isolated example one or two Anglican ministers being recognized as priests… But laregely the theorizing offered on the matter has never played out.

One intrepid contr-distinctive com-box warrior from ROCOR who served as one of my primary interlocutors in another forum insisted that Rome was wrong about the reasons and pointed to Orthodox position statements on AO as having potentiality… Well when pressed to offer the details of how it could work today - would a whole parish, a whole deanery, a whole diocese (heck maybe San Joacqin!) re-adopting ortho-praxis to fulfill sufficiently this theory? He was at a loss to respond.

Moving from theory to actual practice, we see a little different approach being taken…

For example, the seeds of Sub-saharan Orthodoxy among the native people (as opposed to say the ethnic Greeks that lived in Johanesburgh) is rooted in the reception (and subsequent Orthodox chrismation & ordination of the clergy) of a group of Africans in Uganda (and maybe Kenya?) who had been professing the Orthodox faith for decades. Problem was, at the roots of their movement were orders from Joseph Villatte who had consecrated an American Black nationalist that had a vision to create an African Orthodox church (Alex. McGarvey).

McGarvey helped establish missions of his auto-genic church in Africa and the believers there had largely believed and saw themselves as canonical Orthodox just the same as Russians, Greeks, etc. When they DID come become aware of the deficiency in their canonical status was when real live Greeks showed up at their door…

The Greeks were enthusisastic about the African Orthodox and took them in when they sought canonical ties and protection, but only after chrismation and (re)ordination of their clergy.

If the “position paper” theory of AO potentiality had gained widespread acceptence it would seem that the re-ordination of the clergy of that church would not have been needed or undertaken. Considering how much closer the AOC was in history to canonical Christian Orthodoxy, and considering how they were already observing the Orthodox faith (As opposed to the 400+ year divisin of Anglicanism and the Protestantism and self-created liturgy therein…) on paper they should have simply been brought into the fold without re-ordination. They weren’t.

• Very basic credal orthodoxy (which is why the Oriental communion and Assyrians are recognised even though they were long thought heretics, Monophysites and Nestorians respectively).
• A line of tactile succession of bishops.
• Unbroken sound teaching and practice about the Eucharist (Real Presence as a complete change in the elements: you don’t have to use Aristotle and Aquinas to explain it).

More or less my/Anglo-Catholic criteria for what’s Catholic.

The Orthodox add to these ‘being in the church’ which they define as themselves - the Cyprianic view - so they flat-out say no to the Western pretenders of the past century claiming ‘lines of succession’ from them. (But not, as ASimpleSinner pointed out, to those obviously related to them and ’still in the family’: true-believer and nationalist schisms of real Easterners. This is historically true of Greek Catholics: in the Middle East there’s intercommunion but not concelebration/clergy exchange and the priests in the Toth and Chornock splits weren’t reordained!) The Oriental communion and old-fashioned Assyrians (the breakaway Ancient Assyrian Church of the East not the relatively liberal patriarchate which has open Communion with Romans and Anglicans) may believe the same.

The mainline episcopal churches that claim apostolic succession (because of Anglo-Catholicism I won’t say Protestant) seem, like the vagantes, to put all their stock in lines of succession, who touched whom. (But Anglicans like Romans and Easterners don’t bring up first nor talk incessantly about their lines. They’re secure in belonging to a church; they’ve got nothing to prove.) Which as you can see with the vagantes and now with intercommunion with non-episcopal Protestants seems to degenerate into a kind of magic.

Good rule of thumb, applicable if you’re Catholic or not: if a clergyperson first talks about services and activities at a church, about the congregation and Sunday attendance, it’s something real and trustworthy. (Leaving aside doctrine and its ramifications - like belief on the episcopate, the Real Presence, WO or gay weddings - for the purpose of this illustration.) If on the other hand the first thing you see (as a page on a website for example) or hear is a claim to ‘valid lines of succession’ and an attempt to prove it, then run, run, run!

ASimpleSinner wrote:

The fact of the matter on “validity” is that Romans are not as Augustinian and Orthodox are not as Cyprianic as they are made out to be… (cut for brevity)

All correct (schisms like the Old Believers, Old Calendarist sectarians and nationalist ones like the Macedonians aren’t Orthodox but still in the Orthodox family; Western liberal vagante pseuds obviously aren’t no matter their ‘lines’) but:

In the end the Orthodox are NOT going to say “Well who cares about the past you are Orthodox now, come in!!!”

The Orthodox view on Anglican orders is functionally like Rome’s but the argument behind it is different as you’ve mentioned: several patriarchs (Constantinople and Bucharest for example) and other leaders (the founding first hierarch of ROCOR, Metropolitan Anthony - tsarist-bred Russians weren’t particularly hostile to other Christians) have said Anglican orders have valid form; all they’d have to do is as a whole church unprotestantise and join the Orthodox communion and they’d be received in their orders. Not the same as recognition as they are, outside Orthodoxy. As that condition hasn’t been met ex-Anglican clergy accepted for service as Orthodox clergy are always reordained.

I understand that Bishop Hanson was one of (if not the) first ELCA bishops co-consecrated by Episcopalians hence the claim. From then on all ELCA ordinations have had to have the Episcopal connexion to pass on the claim.

Thanks, Fr J. (Here is what the name means.) Actually the Church of France (including the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre) has apostolic succession thanks to a bishop who was an atheist, Talleyrand. It’s said he repented before he died but the whole French episcopate comes from bishops consecrated by him while he was a thoroughgoing unbeliever privately. It doesn’t matter because he was acting in the church and in the name of the church (strictly following the Roman books) not of himself.

The big question is can one claim that for somebody ordained for the Lutherans, the Charismatic Episcopal Church, its breakaway church whose name I don’t remember, churches i.c.w. non-episcopal churches or others in heresy, or the fringy vagantes!