Catholic But Not Roman Catholic

In October of 2005, I attended a mass of consecration for three Catholic bishops in Richmond, Virginia. The presiding bishop anointed the candidates’ heads with oil. He laid hands on their heads and blew vigorously on their scalps, saying the familiar words, “Be filled with the Holy Spirit.” The new bishops received miters, croziers, and rings, and spoke ritual promises. At the end, the whole sanctuary, packed with family and friends, wept and clapped and cheered.

Really, there was only one unusual thing about this particular consecration: the three new bishops were all women.

Catholic women! Ordained not just priests, but bishops. In a number of U.S. faiths, women’s ordination is routine, but not in Catholicism. Or so most people think.

If there is awareness of Catholic women’s ordination, people think it started with Roman Catholic Womenpriests, the contemporary media-savvy collective that has been embraced by a number of Roman Catholic reform groups. But Roman Catholic Womenpriests is just one node of the rhizome that is independent Catholicism.

In U.S. independent Catholicism, women’s ordination has been going on for over fifty years. (Other open sacraments go way back, too, including clerical marriage and same-sex marriage.) In the United States, Roman Catholic Womenpriests’ activity dates to 2006, but the first Catholic ordination of a woman on U.S. soil happened in a radical San Francisco church in 1960. In 1974 – a few months before the famed “Philadelphia Eleven” were ordained as the Episcopal Church’s first female priests – the tiny, little-known Catholic Apostolic Church of Antioch continued making women priests and bishops. So in Richmond, when I attended that 2005 Church of Antioch consecration, it was a ritual that those Catholics had already witnessed a dozen times.

My reflections on the future of Catholic Studies, then, would start simply with saying that not all Catholics are Roman Catholics. For the last ten years, I’ve been hanging out with the woman-bishop-consecrating, same-sex-marrying Church of Antioch. Independents are of course only one category of non-Roman Catholic. Among scholars it is well known that there are twenty-two churches in communion with Rome but not Roman Catholic – Eastern Catholics, such as those in the Coptic and Melkite churches. There are also other big Catholic traditions (capital C, not lower-case c), including Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

In my work, though, I specifically deal with independent Catholics. This is the nomenclature that many of them use for themselves. They gather in small bodies headed by their own bishops, and claim Catholic heritage and authority equal to that of the big communions. The phenomenon began in early modern French and Dutch Catholicism and went global over three centuries. They are hugely diverse, including flavors from traditional to esoteric and ultraconservative to radical. Diverse as they are, however, almost all independents have a few things in common. They have bishops in apostolic succession. They celebrate seven sacraments. They revere the saints. And they state that it is possible to be Catholic outside the big bodies.

In the contemporary United States, there are at least two hundred and fifty of these churches. Key historical ones include the Polish National Catholic Church and the African Orthodox Church. Handfuls of formerly Roman parishes went independent, such as Spiritus Christi in Rochester, New York, and St. Stanislaus Kostka in St. Louis, Missouri. Outside the United States, there are the Union of Utrecht (Old Catholic) and the Philippine Independent Church – both in communion with Anglicanism – as well as the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church.

Studying independents, pretty quickly I gave up trying to decide if other Catholics were really Catholic. They have recognizable hallmarks. Even more basically, they say they are Catholic. The self-description of subjects is not always the final word for scholars. But in this case, it is hard to imagine drawing the boundaries of who is and is not Catholic by any other means, since all other means would position the scholar within the theological norms of some version of Catholicism.

This is not to say that I think I am operating without norms. My...