In light of the fascinating and ongoing discussion on Anglican Orders on one of my most favourite weblogs, Father Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes, I thought I would publish my own review of Father John Jay Hughes' unrivalled theological work Stewards of the Lord...Dear N.
I am so very pleased that you obtained a copy of Fr John Jay Hughes' Stewards of the Lord. I had put off buying a copy of that magnum opus for a number of years, but having finally capitulated and purchased a copy last month, I am eternally grateful to have done so. It is clear from the context of the work that Fr Hughes believes Anglican Orders are undeniably valid, and that his opponents indeed understand his incontrovertible air tight theological case, but are nevertheless insistent on continuing to maintain Apostolicae Curae, even to the detriment of their theological and academic honesty and integrity.
I wish every Roman Catholic bishop and theologian alive were required to read Stewards of the Lord. Not only is it, in my opinion, the best, most lucid and readable, theological and historical defence of Anglican Orders ever written, it is also in its own right one of the best treatises on introductory theology of the Eucharist and Priesthood, as controverted in the reformation period, available in the English language. He manages to cut away five hundred years of polemic on both sides of the reformation to give a balanced and even-handed appraisal of the sixteenth century controversy and why it occurred in the first place. If anything, it is a remarkable and ground-breaking history of the reformation itself, which shows that the English Reformation was not at all a radical break with the Catholic and Christian past, but was as much both a victim of and a doctrinally-faithful heir to the medieval Catholic period as the Church of Trent. He brilliantly shows how the English Reformers were more faithful to St Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard than many Roman Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century. And indeed he demolishes the confused and unintelligible theological claims of Apostolicae Curae, using the best Roman Catholic theologians at hand, such a St Robert Bellarmine, and even modern Vatican decrees, to explode the theological ground-shifting of Pope Leo's Bull.
With astonishing ease, he shows how the essential forms of the Anglican Ordinal are valid because they are from the New Testament and are acknowledged to be valid as such by Roman Catholic tradition, and how the essential sacramental intention is valid because of the Preface of the Ordinal (strangely and deliberately ignored by Apostolicae Curae) and its declaration that in the ordination services of the Church of England she has the intention to do what the Church does. He shows deftly that no other intention is needed or required for validity. He demonstrates convincingly that sacramental intention is so easy and basic that one would have to intend fundamentally to reject Our Blessed Lord not to have it. ‘Positive double exclusion of intention,’ sounds like ‘double secret probation,’ a nonsense of speculation, is shown to be a logical and moral impossibility based as it is only on the worst kind of Latin neoscholastic casuistry. In Fr Hughes’ hands, Apostolicae Curae crumbles. In all it is a fantastic contribution to theology in general and, to my mind, the final word on the Anglican Orders dispute. Stewards of the Lord is, in a word, unanswerable in the truth it establishes.
I am so very pleased that you obtained a copy of Fr John Jay Hughes' Stewards of the Lord. I had put off buying a copy of that magnum opus for a number of years, but having finally capitulated and purchased a copy last month, I am eternally grateful to have done so. It is clear from the context of the work that Fr Hughes believes Anglican Orders are undeniably valid, and that his opponents indeed understand his incontrovertible air tight theological case, but are nevertheless insistent on continuing to maintain Apostolicae Curae, even to the detriment of their theological and academic honesty and integrity.
I wish every Roman Catholic bishop and theologian alive were required to read Stewards of the Lord. Not only is it, in my opinion, the best, most lucid and readable, theological and historical defence of Anglican Orders ever written, it is also in its own right one of the best treatises on introductory theology of the Eucharist and Priesthood, as controverted in the reformation period, available in the English language. He manages to cut away five hundred years of polemic on both sides of the reformation to give a balanced and even-handed appraisal of the sixteenth century controversy and why it occurred in the first place. If anything, it is a remarkable and ground-breaking history of the reformation itself, which shows that the English Reformation was not at all a radical break with the Catholic and Christian past, but was as much both a victim of and a doctrinally-faithful heir to the medieval Catholic period as the Church of Trent. He brilliantly shows how the English Reformers were more faithful to St Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard than many Roman Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century. And indeed he demolishes the confused and unintelligible theological claims of Apostolicae Curae, using the best Roman Catholic theologians at hand, such a St Robert Bellarmine, and even modern Vatican decrees, to explode the theological ground-shifting of Pope Leo's Bull.
With astonishing ease, he shows how the essential forms of the Anglican Ordinal are valid because they are from the New Testament and are acknowledged to be valid as such by Roman Catholic tradition, and how the essential sacramental intention is valid because of the Preface of the Ordinal (strangely and deliberately ignored by Apostolicae Curae) and its declaration that in the ordination services of the Church of England she has the intention to do what the Church does. He shows deftly that no other intention is needed or required for validity. He demonstrates convincingly that sacramental intention is so easy and basic that one would have to intend fundamentally to reject Our Blessed Lord not to have it. ‘Positive double exclusion of intention,’ sounds like ‘double secret probation,’ a nonsense of speculation, is shown to be a logical and moral impossibility based as it is only on the worst kind of Latin neoscholastic casuistry. In Fr Hughes’ hands, Apostolicae Curae crumbles. In all it is a fantastic contribution to theology in general and, to my mind, the final word on the Anglican Orders dispute. Stewards of the Lord is, in a word, unanswerable in the truth it establishes.
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