The illusion of continuity: the Church of England and the break with Catholicity
The question of whether the Church of England can properly be called “Catholic” cannot be settled by rhetoric or by appeals to identity alone. It must be tested against history, doctrine, and the continuity of sacramental life. When examined at that level, the difficulty becomes clear: the English Reformation was not merely a reform within the Church, but a rupture—juridical, doctrinal, and liturgical—with the faith as held universally across Western Christendom and, in key respects, East and West alike.
The break begins not with a theological council, but with an Act of Parliament. The Act of Supremacy (1534) declared Henry VIII to be “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.” This was not a minor adjustment in governance but a fundamental reordering of ecclesial authority. The primacy long exercised by the Bishop of Rome—however understood or contested in detail—was replaced by royal supremacy.¹
The consequences were immediate. Refusal to accept this new settlement was treated as treason. Thomas More and John Fisher were executed in 1535 for refusing the Oath of Supremacy.² The following years saw the dissolution of the monasteries (1536–1541), the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, and the destruction of a monastic culture that had been integral to the spiritual life of the English Church for centuries.³ The Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), a popular uprising in defence of the old religion, was suppressed with severity.⁴
None of this, in itself, proves a theological conclusion. But it establishes a critical fact: the English Reformation began as a state-imposed restructuring of the Church, not as an organic doctrinal development within it.
The decisive transformation occurred under Edward VI (1547–1553), when liturgical and doctrinal changes gave formal expression to a new theological direction. The introduction of the Edwardine Ordinal (1550) and the revised Books of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) altered the language and structure of ordination and Eucharistic worship.⁵ Royal Injunctions of 1547 and 1548 ordered removal of rood screens, images of saints and statues were destroyed, and wall paintings whitewashed. Then between 1549–1552 Altars were torn out and replaced with communion tables. The aim was to purify worship and distance the Church of England from what reformers considered “Catholic excesses.”
This shift is codified in the Thirty-Nine Articles. Here the break becomes explicit. Article XXXI declares that “the sacrifices of Masses… were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits,”⁶ while Article XXVIII rejects transubstantiation as “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.”⁷ These are not clarifications within a shared framework; they are repudiations of positions that had been affirmed across Western Christendom and defined with precision at the Council of Trent.⁸
At this point, the claim to continuity must be tested not against intention, but against substance. Anglicanism frequently appeals to the “primitive Church,” arguing that the Reformation represents not innovation but restoration. This claim, often advanced with confidence, must be weighed against the actual testimony of the early centuries.
At the beginning of the second century, St Ignatius of Antioch insists that those who err “abstain from the Eucharist… because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ.”⁹ This is not the language of symbolic memorialism, but of objective reality. A generation later, St Justin Martyr writes that the Eucharistic elements are “not common bread nor common drink,” but “the flesh and blood of that incarnate Jesus,”¹⁰ and explicitly identifies them as the sacrifices offered by Christians “in every place.”¹¹
The same pattern continues in the Fathers. St Cyprian teaches that “the priest truly acts in the place of Christ,”¹² and St John Chrysostom affirms that “we offer the same sacrifice… or rather we perform a memorial of a sacrifice.”¹³ The terminology develops, but the underlying theological reality remains consistent: the Eucharist as a true participation in the sacrifice of Christ, and the priesthood as ordered to that offering.
The question, therefore, is unavoidable. If the theology embodied in the reformed rites and Articles stands in tension with this consistent witness, can it plausibly be described as a return to the primitive Church? Or does it represent a selective retrieval combined with substantive reinterpretation?
This question is sharpened further when one considers how the new settlement was maintained. The Elizabethan regime did not rely on persuasion alone. The Act of Uniformity required attendance at Anglican worship,¹⁴ and recusancy laws imposed heavy penalties on those who refused.¹⁵ By 1585, it had become high treason for a Catholic priest to enter England, and a capital offence to harbour him.¹⁶
The consequences were not theoretical. Priests trained at Douai and Rome returned at the risk of death; laymen and women who sheltered them faced execution. The records of the English mission, preserved in contemporary accounts, document scores of such martyrdoms across decades, not as isolated incidents but as the normal consequence of fidelity.¹⁷ Figures such as Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitherow stand as representative of a sustained pattern of repression, rather than exceptional cases.
In Ireland, the same pattern unfolded with even greater severity. Penal legislation, particularly from the late seventeenth century onward, systematically restricted Catholic life: excluding Catholics from public office, limiting property ownership, prohibiting Catholic education, and constraining the public exercise of the faith.¹⁸ The intention was not merely religious conformity, but social and political marginalisation. Catholic life endured—but often underground, sustained through concealment, sacrifice, and perseverance.
It must be said plainly: persecution does not prove theological error. Yet it does reveal the character of the settlement. The post-Reformation ecclesial order was not simply received—it was imposed, maintained, and enforced over generations by the authority of the state.
Contemporary Developments: The Question of Continuity in the Present
If the events of the sixteenth century raise serious questions about continuity, developments within the Church of England in the modern period render those questions more acute still. The issue is no longer confined to historical rupture, but extends to ongoing doctrinal and sacramental divergence.
The ordination of women—first to the priesthood in 1992 and subsequently to the episcopate in 2014—marks a decisive departure from the consistent practice of the Church throughout its history, East and West alike.¹⁹ Whatever arguments are advanced in its defence, the fact remains that such a development presupposes a conception of Holy Orders that is not intrinsically tied to sacramental representation of Christ as received in apostolic tradition.
Similarly, the admission of clergy in same-sex relationships, and the movement toward their recognition or blessing, reflects a further shift in moral and doctrinal teaching. The Church of England’s own internal processes—most notably Living in Love and Faith—have revealed not a settled doctrinal voice, but a body negotiating between competing and, at times, incompatible theological positions.²⁰
What sharpens the difficulty further is that these developments occur alongside continued claims to catholicity, frequently expressed in the language of ordination rites, episcopal consecrations, and institutional identity. Clergy are ordained with language of apostolic continuity; bishops swear to uphold the doctrine of the Church as set forth in its authorised formularies. Yet those formularies themselves contain doctrinal positions that stand in tension with the historic understanding of the Church, and contemporary practice often diverges even from those standards.
The result is a form of ecclesial self-description in which Catholic language is retained, while Catholic doctrine is variously interpreted, redefined, or set aside in practice.
It is here that the limits of the Anglo-Catholic project become evident. The Oxford Movement sought to recover the Catholic inheritance of Anglicanism, and in many respects succeeded in restoring a sacramental sensibility. Yet it did so within a structure that ultimately lacked a binding doctrinal authority. Where doctrine remains open to revision, the recovery of Catholic forms cannot secure Catholic substance.
The issue, then, is not whether Anglicanism possesses elements of the Catholic tradition—it plainly does—but whether it maintains continuity in the sense required by the claim to catholicity.
Christianity may indeed be broader than any one communion. But the claim to be Catholic—in its historical and theological sense—rests not on breadth, but on continuity.
And it is precisely that continuity which remains in question.
- Act of Supremacy 1534 (26 Hen VIII c.1)
- Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition, pp. 58–65
- Woodward, Dissolution of the Monasteries
- Ibid.
- Book of Common Prayer (1552); Ordinal (1550)
- Thirty-Nine Articles, Article XXXI
- Ibid., Article XXVIII
- Council of Trent, Session 22
- Ignatius of Antioch, Smyrnaeans 7
- Justin Martyr, First Apology 66
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 41
- Cyprian, Epistle 63
- Chrysostom, Homily on Hebrews 17
- Act of Uniformity 1559
- Recusancy Acts (1581)
- Act Against Jesuits (1585)
- Challoner, Missionary Priests
- Connolly, Religion, Law and Power
- Church of England Measures (1993; 2014)
- Church of England, Living in Love and Faith
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