From Bastards to Brothers: Rome's Doublespeak on Anglican Holy Orders. Why Leo XIV pretends that Anglican orders are genuine when Leo XIII called them fake

By Canon Dr Jules Gomes

MERE MATCHLIGHT

Oct 24, 2025

Would you pretend something is authentic when you know it is counterfeit?

As a lad studying the violin under the virtuoso Melbourne Halloween, I was chastened for failing to distinguish between a fake and a real Stradivarius. Antonio Stradivari was an Italian luthier renowned for crafting the world’s finest violins. His most expensive violin sold for $20million in 2022.

I grew up thinking that my father owned a Stradivarius. He kept his expensive violin locked and bought me a cheaper violin to play. One day, through the F-holes in my father’s violin, I read the label stuck inside the chamber. It said Stradivarius. I was ecstatic. I proudly told Halloween that my father owned a Stradivarius. He smiled.

A week later, my dad allowed me to take his violin to the lesson. Halloween played it sublimely. I asked him how much it was worth. After all, it was a Stradivarius! Amused at my naïveté, he told me it wasn’t a real Stradivarius. He explained that it was not uncommon for violin makers to stick the Stradivarius label on their creations. It simply meant that the instruments they made were copies of a real Stradivarius. I never again told anyone that my dad owned a Stradivarius.

I couldn’t pretend something is authentic when I knew it to be an imitation.

Catholic Priests Are Stradivarii — Protestant Pastors Are Fakes

For centuries, Catholics have been told that their priests are Stradivarius violins. Why? Because they have “apostolic succession” that goes back to Jesus and the apostles. The Council of Trent infallibly claims that “this priesthood was instituted by the same Lord our Saviour.” Except for Eastern Orthodox priests (who may be grudgingly classified as low-grade Stradivarii), Rome designates ministers of other churches as bootleg priests.

Most Protestant churches couldn’t give a hoot about Rome’s cock-a-doodle-do. Apostolic succession is vital for them, but they understand apostolic succession as the continuity of apostolic teaching and not as the tactile transmission of a bishop laying his white-gloved hands on the vaseline-manicured scalp of an ordinand (who is ontologically transformed by this episcopal alchemy).

Rome has a particular problem with Anglicans, who assert that their priests are also Stradivarii because they retained apostolic succession. But Pope Leo XIII’s bull Apostolicae Curae (1896) trashed Anglican orders as “absolutely null and utterly void.” He stipulated that his bull “shall be always valid and in force and shall be inviolably observed both juridically and otherwise….”

While Leo XIII ruled that Anglican bishops and priests are laypersons cosplaying as clergy with their cassocks, chasubles, and croziers, Leo XIV seems to believe that Anglican bishops and priests are the real thing. He took the extraordinary step of hosting King Charles III, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Anglican Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, for a joint prayer service in the Sistine Chapel on October 23.

Leo Welcomes Archbishop of Canterbury on Equal Terms

Leo didn’t treat Charles and Cottrell as fakes. He welcomed them with full honours according to their respective ecclesiastical roles. He didn’t address Cottrell as “Mister” but as the “Most Reverend.” Cottrell was decked out in full clerical investiture for the service. He stood alongside Leo on an equal footing. The Anglican-styled service was in Elizabethan English. Thomas Tallis’ anthem If ye love me was the high point of the service. I felt I was back leading Evensong in my Anglican cathedral. Leo and Cottrell led the service together antiphonally and gave the benediction together in unison.

Even more significantly, Leo bestowed on Charles the spiritual title of the Royal Confrater of the papal basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. Leo even ordered a special chair to be permanently installed in the basilica for Charles and his successors. The “throne” will bear King Charles’s coat of arms and the Latin inscription Ut unum sint, which, not insignificantly, is the title of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on ecumenism. In turn, with the approval of King Charles, the [Anglican] Dean and Canons of the College of St George Windsor bestowed the title of Papal Confrater of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on Leo. The pope accepted the honour. Bob and Charlie are now (confraternity) brothers.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, now excommunicated, tore his robes like Caiphas the high priest, asking how it was possible for the pope to commune with “lay heretics dressed up as prelates.” Traditionalist cardinals Raymond Burke and Robert Sarah, now domesticated, sat quietly like Peter warming himself by the fire.

Popesplainers might argue that Leo, at best, is demonstrating politeness as one might expect from a good host. At worst, he is humouring the Anglican pretence/delusion that their orders are valid. But these arguments ring hollow. First, Leo doesn’t have to stage a prayer service for Charles. As a canonist, he knows that the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1258) forbade praying with non-Catholics. He can host Charles according to Vatican protocol for receiving heads of state. Second, if Leo is pandering to an Anglican delusion, he is being staggeringly dishonest. He’s signalling to the world that a rip-off Stradivarius is the equivalent of a genuine Stradivarius.

So why are Leo XIII and Leo XIV marching in opposite directions? Like all pontiffs, Leo is a pope of his times. For centuries, Rome had disparaged Anglicans as heretics, schismatics, and apostates—the illegitimate children of King Henry VIII. Then, at the Second Vatican Council, God changed his mind. Rome waved the magic wand of its magisterium, and Bob’s your uncle, Anglicans were no longer bastards!

In obedience to Rome’s decrees, God was compelled to adopt Anglicans (and other Protestants) as His foster children. Still, they were “separated brethren,” mongrels belonging to “ecclesial communities” (a rather torturous tautology, as if to say the “church,” which in Greek is ecclesia, i.e., community, isn’t an “ecclesial community”).

Pope Leo’s Bull: A Cannon Without Balls

Suddenly, the popes began schmoozing with the archbishops of Canterbury like teenage boys who have just discovered girls. John XXIII was the first to pop open a prosecco for Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher in 1960. In 1966, Paul VI took Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s right hand and placed his diamond episcopal ring on the Anglican prelate’s finger.

Since then, popes have been bestowing gifts freighted with symbolic weight on the archbishops of Canterbury. John Paul II gave a pectoral cross to Archbishop Rowan Williams on the occasion of his enthronement.

John Paul II gave Archbishop George Carey a copy of the Codex Vaticanus New Testament. Francis presented a crozier to Archbishop Justin Welby, which was a replica of St. Gregory the Great’s staff (the same Gregory who sent St Augustine to England as the first archbishop of Canterbury).

These gifts go beyond tokens of diplomacy; they are semiotically subversive and performative speech acts (J.L. Austin). First, their purpose is to publicly acknowledge the archbishops of Canterbury as valid bishops. Second, they are cleverly calibrated to defenestrate Apostolicae Curae. The “guerrilla theatre” (Amos Wilder) of the recent popes has been wildly successful. Leo XIII’s bull is now like a cannon without balls. Traditionalist Catholics who want to turn the clock back may fire it with gunpowder, but they can only make loud bangs without balls to demolish the target.

Leo IV and Leo XIII: Different Views on Priesthood

Leo XIII treated Anglican clergy as bastards. Leo XIV treats Charles and Cottrell as brothers. What explains the seismic shift from bastard to brother?

Let me try and simplify a complex debate: Leo XIII’s primary rationale for rubbishing Anglican orders was his belief that Anglicans had jettisoned the theology of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice and had abandoned tactile apostolic succession. Form, matter, and intention were no longer present. Ergo, Anglicans were not ordaining cultic functionaries (sacerdos or hiereus) who would offer the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, but were ordaining elders or presbyters (presbyteros) following the model of the New Testament.

The key question here is: Did Jesus intend to institute a cultic priesthood? The Council of Trent states (“infallibly”) that Jesus both intended and instituted a sacerdotal office. But there isn’t a word in the New Testament that suggests that Jesus or the apostles contemplated or created a cultic priesthood. The Greek word used in the New Testament for “priest” (as a cultic functionary) is hiereus. It is used for Jesus, pagan priests, Jewish priests, and for all Christians who are called to offer “sacrifices” of praise and thanksgiving (Hebrews 13:15). It is never used to designate Christian ministers.

“There is no evidence in the language of Jesus that he thought about a priesthood replacing the Jewish priesthood in the Temple,” concedes the great Catholic New Testament scholar Fr. Raymond E. Brown in his book Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine. “We know that nowhere in the New Testament is the Christian minister considered to be a priest (hiereus),” writes Catholic scholar Ray Robert Noll, in his magisterial Christian Ministerial Priesthood: A Search for its Beginnings in the Primary Documents of the Apostolic Fathers.

From Presbyter to Priest

One might argue that the common practice of far-flung churches of apostolic origin from India to Ethiopia is proof of the antiquity of the sacerdotal priesthood. But antiquity does not equal apostolicity. And there is a virtual consensus among Catholic historians (including the eminent Prof Eamon Duffy) that the churches in Rome were governed for over a century and a half by a plurality of presbyters before the emergence of the mono-episcopate.

The question is how, when, where, and why the presbyteros evolved into a hiereus. Noll states the problem with precision: “How did the Old Testament and pagan nomenclature for the priestly class find its way into the Church, and along with it the sacral-cultic conception of priesthood and of Christianity.”

Noll concludes that the office of the Catholic sacerdos is “the result of a gradual development over about 300 years, a slow and cumulative development, much like pieces of snow that begin to roll down a mountainside, combining and gathering mass and momentum as they go.”

“Prior to the beginning of the third century, no Christian text uses the title ‘priest’ (hiereus in Greek, sacerdos in Latin) directly to designate a particular individual or group of ministers within the Church,” Paul Bradshaw, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Notre Dame, writes in The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship.

A Plea For Holy Humility

Catholics and Protestants disagree on whether such a development was faithful to the apostolic intention. Two results, however, are assured: First, if the cultic priesthood is a later development, so is the idea of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, since one cannot offer a sacrifice without a sacerdos. Second, any idea of a development decimates the notion of tactile apostolic succession as holy humbug. Why? Because neither Jesus nor the apostles nor bishops (often presbyters) in the embryonic Church were ordaining presbyteroi with the intention of ordaining cultic priests.

Moreover, “the theory about passing on powers through ordination faces the serious obstacle that the NT does not show the Twelve laying hands on bishops either as successors or as auxiliaries in administering sacraments,” Fr. Raymond Brown observes in his book Priest and Bishop: Biblical Reflections.

Catholic scholars know this. Most Catholic seminarians are taught this. Leo XIV studied at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. It would be remarkable if his professors never taught him these historical and biblical facts about the “priesthood” in his modules on Liturgy, New Testament, Sacramentology, Ecclesiology, or Church History.

“Although a rethinking of ministerial priesthood has been and remains a sensitive issue in the Roman Catholic Communion, nonetheless, the Catholic Church today, at all its levels, must face the historical data on priestly ministry in its fullness and correctness and be willing to make all necessary theological adaptations,” concedes Fr. Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M. of the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California.

Osborne, in effect, is calling for holy humility within the Church of Rome. Popes from John XXIII to Leo XIV have graciously demonstrated this humility by recognising Anglican archbishops as brothers, not bastards. The evidence is also a call for supremacist Catholics to repent of their hubris and stop insisting that Protestants have fake “sacraments” because their ministers are not real Stradivarii.

Because, when all is said and done, no sinful human is a real Stradivarius. Jesus, our High Priest, is the only true Stradivarius who made on the hard wood of the cross “by his one oblation of Himself once offered a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world” (Book of Common Prayer).

Canon Dr Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.