In 1897 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York answered Leo XIII with Saepius Officio, a learned defence of Anglican Orders which deserves considerably more attention than it commonly receives from Catholic controversialists. Its appeal to ancient ordination forms exposes the weakness of any argument which reduces Apostolicae Curae to missing medieval ceremonies or a verbal checklist. Yet the Edwardine rites themselves present a deeper difficulty. The Ordinal, Communion Office and Articles of Religion record, almost step by step, a changed theology of Eucharist, sacrifice and priesthood. In defending those changes, Saepius Officio does less to disprove Leo XIII’s historical diagnosis than its authors supposed.
Nuntiatoria’s accompanying study, “Anglican Orders I: The Rite, the Rupture and Apostolicae Curae,” considered Leo XIII’s judgment against the history of the Edwardine Ordinal, the Marian restoration, the Victorian Ritualist controversies and the later development of Anglican–Roman Catholic dialogue. The present article belongs, however, to a longer argument in these pages. In October 2025, “Pope Leo’s Doublespeak and the Unbroken Authority of Apostolicae Curae” examined the continuing force of Leo XIII’s judgment and the inability of later Old Catholic participation — the so-called “Dutch Touch” — simply to repair an Anglican rite whose sacramental signification was itself in question.¹² In April 2026, “The Form, the Rite, and the Reality: Why Apostolicae Curae Still Stands” developed the point more directly: the Catholic objection is not reducible to episcopal genealogy or isolated words, because the Church judges what the rite signifies as an integrated sacramental act.¹³ Anglican Orders I supplied the fuller historical setting. The question now is whether Anglicanism’s strongest contemporary answer to Leo can overcome that case.
No serious examination of Leo’s judgment is complete without the formal answer issued from Canterbury and York. Saepius Officio, dated 19 February 1897 and published in the names of Archbishop Frederick Temple of Canterbury and Archbishop William Dalrymple Maclagan of York, remains the classical Anglican response to Apostolicae Curae. It is learned, occasionally formidable and much more interesting than the caricature in which Anglicans merely asserted an unbroken succession of bishops while Rome replied that Anglican Orders were invalid.¹
Its authors understood that Leo’s case concerned sacramental theology. They accepted imposition of hands as the matter of ordination, maintained that the form must be read with the surrounding rite, and agreed that ecclesial intention is discerned from what is publicly and objectively manifested rather than by attempting to penetrate the private psychology of individual ministers. The disagreement concerned the meaning objectively expressed by the Edwardine rite.
Saepius Officio begins from an apparently powerful fact. The Preface to the Ordinal declares that bishops, priests and deacons have existed in Christ’s Church from apostolic times and that these Orders are to be continued. The rite employs episcopal laying-on of hands and invocation of the Holy Ghost. Candidates are charged with preaching, pastoral government, absolution and the administration of Sacraments. On the Anglican argument, a Church which expressly professes its intention to continue the apostolic Orders can hardly be accused of intending to abolish ordained ministry.¹
That proposition need not be disputed. The English Reformers did not abolish bishops, priests, deacons, Sacraments, pastoral government or the laying-on of hands. The more exact question is whether bishop, priest, sacrifice, Eucharist and even Sacrament continued to signify the same theological realities once the rites in which those words operated had been reconstructed. Continuity of vocabulary does not by itself establish continuity of sacramental meaning.
The strongest technical objection in Saepius Officio concerns ancient ordination rites. Temple and Maclagan point out that unquestionably Catholic early forms contain nothing corresponding to the later Western formula explicitly committing to the priest the power of offering sacrifice. If such terminology were intrinsically necessary to every valid ordination, they argue, the Catholic case would endanger Orders which Rome itself recognises.¹ The objection is effective against a crude theory of Apostolicae Curae. Neither the porrection of chalice and paten, nor anointing of hands, nor a particular medieval formula belongs by divine institution to the essence of priestly Ordination. Pius XII confirmed this in Sacramentum Ordinis in 1947, identifying imposition of hands as the matter and the determining words of the consecratory prayer as the form in the Roman rite. Those words must signify the sacramental effect: the Order conferred and the grace of the Holy Ghost.²
The difficulty for Saepius Officio lies elsewhere. An ancient Catholic rite may express priesthood tersely within a Church which continues to profess without interruption the sacrificial priesthood which the rite confers. The Edwardine case concerns an inherited rite deliberately reconstructed while the same ecclesiastical authority was simultaneously rejecting or redefining doctrines previously expressed within it. Leo’s argument concerns not liturgical brevity but the theological significance of deliberate alteration. As Nuntiatoria argued in “The Form, the Rite, and the Reality,” the whole governs the part: surviving Catholic words or gestures cannot be abstracted from the doctrinal and liturgical organism in which the Reformers deliberately placed them.¹³
The Ordinal as Evidence of Theological Change
The English Ordinal gives unusually concrete evidence because the development can be followed through successive texts. In the received Western rite, the newly ordained priest received the chalice and paten with an explicit commission, in translation, to receive the power to offer sacrifice to God and celebrate Mass. Whatever judgment is made about the historical development or sacramental necessity of that ceremony, its theology is unmistakable: the man being ordained is a sacerdos whose office includes the Eucharistic Sacrifice.³
The Ordinal of 1550 did not initially abolish the presentation of Eucharistic instruments. The bishop still delivered a Bible together with the chalice and bread, but the inherited sacrificial interpretation disappeared. The ordinand was instead told to “preach the word of God, and to minister the holy Sacraments in this Congregation.”³ The material symbol therefore survived while its explicit theological meaning changed. The chalice remained in the priest’s hands; the commission identifying his priesthood with Eucharistic sacrifice did not.
The revision of 1552 completed the movement. The chalice and bread disappeared and the Bible alone was delivered. The priest remained preacher of the Word, minister of the Sacraments and recipient of the authority associated with forgiveness and retention of sins, but the rite no longer defined his office by consecrating and offering Eucharistic sacrifice.⁴ The sequence is significant: the Catholic rite explicitly expressed sacrificial sacerdotium; in 1550 the Eucharistic instruments remained while their sacrificial interpretation was removed; in 1552 the instruments themselves disappeared.
Nothing in that argument requires the porrection of the instruments to have been essential sacramental matter. Pius XII eventually settled that question in the negative. Their importance here is historical. Cranmer inherited a rite whose sacerdotal meaning was explicit and rewrote precisely those passages in which priesthood was related to Eucharistic sacrifice. A ceremony can be non-essential to validity and still provide compelling evidence of what the Reformers intended to reject or redefine.
Saepius Officio itself makes the reason for the alterations unusually clear. Temple and Maclagan defend the Reformers’ removal of older prayers and ceremonies because they associate them with theological developments — including transubstantiation and a conception of the sacrifice of the Mass — which the English Reformation rejected.¹ Their defence is therefore not that the theological meaning of the older rite remained untouched. It is that the Reformers were justified in purifying it.
That distinction takes us to the central question. Canterbury and York maintain that apostolic priesthood survived because ministry, imposition of hands, invocation of the Holy Ghost, Word and Sacraments remained. Leo asks what kind of priesthood those elements signified after the Eucharistic and sacrificial theology surrounding them had changed. This is also where the argument developed in Nuntiatoria’s “The Illusion of Continuity: The Church of England and the Break with Catholicity” becomes relevant. That article traced the Edwardian Prayer Books and Ordinal not as a Catholic inheritance merely translated into English, but as part of the moment when the Henrician breach of jurisdiction acquired an overtly doctrinal and liturgical character.¹⁴ The Communion rites make that change particularly visible.
The Communion Office as the Theological Key
The Edwardine Ordinal was created while the same authority was reconstructing the liturgy for which its new priests were ordained. The theology of the priesthood cannot therefore be separated from the theology of the Eucharist those priests were commissioned to celebrate.
In the received Catholic Mass, the Eucharistic action is sacrificial in an objective sense. After the Consecration the Roman Canon speaks of the hostia pura, hostia sancta, hostia immaculata — the pure, holy and spotless Victim — and places the Eucharistic offering in continuity with Abel, Abraham and Melchisedech. The Mass does not posit another sacrifice beside Calvary; it sacramentally makes present and offers the one Sacrifice of Christ.
The First Book of Common Prayer of 1549 had already altered that theological architecture, although much more of the inherited liturgical world remained than would survive three years later. Its Eucharistic prayer still petitioned for the sanctification of the bread and wine; the memorial was made before the divine Majesty with the “holy gifts”; and an oblation remained within the prayer. Yet the sacrifice expressly offered by the Church was increasingly characterised as praise and thanksgiving, together with the offering of the faithful themselves, while Christ’s propitiatory oblation was located emphatically in the once-for-all Sacrifice of the Cross.⁵
The 1552 revision went appreciably further. The petition for the blessing and sanctification of the bread and wine disappeared. The memorial-oblation which had remained within the 1549 Eucharistic prayer was dismantled and redistributed. The Church’s self-offering came after Communion rather than appearing within an objective oblation of the consecrated gifts.⁶ The change in the words of administration is equally revealing. In 1549 the minister presented the Sacrament with an objective declaration identifying what was given with Christ’s Body and Blood. In 1552 the communicant was told to receive “in remembrance” and to feed upon Christ “in thy heart by faith.”⁶
No single alteration settles every possible Anglican doctrine of Real Presence, but the theological direction chosen by the revision becomes difficult to dispute when the changes are read together. The Declaration on Kneeling — the “Black Rubric” — stated that kneeling at Communion did not signify adoration of the sacramental bread and wine or any “real and essential presence” of Christ’s natural Flesh and Blood there. The elements remained in their natural substances, and adoration directed towards them was rejected as idolatrous.⁶ Cranmer’s correspondence with the Privy Council during completion of the book confirms the immediate controversy surrounding kneeling and Eucharistic presence.⁷
The material language of worship moved in the same direction. The altar gave way to the Communion table; the liturgical structure moved decisively away from the inherited Mass; elevation had already been prohibited; the traditional Mass vestments disappeared in 1552; ordinary bread was prescribed; and the treatment of the remaining elements was incompatible with the traditional cultus of reservation and adoration. No one of these changes, taken by itself, proves the invalidity of Orders. Together they establish something more fundamental for Leo’s argument: the Eucharistic theology surrounding the Ordinal was being deliberately reconstructed.
The parallel is exact enough to matter. In the inherited rite of ordination the priest was explicitly commissioned in relation to Eucharistic sacrifice. In 1550 the chalice survived while its sacrificial interpretation disappeared; in 1552 even the chalice disappeared. At almost the same moment, the Communion rite moved from the inherited Mass through the transitional form of 1549 to the considerably more Reformed settlement of 1552, in which sacrificial oblation was recast, Eucharistic adoration repudiated, objective language at administration replaced, and reception by remembrance and faith brought decisively to the foreground. The new Communion service therefore tells us what the newly defined ministry was for, while the new Ordinal tells us what sort of minister was being constituted to serve it.
This is the force of Leo XIII’s appeal to the “native character and spirit” of the Edwardine Ordinal. His case is poorly represented as a syllogism in which Cranmer removed the word sacrifice and thereby rendered Orders invalid. The rite which created the priest and the rite in which that priest exercised his defining sacramental ministry were being reconstructed together according to the same theological judgement.
The Articles Say What the Rites Mean
The Second Book of Common Prayer and revised Ordinal appeared in 1552. The following year, under Edward VI, the Forty-Two Articles gave doctrinal expression to the same reforming settlement. Cranmer’s Articles were subsequently revised under Elizabeth into the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563–1571. The sequence is chronological as well as theological: the inherited rites were reconstructed, the principles governing that reconstruction were stated doctrinally almost immediately afterwards, and the Elizabethan Church later received, revised and consolidated that inheritance.⁸
On the questions most relevant to Eucharist and priesthood, the Edwardian Articles were already explicit. The 1553 Eucharistic Article rejected transubstantiation and denied the “real and bodily presence” of Christ’s Flesh and Blood in the Sacrament. The Elizabethan revision removed that particular phrase and adopted the more measured language now found in Article XXVIII: Christ’s Body is given, taken and eaten “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”, with faith identified as the means of reception.⁸ ⁹ The later wording was therefore, in this respect, less stark than the Edwardian formulation which followed immediately upon the Second Prayer Book.
The connection with the 1552 Communion Office scarcely requires inference. The Black Rubric denied that kneeling implied adoration of the bread and wine or a “real and essential presence” of Christ’s natural Flesh and Blood in them; the following year the Edwardian doctrinal formulary expressed the same theological direction propositionally. The Eucharistic changes in the Prayer Book were not neutral ceremonial adjustments to which later generations subsequently attached a Protestant interpretation.
The doctrine of sacrifice is equally clear. The Forty-Two Articles already contained substantially the proposition later preserved as Article XXXI: Christ’s offering upon the Cross is the one perfect and sufficient oblation for sin, while the “sacrifices of Masses” in which priests were said to offer Christ for living and dead for remission of guilt or punishment were condemned.⁸ ⁹ The substance therefore belongs to the Edwardian settlement itself.
The chronological conjunction is striking. The inherited ordination rite commissioned the priest in relation to Eucharistic sacrifice; the Edwardine Ordinal removed that commission. The 1552 Communion Office reconstructed the inherited Eucharistic action. The Forty-Two Articles of 1553 then stated the theology underlying those changes in propositions rejecting the Catholic understanding of Eucharistic Presence and condemning the “sacrifices of Masses”.
The Elizabethan Thirty-Nine Articles retained that doctrinal architecture while moderating or refining some of its language. Article XXVIII continued to reject transubstantiation and denied that the Lord’s Supper was instituted for reservation, carrying about, elevation or worship. Article XXXI retained the condemnation of the “sacrifices of Masses”.⁹ The later Article XXV placed Orders, together with Confirmation, Penance, Matrimony and Extreme Unction, among those rites “commonly called Sacraments” which were not to be counted among the two Sacraments of the Gospel in the same sense as Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. That particular formulation belongs to the mature Elizabethan settlement rather than to the Forty-Two Articles in precisely the same form and should be read as a later development within the doctrinal framework inherited from Edward’s reign.⁹
Article XXXVI then expressly ratified the Edwardine Book of Consecration of Archbishops and Bishops, and Ordering of Priests and Deacons, declaring the rite sufficient and lawful and recognising those ordained according to it as rightly and lawfully ordered.⁹ The same confessional settlement which rejected transubstantiation, reservation, Eucharistic adoration and the “sacrifices of Masses” thus formally received the Ordinal from which the inherited sacrificial articulation of priesthood had disappeared.
The evidence is consequently cumulative rather than dependent upon any isolated omission. The Ordinal reveals what happened to the conception of priesthood. The Communion Office reveals what happened to the Eucharistic action for which that priest was ordained. The Forty-Two Articles state the theology of the Edwardian reform almost contemporaneously with those rites. The Thirty-Nine Articles then preserve, refine and formally incorporate that inheritance into the mature Church of England settlement. The appeal in Saepius Officio to the continued use of terms such as priest, bishop, Sacrament and sacrifice must therefore reckon with the doctrinal system in which those terms were being used.
There is little need to reconstruct Cranmer’s private psychology when authorised worship and authorised doctrine develop together within the same generation. Lex orandi and lex credendi converge. The Eucharistic rite was reconstructed, the rite of ordination was reconstructed with it, and the doctrinal formulary accompanying those reforms expressly rejected central elements of the sacrificial and Eucharistic theology embodied in the rites they displaced. The theology was published alongside the rites. That is also why the argument made in “The Illusion of Continuity” matters here: the Reformation settlement cannot be reduced to an unfortunate jurisdictional estrangement beneath which an essentially unchanged “Catholic” Church of England quietly persisted.¹⁴ Its own authorised texts testify to doctrinal reconstruction.
What Saepius Officio Concedes
Read against that evidence, Saepius Officio becomes more, not less, interesting. Temple and Maclagan vigorously deny that Anglicanism rejects Eucharistic sacrifice. They speak of sacrifice in terms of praise and thanksgiving, the Church’s self-offering, and the pleading or memorial representation of the one Sacrifice accomplished upon Calvary.¹ There is substantial Christian theology here. Catholic doctrine likewise affirms thanksgiving, memorial and ecclesial self-offering, and does not teach that Christ is crucified anew at every Mass.
The disagreement lies in whether the Eucharistic action itself is the sacramental offering of that one Sacrifice through a ministerial priest acting within a true sacerdotium. A theology centred upon memorial, praise, thanksgiving and reception can contain important truths while still differing from the Catholic doctrine of propitiatory Eucharistic sacrifice and sacerdotal priesthood. Saepius Officio defends the Reformers’ removal of older sacrificial expressions precisely because Canterbury and York regard the associated theology as a later or distorted development. It therefore supplies an argument that the Reformation corrected Catholicism; it does not establish that the theology of Eucharist and priesthood remained unchanged.
The direct comparison of the rites makes the issue particularly concrete. A man called priest in 1552 was ordained through a rite from which the inherited sacrificial articulation of his office had disappeared, to minister a Communion rite from which the inherited sacrificial and Eucharistic cultus was simultaneously being dismantled, while the following year the Articles condemned the theology associated with those discarded forms. The convergence is precisely the kind of objective ecclesial evidence to which Leo appealed.
The Ancient-Form Objection Revisited
The appeal to ancient Catholic ordination forms remains the strongest Anglican objection. An early Roman form may say comparatively little about Eucharistic sacrifice and yet be unquestionably valid. But brevity within an ecclesial tradition which continues to profess sacrificial priesthood is not equivalent to deliberate subtraction carried out while that theology is being rejected or redefined elsewhere in the same Church’s authorised formularies.
An ancient form can omit an explicit statement of sacrifice without denying sacrificial priesthood. Its silence is supplied by the faith, worship and sacramental practice of the Church in which it operates. The Edwardine reform begins from a different historical fact: a received rite already possessing explicit sacrificial signification was rewritten while the Communion rite and doctrinal formularies were being altered in parallel. The evidential question is therefore not merely what the new text omits, but why the omission occurred and what authorised doctrine accompanied it.
Sacramentum Ordinis does not disturb that distinction. Pius XII confirmed that the later Western delivery of instruments was not essential to validity; he did not render the ecclesial meaning of sacramental form irrelevant.² His teaching that the determining words must signify the Order and sacramental grace conferred leaves intact the question Leo had asked: what does priesthood signify in this particular rite and within the theological system which created it?
The Marian Evidence
Saepius Officio presents a more substantial challenge to careless use of the Marian restoration. Apostolicae Curae appealed to Julius III, Cardinal Pole and Paul IV, together with subsequent Roman discipline, as evidence that Edwardine Orders were treated as invalid almost contemporaneously with their creation. Canterbury and York questioned whether Marian England witnessed anything resembling a universal programme of reordaining every Edwardian clergyman.¹
That caution should be accepted. Tudor ecclesiastical administration cannot be rewritten as a modern centralised system in which every cleric’s history survives in a uniform dossier. Some clergy disappeared from office, others conformed, some received further rites, and the surviving record is incomplete. The Catholic case does not require a statistical claim that every Edwardian minister was demonstrably and systematically reordained.
The papal documentary record nevertheless remains. Julius III distinguished those who had truly received Orders according to the accustomed Catholic rite from those requiring promotion to Orders. Pole’s delegated faculties reflected the same distinction. Relevant material from the English Ordinal was carried to Rome. Paul IV’s Praeclara carissimi and his subsequent clarification dealt with bishops not ordained according to the form and intention of the Church, while the expression nulliter et de facto supplied part of the juridical language upon which Leo later relied.¹⁰ Saepius Officio complicates the history of implementation; it does not erase the Roman principle by which the new rite was being judged.
Gordon, Parker and the Rite Itself
Similar discipline is needed with John Clement Gordon. Saepius Officio criticises features of the eighteenth-century Roman proceedings: Gordon himself sought Catholic Orders, some historical arguments surrounding the case were disputable, and older Catholic controversy had become entangled with Matthew Parker and William Barlow.¹ Yet Leo’s use of Gordon is significant precisely because he records that the Parker argument was set aside. The Anglican Ordinal itself was examined against Eastern and Western forms, and in 1704 Clement XI required Gordon to receive Orders absolutely. Leo cites the case as evidence that Roman judgment had settled upon form and intention rather than upon the more vulnerable assertion that Parker had never been consecrated.¹⁰
The Catholic case is stronger without the Nag’s Head legend and without making everything depend upon Barlow’s documentary history. Parker underwent a ceremony of consecration at Lambeth on 17 December 1559. The serious sacramental question is what the Edwardine rite employed on that occasion signified and conferred.
That distinction also bears upon the later “Dutch Touch”. As Nuntiatoria argued in “Pope Leo’s Doublespeak and the Unbroken Authority of Apostolicae Curae,” valid episcopal lineage and valid participation by an Old Catholic bishop do not operate as a sacramental disinfectant independently of the rite actually being used.¹² The minister and the sacramental act are distinct questions. A validly consecrated bishop may possess the power of Order; whether a particular ceremony validly conveys an Order still depends upon matter, form and objective sacramental intention. The later presence of Ultrajectine hands therefore cannot by itself answer Leo’s judgment upon the Edwardine rite.
The Catholic Reply and the Victorian Problem
The Bishops of the Province of Westminster answered Saepius Officio in 1898 with A Vindication of the Bull “Apostolicae Curae”. Their strongest line was not an insistence that every medieval ceremonial feature was essential, but that familiar words could not automatically retain their former Catholic signification once the ecclesial body using them had rejected the theological framework within which those words had previously operated.¹¹ The comparison of Ordinal, Communion Office and Articles gives that argument considerable historical substance.
There is also a chronological difficulty in treating Saepius Officio as a transparent guide to Edwardian theology. It was written in 1897, after the Oxford Movement and decades of Anglican recovery of increasingly Catholic language concerning Real Presence, Eucharistic sacrifice and sacerdotal ministry. Temple and Maclagan were perfectly entitled to state what they believed Anglicanism taught in their own time; the difficulty is reading that late-Victorian synthesis directly back into 1550.
The history considered in “Anglican Orders I” makes the distinction visible. Eucharistic vestments, eastward celebration, elevation, genuflection, incense, reservation and Eucharistic adoration returned within Anglicanism through controversy, litigation and gradual accommodation. Bishops, courts and commissions repeatedly measured them against the “long-sanctioned and usual ritual” of the post-Reformation Church of England. The point is not that a chasuble or thurible determines validity, but that practices expressive of a more Catholic theology of Presence, sacrifice and priesthood returned as disputed recoveries rather than as the uncontested continuation of the Edwardian settlement.
Nuntiatoria has approached the same problem from another direction in “From Patrimony to Paradigm: The Reframing of the Anglican Ordinariates in the Post-Benedictine Church.”¹⁵ There is an authentic English Catholic patrimony — Sarum, the English saints, Walsingham and the spiritual inheritance of pre-Reformation England — which Catholicism can recognise as its own. That is not the same thing as treating the post-Reformation Anglican formularies as untouched vessels of Catholic doctrine. Anglicanorum coetibus itself preserves patrimony within Catholic communion and subject to Catholic faith; it does not canonise every doctrinal feature of the Reformation settlement.
That historical background makes Saepius Officio a document of considerable theological importance but a problematic witness to original Edwardian intention. Its authors sought to demonstrate that Anglicanism possessed a genuinely “Catholic” theology of Orders and Eucharistic sacrifice; the preceding three centuries make it legitimate to ask how much of their synthesis represented the theology of 1550 and how much belonged to a later recovery.
From Doctrine to Symbolism
The issue is not merely antiquarian. Nuntiatoria returned to Apostolicae Curae in June 2026 in “From the Clementine Chapel to Walsingham: Apostolicae Curae and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Symbolism,” examining the widening gap between the Catholic Church’s unchanged doctrinal judgment and ecumenical gestures which can appear to treat Anglican ministry as sacramentally equivalent in practice.¹⁶ That tension helps explain why the nineteenth-century argument still matters. If Saepius Officio had successfully demonstrated that Leo’s judgment rested upon a historical misunderstanding, subsequent symbolism might be interpreted as the gradual practical recognition of a theological reality which Rome had once failed to perceive. But that conclusion requires the Anglican reply to answer the actual problem exposed by the Edwardian documents.
It does not. Ecumenical dialogue, including ARCIC’s important work on Eucharist and ministry, may produce genuine theological convergence; it cannot alter retrospectively what the Edwardine Ordinal, Communion Office and Articles meant when they were enacted. Nor can later “Catholic” ceremonial or a richer contemporary theology supply an intention which the historical rite objectively failed to signify at the point at which the Anglican succession was being constituted. This was the distinction Nuntiatoria drew at Walsingham: cordiality and convergence are one thing; sacramental identity is another.¹⁶
What Saepius Officio Actually Achieves
Saepius Officio performs a valuable service by preventing Catholics from defending Apostolicae Curae badly. The case against Anglican Orders cannot rest upon the disappearance of ceremonies which were never themselves essential to Holy Orders. It requires neither the Nag’s Head story nor a theory that the porrection of instruments was divinely instituted, and it gains nothing from exaggerating the administrative uniformity of Marian reordinations.
Once those weaker claims are removed, the underlying issue becomes clearer. The Church of England unquestionably retained an episcopal polity: men continued to bear the titles of bishop, priest and deacon; bishops continued to impose hands; the invocation of the Holy Ghost remained; and preaching, absolution and sacramental ministry continued to be assigned to the ordained ministry. None of that, however, establishes that the sacramental episcopate and priesthood themselves survived the Edwardian reconstruction. That is precisely the question at issue. The controversy turns upon whether rites deliberately recast within a changed theology of priesthood, Eucharist and sacrifice continued objectively to signify — and therefore to confer — the Orders which their Catholic predecessors had conferred.
The authorised texts are unusually coherent. The inherited Catholic ordination rite defined priesthood explicitly in sacrificial relation to the Mass. In 1550 the Eucharistic instruments remained while the sacrificial commission disappeared; in 1552 the instruments disappeared as well. The 1549 Communion Office had already altered the language of oblation; the 1552 revision went further, changing the structure of the Eucharistic prayer, the words of administration and the treatment of Eucharistic presence and adoration. The Forty-Two Articles then expressed the same theological direction in explicit propositions concerning transubstantiation, corporal presence and the “sacrifices of Masses”, while the Elizabethan settlement retained the central doctrinal architecture and formally ratified the Edwardine Ordinal.
One may defend those reforms. One may argue, as Canterbury and York effectively did, that they represented a recovery of Scripture and Christian antiquity and a purification of medieval accretions. What is much harder to maintain after the rites and doctrinal formularies are read in chronological sequence is that nothing fundamental changed in the theology of Mass and priesthood.
That is where Saepius Officio fails to dislodge Leo XIII’s deepest argument. Apostolicae Curae is strongest when read neither as a fetishisation of medieval ceremonial nor as a search for one missing phrase, but as a judgment upon a coordinated ecclesial act. The English Reformers inherited rites in which Eucharistic sacrifice and sacerdotal priesthood were explicit; they reconstructed the Eucharistic liturgy according to another theological understanding and simultaneously reconstructed the rite which constituted its ministers, before giving doctrinal expression to the same settlement in the Articles. The Ordinal, Communion Office and doctrinal formularies therefore illuminate one another.
That conclusion also gathers together the argument Nuntiatoria has pursued across its earlier treatment of the subject. “The Form, the Rite, and the Reality” established that sacramental signification belongs to the rite as a whole; “The Illusion of Continuity” situated that rite within the doctrinal rupture of the English Reformation; “Pope Leo’s Doublespeak” showed why later episcopal pedigree cannot simply cure a defect intrinsic to the sacramental act; and “From the Clementine Chapel to Walsingham” showed why contemporary symbolism cannot be allowed to obscure a doctrinal judgment which has never been reversed.¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁶ Saepius Officio remains the strongest Anglican answer because it forces Catholics to state Leo’s argument accurately. Once stated accurately, however, the answer does not overturn it. Canterbury and York can argue that the Reformers were right to make the theological change. They cannot make that change disappear, and it is precisely that change which lies at the historical heart of Apostolicae Curae.
¹ Frederick Temple and William Dalrymple Maclagan, Saepius Officio: Answer of the Archbishops of England to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII, 19 February 1897.
² Pius XII, Sacramentum Ordinis, 30 November 1947, especially §§3–5 on the matter and form of Holy Orders and the sacramental effects signified by the determining words.
³ Joseph Ketley (ed.), The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549 and A.D. 1552, with Other Documents Set Forth by Authority in the Reign of King Edward VI (Cambridge: University Press for the Parker Society, 1844), especially pp. 159–186 for the 1550 Ordinal; the volume reproduces the Edwardian authorised texts and original title-pages.
⁴ Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments (1552), including the revised Ordinal.
⁵ Church of England, The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administracion of the Sacramentes (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1549), especially The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass.
⁶ Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (1552), Holy Communion and the Declaration on Kneeling, including the revised words of administration and the denial that kneeling implied adoration or a “real and essential presence” of Christ’s natural Flesh and Blood in the sacramental elements.
⁷ Thomas Cranmer to the Privy Council, 7 October 1552, concerning the controversy over kneeling at Communion during completion of the Second Prayer Book; The National Archives.
⁸ Church of England, Articles agreed on by the Bishoppes, and other learned menne in the Synode at London (1553), the Forty-Two Articles; reproduced in Ketley, The Two Liturgies, pp. 526ff.
⁹ Church of England, Articles of Religion, especially Articles XXV, XXVIII, XXXI and XXXVI.
¹⁰ Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae, 13 September 1896, especially its treatment of Julius III, Cardinal Pole, Paul IV, John Clement Gordon, the Edwardine Ordinal and defects of form and intention.
¹¹ Cardinal Herbert Vaughan and the Bishops of the Province of Westminster, A Vindication of the Bull “Apostolicae Curae”: A Letter on Anglican Orders (1898), written in reply to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
¹² Nuntiatoria, Pope Leo’s Doublespeak and the Unbroken Authority of Apostolicae Curae, 31 October 2025.
¹³ Nuntiatoria, The Form, the Rite, and the Reality: Why Apostolicae Curae Still Stands, 15 April 2026.
¹⁴ Nuntiatoria, The Illusion of Continuity: The Church of England and the Break with Catholicity, 17 April 2026.
¹⁵ Nuntiatoria, From Patrimony to Paradigm: The Reframing of the Anglican Ordinariates in the Post-Benedictine Church, 24 April 2026.
¹⁶ Nuntiatoria, From the Clementine Chapel to Walsingham: Apostolicae Curae and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Symbolism, 5 June 2026.
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