From: nadeem%igpho@uunet.uu.net (Nadeem Malik)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Anglican and Roman Catholic
Date: 23 Nov 92 02:48:18 GMT
Organization: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH

U94_DLAVDAS@vaxc.stevens-tech.edu (D E A N) writes:
: 
: 	I have a friend who told me that he knows a Roman Catholic priest
: who was an Anglican priest and upon converting to Catholicism he automatically
: became a RC priest.  I find that hard to believe, but then again I am neither
: RC nor Anglican.  Can anybody explain if this is true or false?

I am not a chritian at all, I am a Muslims in fact. But I may be able to offer
some info here because I studied at St. Edmund's College, Univ. Cambridge, which
has a strong catholic tradition (the only one in Oxford or Cambridge in fact).
I came across many Catholic priests during my time there and as it happened
this very question arose once. The answer is that those non-Anglican priests
who can trace their ordination back to the division of Rome and Angilcans etc.
are automatically catholic priests on conversion. In other words, if the entire
line of ordained bishops who ordained one another that led to ordination
of the priest in question has a genuine Catholic Bishop along the line, then`
thayt is ok. 


Hoever, since the numbers of this type is miniscule, the effective answer is
no in >99% of cases.


Apologies for any errors ...they are not mine ! :-):-)

Nadeem Malik, nadeem@p.igp.ethz.ch

[This explanation is roughly correct, but a few terms are confused.
Based on the number of responses I'm getting (not all of which are
being posted), I'd like to try to clarify things.  As I understand it,
a valid Catholic sacrament requires several things, of which the
relevant ones here are (1) that the person doing it is empowered to do
it, and (2) that when they do it they intend to do what the Church
does.  Ordination requires a validly consecrated bishop.  Consecrating
a bishop (which is a different act than ordaining a priest) requires
three validly consecrated bishops (more or less -- consecrations done
with fewer than three are valid but irregular).  Thus to have a
validly consecrated priest, you have to look at the bishop who
ordained him, and then you have to trace the line of that bishop.  It
must be traceable back to a Catholic bishop, and at every step the
consecration must be valid.  If at any step one generation didn't
properly consecrate the next, then the chain breaks.  At each step you
must ask not only whether the person doing the consecration is himself
validly consecrated as a bishop, but whether the consecration he is
performing is itself valid.  In this case, the problem is that at
certain points in its history the Anglican church was more overtly
Protestant than it is now.  There was a period when the liturgy used
for consecration departed from the traditional liturgy in a way that
makes Catholic theologians believe that it does not describe the same
act that the Catholic Church does when it consecrates.  A sacrament is
not valid if the person doing it does not intend to do what the Church
does.  If their analysis is correct, then the succession of validly
consecrated bishops breaks at that point.  If one could show that a
particular bishop could trace his consecration through a chain of
bishops that doesn't involve this suspect liturgy, then he might be
OK.  The Roman Catholic Church seems to have concluded that there are
no cases of this, since the policy on Anglican orders is
unconditional.  I should note that high church Anglicans dispute this
Roman Catholic analysis.  They believe that their bishops are valid by
Catholic definitions.  However the question being discussed is the
Roman Catholic position on the status of Anglican priests.  --clh]