A Brief History of the Old Catholics

The term “Old Catholics” refers to a loose association of Christian groups who, claiming to be faithful to original Catholic teaching, have rejected the doctrines of papal infallibility and supremacy as novelties. They separated from Rome after the declarations on the papacy at Vatican I (1870).

However, the roots of the Old Catholic groups lie much further back. Various movements throughout Church history have opposed, in some way or another, the power of the papacy. This includes the conciliarism of the 15th century and the Gallicanism and Jansenism of the 17th century. A direct precursor to the Old Catholics—the schism of Utrecht—broke from Rome in the 18th century.

This challenge to the pope’s authority ebbed and flowed over time, but strains of it remained persistently present in the Church. The plans for Vatican I and the promulgation of the doctrine of infallibility of the pope unleashed these latent forces of hostility to papal power, giving rise, ultimately, to a new schismatic grouping of churches.

After the conclusion of Vatican I, the bishops who had opposed the doctrine one by one gave their assent. But among the priests and laity, particularly in Germany, resistance remained strong. Some 1,400 Germans issued a declaration in September of 1870 rejecting the dogma of infallibility “as an innovation contrary to the traditional faith of the Church.” These would eventually rupture definitively with Rome and establish “Old Catholic” churches in a number of countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

In September of 1871, the Old Catholics held a congress in Munich to organize themselves and articulate their beliefs. The Old Catholic Encyclopedia lays out some of the key principles that emerged from the conference: adherence to the ancient Catholic Faith, rejection of new dogmas, efforts to reunite various Christian confessions (some Protestants were invited to the conference), reform of the Church to include a larger role for the laity, adherence to the state and rejection of ultramontanism, and a rejection of the Jesuits.

The Old Catholics managed to persuade several German and Swiss governments that they were the true, authentic Catholics, thus receiving the support of these governments and even, in some cases, Catholic Churches handed over to them by civil authorities. Rome attempted to respond with a Decree of the Inquisition in September of 1871 proclaiming that the Old Catholics had no connection to the Catholic Church and thus no right to her property, yet the Old Catholics continued to enjoy state support in the regions where they operated.

By spring of 1872, a number of leading theologians of the anti-infallibility movement had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church. But the Old Catholics carried on. They organized another congress in September of 1872, where they agreed to elect a bishop (no Catholic bishop had permanently sided with them). Joseph H. Reinkens was elected bishop and consecrated by a bishop of the Jansenist Church of Holland, Bishop Heykamp (or Heydekamp), in August of 1873.

This action received a swift and firm response from Rome. Bl. Pius IX excommunicated Reinkens by name on November 9, 1873, in the encyclical Etsi Multa, which was also a general response to Old Catholic activities and other ecclesial problems of the time—primarily the Kulturkampf (culture struggle) enacted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Church.

In this powerful document, we get a glimpse of the upheaval caused by the Kulturkampf and Old Catholic intrigues. The pope speaks in an agonized voice of the “monstrous errors” of the sect and the “ruin of souls redeemed by the blood of Christ” which “force tears” from his eyes.

He goes on to clearly condemn the Old Catholics for their denial of the doctrinal authority of an ecumenical council and the indefectibility of the college of bishops united to the Holy Father.

What these sons of perdition intend is quite clear from their other writings, especially that impious and most imprudent one which has only recently been published by the person whom they recently constituted as a pseudo-bishop. For these writings attack and pervert the true power of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff and the bishops, who are the successors of blessed Peter and the apostles; they transfer it instead to the people, or, as they say, to the community. They obstinately reject and oppose the infallible magisterium both of the Roman Pontiff and of the whole Church in teaching matters. Incredibly, they boldly affirm that the Roman Pontiff and all the bishops, the priests and the people conjoined with him in the unity of faith and communion fell into heresy when they approved and professed the definitions of the Ecumenical Vatican Council. Therefore they deny also the indefectibility of the Church and blasphemously declare that it has perished throughout the world and that its visible Head and the bishops have erred. They assert the necessity of restoring a legitimate episcopacy in the person of their pseudo-bishop, who has entered not by the gate but from elsewhere like a thief or robber and calls the damnation of Christ upon his head.

Pius IX thus considered the Old Catholic position untenable not only for its denial of papal infallibility but also for its denial of the Church’s indefectibility. As he states above, if the entire college of bishops united to the pope had fallen into such grievous error that sound doctrine could only be preserved through an unauthorized episcopacy, then the Church would have failed.

Echoing St. Augustine’s refutation of the Donatists from centuries prior, Pius explains that Christ’s promises to the Church include that she will remain present and widely dispersed throughout the world until the end of time, which precludes the possibility that the true faith could be confined to a single small remnant.

He continues:

They have chosen and set up a pseudo-bishop, a certain notorious apostate from the Catholic faith, Joseph Hubert Reinkens…But as even the rudiments of Catholic faith declare, no one can be considered a bishop who is not linked in communion of faith and love with Peter, upon whom is built the Church of Christ; who does not adhere to the supreme Pastor to whom the sheep of Christ are committed to be pastured; and who is not bound to the confirmer of fraternity which is in the world…it is from this Apostolic See, where blessed Peter “lives and presides and grants the truth of faith to those seeking it,” that the rights of venerable communion flow to all.

Two years later, Pius IX issued another encyclical against the Old Catholics, Graves ac Diuturnae. In the encyclical, he observes how the Old Catholics “love to deceive the unwary and the innocent and to draw them into error by deception and hypocrisy” and

repeatedly state openly that they do not in the least reject the Catholic Church and its visible head but rather that they are zealous for the purity of Catholic doctrine declaring that they are the heirs of the ancient faith and the only true Catholics.

Yet he rejects their claim to be faithful to the ancient Faith and to the papacy because “in fact they refuse to acknowledge all the divine prerogatives of the vicar of Christ on earth and do not submit to His supreme magisterium.”

In the same document, he reiterates the schismatic character of the movement and warns the faithful that

They should not have any dealings or meetings with usurping priests…who dare to exercise the duties of an ecclesiastical minister without possessing a legitimate mission or any jurisdiction…We urge you with the greatest enthusiasm to give support strongly and constantly to your legitimate shepherds who have received a legitimate mission from this Apostolic See.

Despite their stance against “innovation,” it didn’t take the Old Catholics long to begin innovating themselves. In the 1880s, they repealed confession and the requirement of celibacy for priests.

In 1876, they elected another bishop, Eduard Herzog, this time for the Swiss Old Catholic communities called the Christian Catholic National Church, and he was consecrated by Bishop Reinkens.

The movement never grew to huge proportions, though one branch, the Polish National Catholic Church, came into being in the United States and Canada in 1897 through Bishop Herzog of Switzerland. The movement also merged with the older schism of the Church of Utrecht, which had broken with Rome over papal authority in the 1700s.

The 1889 “Declaration of Utrecht” by the Union of the Old Catholic Churches became a guiding charter for Old Catholicism. Among other statements, we find these proclamations in the declaration:

We adhere faithfully to the Rule of Faith laid down by St. Vincent of Lerins in these terms: “Id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est; hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum” [“Let us hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all; for that is truly and properly Catholic.”]…

We therefore reject the decrees of the so-called Council of the Vatican, which were promulgated July 18th, 1870, concerning the infallibility and the universal Episcopate of the Bishop of Rome, decrees which are in contradiction with the faith of the ancient Church…

We also reject the dogma of the Immaculate Conception promulgated by Pius IX in 1854 in defiance of the Holy Scriptures and in contradiction to the tradition of the centuries…

As for other Encyclicals published by the Bishops of Rome in recent times for example, the Bulls Unigenitus and Auctorem fidei, and the Syllabus of 1864, we reject them on all such points as are in contradiction with the doctrine of the primitive Church, and we do not recognize them as binding on the consciences of the faithful… 

By maintaining and professing faithfully the doctrine of Jesus Christ, by refusing to admit those errors which by the fault of men have crept into the Catholic Church, by laying aside the abuses in ecclesiastical matters, together with the worldly tendencies of the hierarchy, we believe that we shall be able to combat efficaciously the great evils of our day, which are unbelief and indifference in matters of religion.

We see in this declaration the influence of the man who was the driving intellectual force behind the Old Catholic movement: the learned and respected theologian and Church historian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger. His theological and ecclesiological positions are worth examining, along with the sad human drama of his steady distancing from the Church which culminated in excommunication.

Döllinger was born in Bamberg, Bavaria in 1799. After studying at the Bamberg seminary, he was ordained a priest of the Catholic Church in 1822. Döllinger was a remarkably gifted student. However, as The Old Catholic Encyclopedia notes, “Despite the profound grasp of dogma and moral theology that his works at times exhibit, his career gives evidence enough that he never took the pains to round out satisfactorily the insufficiency of his early training in theology.”

He became a professor of Church history and canon law at the lyceum at Aschaffenburg and, later, professor of theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. In addition to his theological posts, he also served as a representative to the Frankfurt Parliament from 1848-49.

Over time, Döllinger developed attitudes hostile to the Jesuits and the Roman Curia, which pushed him toward liberal circles that shared these sentiments. Eventually, he began to develop a warped ecclesiology. As The Catholic Encyclopedia relates,

He held no longer to the universal idea of Catholicism as a world-religion; in its place, nourished by the court atmosphere he loved so well, arose a strictly nationalistic concept of the catholic Church. All ecclesiastical measures he henceforth criticized from the narrow angle of Gallicanism, and ridiculed in anonymous articles and other writings.

Döllinger vehemently opposed Vatican I and its definition of papal infallibility and the pope’s universal jurisdiction. When his bishop asked him to make a clear submission to the Council’s teachings, he replied, in a letter of March 28, 1871, with just the opposite: a complete repudiation of the doctrine. He argued that Vatican I had invented a novelty, opposed to genuine Catholic tradition, and that he therefore could not adhere to it in good conscience.

He wrote:

The Fathers of the Church have all without exception expounded the passages in question in a sense entirely different from the new Decree, and especially in the passage Luke xxii. 32 they were far from seeing an infallibility granted to all popes.

He continues, “Accordingly, if I were willing to accept the Decrees with this interpretation, without which they are deprived of all biblical foundation, I should forswear myself.”

The old professor was absolutely convinced that Vatican I was a flat contradiction of tradition, including prior councils.

I appeal to the fact, and offer to prove it in public, that two General Councils and several popes as early as the fifteenth century decided the question of the extent of the pope’s power and infallibility by solemn decrees which were proclaimed by the Councils, and repeatedly confirmed by the popes, and that the [Vatican I] Decrees of the 8th July 1870 stand in glaring contradiction to these Resolutions, whence it is impossible that they should be binding.

To further justify his resistance, he criticized the way the council was conducted, accusing it of failing to thoroughly examine and adhere to tradition. He even hints that it was not a “true” council.

It is certainly well known to your Grace that when a true Ecumenical Council was to issue Decrees, the most exact and mature examination of tradition was always required as a condition of their validity. What a contrast, too, in this respect were the proceedings at Trent, compared with what happened at Rome in 1870!

In the same vein, he questioned the erudition and orthodoxy of the bishops present at the council, asserting that they “lacked either the will or the proper discernment for separating truth from falsehood, right from wrong.”

He considered the notion of submitting one’s judgment to the pope’s magisterium ludicrous, and he attributed it to the intrigues of the Jesuits who, he claimed elsewhere, wanted to rule the world through the pope. He summarized his attitude toward Vatican I’s definition by saying, “I cannot [accept them] as a theologian, because the whole genuine tradition of the Church stands irreconcilably opposed to it.”

Archbishop von Scherr replied to Döllinger’s declaration on April 2, 1871, calling it “exceedingly deplorable” and reminding him that

The Church to which Jesus Christ has promised His aid to the end of the world cannot require us to believe anything but what God has Himself revealed. Whoever, therefore, opposes the dictum of the Church opposes God. “Whoever neglects to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen and a publican” (Matt, xviii. 17).

As a result of his defiance, Döllinger was excommunicated in April 1871. Yet still he remained intransigent and aligned himself with (and largely inspired) the growing Old Catholic movement, whose aims he defined as:

(1) “to bear witness for the truth and against new-fangled errors, especially the disastrous and arbitrary development of new articles of the faith; (2) gradually to bring into being a Church which will be more closely conformed to the ancient undivided Church; (3) to serve as an instrument for a future great reunion of separated Christians and Churches.”

After his excommunication, he continued to rail against the Jesuits, asserting that they had infiltrated and compromised the Roman Church. For instance, he wrote to Pastor Widmann of Todtnau in 1874,

In the whole of this papal community within and without the confines of Italy, there is no longer any moving power but one, in the presence of which all others, the episcopacy, the cardinalate, the spiritual orders, the schools, etc., remain passive—and that is the Order of the Jesuits…the Roman Curia, in order to remain a curia, to preserve its ecclesiastical monopoly, its financial resources, etc., is compelled to rely on the Jesuits, i.e. to be subservient to them and their impulses. And the Jesuits are the incarnation of superstition united with despotism.

He also criticized Rome for proclaiming St. Alphonsus Liguori a Doctor of the Church, an act he considered the “greatest monstrosity that has ever occurred in the domain of theological doctrine” because of Liguori’s alleged “false morals, perverse worship of the Virgin, constant use of the grossest fables and forgeries.” He lamented that “in all theological colleges the growing generation of the clergy is being poisoned with these books of Liguori.”

For Döllinger, Rome was truly a lost cause at this point. In the same letter cited above, he concluded by warning Widmann not to succumb to the Church’s call for unity and obedience. “Do not allow yourself to be deluded by the pretexts of unity which ought to be preserved, and of unconditioned obedience, whereby every erroneous idea and every deformity of religion, however terrible, is palliated.” Rather than obey, he argued, it was necessary to stand up for the truth. “What we can and ought to do in this wretched condition is to bear testimony before God and the world, and to give the truth as recognised by us the honour which is due to it.”

Repeated attempts to bring Döllinger back into the fold were unsuccessful. Relying on his own research and personal interpretation of tradition, he was absolutely convicted that Vatican I contradicted Catholic tradition.

In Döllinger’s mind, it was he who had remained true to the Faith and the rest of the Church that had changed and invented novelties. In an 1880 letter to a noblewoman, he wrote, “Yesterday still orthodox, I was to-day a heretic worthy of excommunication, not because I had changed my teaching, but because others had considered it advisable to undertake the alteration, and to make opinions into Articles of Faith.”

In addition to revealing his firm confidence in his own opinions over and against Church authority, Döllinger’s correspondences later in life exhibit a weariness and bitterness, the quiet frustration of a man who felt he had been profoundly unjustly treated. He did not believe his excommunication was valid, arguing, to the end, that he was innocent.

As he wrote to Archbishop von Steichele, “There was thus clearly no pertinacia on my part, and your Grace knows that where this is wanting, an excommunication on account of a difference of doctrine is null and void”; and, “according to the teaching of the Fathers, an unjust ban redounds to the one concerned as a blessing and not as a curse.”

He went on to complain,

The way in which I have been treated is indeed an unexampled occurrence in the history of the Church…What crime had I committed that I should be subjected to the heaviest of all punishments…? I had refused to recognise a Council which, except numbers, lacked all the conditions of validity fixed by theology; a Council at which there was notoriously no freedom, no thorough examination, and no statement of actual tradition; a Council whose very unexampled order of business proclaimed the servitude of the bishops.

The crime he had committed, of course, was to reject the infallible decrees of an ecumenical council and to place his own interpretation of tradition above that of the Church.

Tragically, Döllinger died in 1890 without having reconciled with the Church.

The movement of Old Catholics that he helped generate continues to this day. The American Catholic Church website claims there are about 230,000 Old Catholics in the United States and many more in Europe.

Separated from the See of Peter, the Old Catholics have continued to drift further from true orthodoxy. Today, they embrace the ordination of women priests and allow intercommunion with all Christians (although there are some break-off branches that resist these practices).

It’s a tragic conclusion to a tragic story.