La validez de las ordenaciones Anglicanas. Los documentos de la comisión preparatoria de la bula «Apostolicæ Curæ». Tomo II : Los documentos de 1896 ed. by Alejandro Cifres (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: La validez de las ordenaciones Anglicanas. Los documentos de la comisión preparatoria de la bula «Apostolicæ Curæ». Tomo II: Los documentos de 1896 ed. by Alejandro Cifres Clinton A. Brand La validez de las ordenaciones Anglicanas. Los documentos de la comisión preparatoria de la bula «Apostolicæ Curæ». Tomo II: Los documentos de 1896. Introduction, transcription, and notes by Alejandro Cifres. [Fontes Archivi Sancti Officii Romani: Series documentorum archivi Congregationis pro Doctrina Fidei, 2.] (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 2012. Pp. xii, 487. €60,00. ISBN 978-88-209-8959-0.) At long last, scholars now have available all of the pertinent documents that went into the making of Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 bull Apostolicae curae declaring Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void.” Among the first fruits of the 1998 opening of the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [End Page 372] (currently accessible through 1903), the present volume rounds out the collection begun by Andre-François von Gunten, O.P., and published in 1997 as the first book in the series Fontes Archivi Sancti Officii Romani. Expertly edited (in Spanish) by Monsignor Alejandro Cifres (archivist of the Holy Office since 1994), this second volume offers for the first time fully annotated versions of the original texts (in Latin and Italian) of the twelve sessions of the preparatory commission that met in 1896 to study the question of Anglican orders, together with the summary report composed by Raffaele Pierotti, whose synthesis played a crucial role in shaping Leo’s conclusion of definitive nullity. As scholars have long known, the members of the preparatory commission were divided and could reach no consensus on the possible recognition of Anglican orders. Pierotti’s report, however, failed to convey the impasse and instead reflected his own views in favor of a negative judgment, as well as the considerable influence of the English Catholic bishops against any acknowledgment of the validity of Anglican sacraments. The result, of course, was Pope Leo’s unequivocal rejection of Anglican orders, a judgment that has proved ecumenically vexing, even as the tangled argumentation of Apostolicae curae has occasioned no end of academic controversy and much ecclesial defensiveness. On one hand, the documents collected in this volume could give credence to the view that the investigative process of the preparatory commission was deeply flawed and that the concluding, advisory report was certainly manipulated. But, on the other hand and perhaps more important, these texts and the fissures they reveal also help us to understand how the arguments issuing in and issuing from Apostolicae curae provoked—for Catholics and Anglicans alike albeit in different ways—some searching inquiry into more developed criteria for sacramental validity, a deeper theology of holy orders, and a wider appreciation of the ecclesiology of Christian unity. Debates about the subtleties of sacramental form and intention can be otiose apart from the informing experience of ecclesial koinonia and a shared sense of the Church herself as the sacrament of unity. Leo XIII seems to have intuited as much in making a decision that hindsight suggests he could not have made differently; he grasped, in other words, that the simple recognition of Anglican orders would not have healed the wounds of schism or done more than paper over deeper sources of division. This critical compendium offers a significant contribution to the context for understanding Apostolicae curae while supplementing the pioneering work of John Jay Hughes and Giuseppe Rambaldi, among others. But illuminating as it is, this archival collection will not augur any official reopening of the question of Anglican orders. Given the complexly shifting horizons of historical and theological interpretation that have challenged readings of Apostolicae curae, not to mention the frustrations of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission and the ongoing disintegration of the Anglican Communion, Pope Leo’s judgment has been vindicated, if not in the particular details of his argument then in his manifest foresight over the century since its declaration. In 1998 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [End Page 373] as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an instruction accompanying Ad tuendam fidem, Pope John Paul II’s motu proprio, and mentioning...