Accipe Spiritum Sanctum

Father John Hunwicke provides us this week with a splendid meditation on rites of Episcopal Consecration old and new, and cites the writing of the eminent theologian, canonist and Church historian Cardinal Pietro Gasparri.

Father Hunwicke states: [Gasparri] was writing at a time when the universal opinion was that the Form of Episcopal Consecration was the formula Accipe Spiritum Sanctum, said by the consecrator as he imposed hands... and then quotes the Cardinal.

'Among all these rites which the Roman Pontifical prescribes in Episcopal Consecration, the common opinion is that the Matter is the imposition of the hands of the consecrating bishop (rather, of the consecrating bishops) and the Form is the related words Receive the Holy Spirit.

We think ... that, in the hypothesis of the imposition of the bishop's hands with the Preface alone, without those words Receive the Holy Spirit, the Consecration is valid, just as it was valid in the ancient liturgy; for how could you prove that the Church had taken its consecratory power away from this Prayer?

Equally, in the hypothesis of the imposition of the bishop's hands with those words alone Receive the Holy Spirit, without the Preface, we admit, with the common opinion, that the ordination is valid, since, although those words alone, considered in themselves, are indeterminate and do not sufficiently express the conferring of the episcopal order, nevertheless they are made sufficiently determinate not only by the Preface but by the caeremonia itself without the Preface.'

Cardinal Gasparri's sensible and historically-grounded theological explanation of the form of Episcopal Consecration, had it been applied generously in the deliberations of the Papal Commission of 1896 concerning Anglican Orders, would have likely produced a different result from the said Commission. Good liturgical theology has always recognised the reality of the moral unity of a rite, in which all the varying parts, acts and ceremonies together as an organic whole determine the meaning of the sacramental action. The convoluted and confusing theological method of Apostolicae Curae, shifting as it does from ground to ground in an effort scholastically to pinpoint a defect in the rites of Anglican ordination, could have been cleanly swept away or corrected by the use of Gasparri's historical-liturgical examination of the facts.

In other words, Anglican Orders are valid.

That in this and subsequent ordinations there are found in their fullness those orthodox and indispensable, visible and sensible elements of valid episcopal ordination - viz. the laying on of hands, the Epiclesis of the All-Holy Spirit and also the purpose to transmit the charisma of the Episcopal ministry.

Meletius, Patriarch of Constantinople, 1922