Grace & Peace!
I found this interesting, from the document Saepius Officio, the response of the Archbishop of Canterbury to Leo, applying to Roman and Eastern orders the same rationale which the Pope had applied to Anglican orders:
(from section XX)
"Finally, we would have our revered broth in Christ beware lest in expressing this judgment he do injustice not only to us but to other Christians also, and among them to his own predecessors, who surely enjoyed in an equal measure with himself the gift of the Holy Spirit.
"For he seems to condemn the Orientals, in company with ourselves, on account of defective intention, who in the “orthodox Confession” issued about 1640 name only two functions of sacramental priesthood, that is to say that of absolving sins and of preaching; who in the “Longer Russian Catechism” (Moscow, 1839) teach nothing about the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, and mention among the office which pertain to Order only those of ministering the Sacraments and feeding the flock.
…
"But let the Romans consider now not once or twice what judgment they will pronounce upon their own Fathers, whose ordinations we have described above. For if the Pope shall by a new decree declare our Fathers of two hundred and fifty years ago wrongly ordained, there is nothing to hinder the inevitable sentence that by the same law all who have been similarly ordained have received no orders. And if our Fathers, who used in 1550 and 1552 forms which as he says are null, were altogether unable to reform them in 1662, his own Fathers come under the self-same law. And if Hippolytus and Victor and Leo and Gelasius and Gregory have some of them said too little in their rites about the priesthood and the high priesthood, and nothing about thte power of offering the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, the church of Rome herself has an invalid priesthood, and the reformers of the Sacramentaries, no matter what their names, could do nothing to remedy her rites…Thus in overthrowing our orders he overthrows all his own, and pronounces sentence on his own Church. Eugenius IVth indeed brought his Church into peril of nullity when he taught a new matter and a new form of Order and left the real without a word. For no one knows how many ordinations may have been made, according to his teaching, without any laying on of hands or appropriate form. Pope Leo demands a form unknown to previous Bishops of Rome, and intention which is defective in the catechisms of the Oriental Church.
“To conclude…we acknowledge that the things which our brother Pope Leo XIIIth has written from time to time in other letters are sometimes very true and always written with a good will. … We also gladly declare that there is much in his own person that is worthy of love and reverence. But that error, which is inveterate in the Roman communion, of substituting the visible head for the invisible Christ, will rob his good words of any fruit of peace.”
The Archbishop goes on to discuss the ordination of John Gordon in 1688, which ordination the Holy Father uses as the central case in the controversy, followed by a statement of astonishment that the Congregation of the Supreme Inquisition would approve the ordination of Abyssinian priests when the form of their ordination so clearly falls into Leo’s description of invalid form. While confessing that the document in which such approval is given was later (much much later) repudiated, he concludes, “who hereafter can believe that the holy Office is an adequate witness in such a controversy, or even on the character of its own documents?.. For these reasons we may justly say that the darkness in which the holy Office is enveloped is insufficiently dispersed by the Pope’s letter.”
Under the Mercy,
Mark
Deo Gratias!
